Turn on the Discovery Channel or the History Channel and chances are you�ll see programs about the wonderful accomplishments of the ancient Greeks and Romans. But what about that other great, contemporaneous, central Mediterranean power: the nearly forgotten city-state of Carthage?

Most of us recall that the Carthaginian king Hannibal (c. 247-182 B.C.), the scourge of Rome, led elephants and soldiers over the Alps to inflict heavy casualties on unsuspecting Italian armies. We all learned that the Romans defeated Hannibal�but what else do we really know about this enigmatic people? The French writer Gustave Flaubert set his novel Salammb� (1862) in third-century B.C. Carthage, after visiting the scant Carthaginian ruins and becoming fascinated by ancient accounts of their fondness for human sacrifice. Epic movies of the l950s such as Carthage in Flames show the Carthaginians sacrificing virgins to their chief god, Ba�al. So is that who the Carthaginians were, war-mongering virgin-killers?

The Carthaginians were Phoenicians, of Canaanite ancestry, who settled on the northeastern coast of what is now Tunisia. By the beginning of the Iron Age (c. 1200 B.C.), the Phoenicians had taken control of that part of the Levantine coast now occupied by northern Israel, Lebanon and Syria. The Phoenicians were known throughout the Mediterranean world as merchants, sailors and craftsmen. According to the Hebrew Bible, the Phoenician king Hiram of Tyre provided the Israelite king Solomon (c. 965-928 B.C.) with masons and architects to help build the Jerusalem Temple (1 Kings 5ff.). It was from the literate, Semitic-speaking Phoenicians, moreover, that the Greeks borrowed the alphabet�the direct ancestor of the alphabetic characters that you see before you.*

No one knows exactly how the Phoenicians got to Carthage, where they settled among the Berbers, a semi-nomadic people who had been in North Africa since the fifth millennium B.C. According to the not-always-reliable Greek historian Timaeus (c. 356-260 B.C.), Carthage was founded in 814 B.C. by a Phoenician princess named Dido (who is called Elissa in Phoenician). Dido was the sister of Pygmalion, a king of Tyre who ruled a century after Hiram (this Pygmalion is not to be confused with the Pygmalion who fell in love with a statue that he himself had carved). When Pygmalion murdered Dido�s husband, she gathered up the royal treasury and a group of supporters and headed off to nearby Cyprus. There she managed to attract more women to her group. She then headed out over the open sea to Carthage, a name which means �new city� in Phoenician.

Dido and her band settled on a large hill called the Byrsa. According to Virgil�s Aeneid (late first century B.C.), the local Berber chieftain told Dido that her people could have as much land as could be covered with a single oxhide (a form of monetary exchange in the ancient world). So the ingenious princess cut an oxhide into tiny strips and set them end to end, so that they girded the entire Byrsa hill. (In fact, the term �Byrsa� in Phoenician means citadel or fortress, which is probably how the hill actually got its name. The oxhide story may have arisen because the phonetic equivalents of �Byrsa� in both Greek and Latin mean hide�from which we derive our words �bourse,� or stock market, and �purse.�)

We know little about Queen Dido�s successors. Even though the Phoenicians transmitted the alphabet, virtually nothing of their literature and little of their history have survived. Most of what we know about them comes from 20th-century archaeological excavations or from ancient Egyptian, biblical, Assyrian, Greek and Roman sources. The name �Phoenicians,� for instance, was not what they called themselves but what the Greeks called them; the word means dark red and refers to the royal purple dye that Phoenicians extracted from murex shells. Some scholars believe that they were mercenary traders with little culture or literature of their own. Others are convinced that the literature existed but was obliterated when their civilization was destroyed and assimilated by the Romans�whether in the Levant or in Carthage. The existence of a Phoenician, and particularly Carthaginian, literature, is hinted at in Roman sources, though only in the briefest of references.

The Carthaginians were adventurers. They loved to travel and trade all over the Mediterranean�and as such they came into conflict with Greek and then Roman expansionists. Possessing superior ships, the Phoenicians sailed from the eastern Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar and beyond, looking not only for gold and tin but also for the murex shells from which they produced the dye for their famed Tyrian purple robes, so admired by the Romans, among others. Carthaginian explorers certainly sailed beyond the strait and up the Iberian coast, possibly reaching England.


One remarkable expedition led by Hanno the Navigator around the middle of the fifth century B.C. seems to have set out to circumnavigate the African continent from the west�this at a time when the size of Africa was not known. Amazingly, Hanno�s account of his voyage survives. Originally written in Punic,** the account was later translated into Greek and Latin, but only the Greek version is extant. The Periplus [literally, �Sailing Around�] of Hanno recounts how Hanno sailed beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, where the Phoenicians had established Punic colonies both in North Africa and southern Spain. In Lixus, not far from modern Tangiers, Morocco, he recruited translators who knew something of the tongues spoken beyond the strait and around the western coast of Africa. Hanno sailed down the African coast, probably as far as the Senegal River, which forms the border of modern Senegal and Mauritania. Hanno�s party appears to have traveled inland along the river, where they entered the tropical rain forest and encountered fantastic creatures they had never seen before, like hippopotami and crocodiles.

Hanno�s account reads like a script for an Indiana Jones movie: The Carthaginians move cautiously through the eerie, thick forest, as barbarous natives play flutes and beat drums in the distance. Suddenly Hanno comes across strange savages:

The biggest number of them were females, with hairy bodies which our Lixite interpreters called gorillas. Chasing them we could not catch any of the males, because all of them escaped by being able to climb steep cliffs and (by) defending themselves with whatever was available; but we caught three females who bit and scratched their captors and they did not want to follow them. So we had to kill them and flay them, and we brought their skins to Carthage.

It seems likely that Hanno did indeed scuffle with a family of what we, too, call gorillas. Our term �gorilla,� which refers to the large anthropoid apes of west equatorial Africa, only goes back to 1847 when it was coined by Thomas Staughton Savage, an American clergyman and naturalist. Savage was a missionary sent to Africa on behalf of the Protestant Episcopal Church of Cromwell, Connecticut. Where did Savage get the term �gorilla�? He had read it in a 1797 English translation of the Periplus of Hanno!

Upon returning to Carthage, Hanno had the gorilla skins displayed and offered to the gods in a special open-air cultic precinct in Carthage, which is known today as the Tophet. According to the Hebrew Bible, the Tophet was a place just south of ancient Jerusalem where erring Israelites sacrificed their children by burning them. The Judahite king Josiah (640-609 B.C.) is said to have destroyed the Tophet �so that no one would make a son or daughter pass through fire as an offering� (2 Kings 23:10).

Did the ancient Phoenicians, in Carthage and elsewhere,* sacrifice living children to their gods? For the past two decades this has been the subject of heated scholarly debates. (See �An Odyssey Debate: Were Living Children Sacrificed to the Gods?�) Although some French and Tunisian scholars have argued that children were not sacrificed in large numbers at Carthage, the evidence is against them.

Certainly in ancient times the Phoenicians had a reputation for sacrificing children. The third-century B.C. Greek author Kleitarchos was quoted by a later source as writing: �Out of reverence for Kronos [the Greek equivalent of Ba�al Hammon, the chief god of the Punic pantheon], the Phoenicians, and especially the Carthaginians, whenever they seek to obtain some great favor, vow one of their children, burning it as a sacrifice to the deity, if they are especially eager to gain success.�(1)

The Carthage Tophet first came to modern attention in 1921, when a local official caught an antiquities trafficker removing decorated stelae from the site. A few years later the Tophet was bought and excavated by the French explorer/adventurer Count Byron Khun de Prorok, who uncovered numerous burial urns containing charred human remains. �This is a dreadful period of human degeneracy,� de Prorok wrote, �that we are now unearthing in the famous temple of Tanit [the consort of Ba�al Hammon].�(2) De Prorok later recalled that he had found �six thousand funerary urns� in the sanctuary of Tanit, �where the little children of Carthage made their great, but unwilling, gift of life for the sake of the city�s security.�(3)

**Referring to the Phoenicians�and their language�in the western Mediterranean, the term �Punic� derives from the Latin adjective punicus, a transliteration of the Greek Phoinikos (Phoenician), which derives from the Greek word for purple (as in purple dye).

Major excavations of the Tophet were conducted in the mid- to late 1970s by Lawrence Stager (then with the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and now at Harvard) and a team that included the author. Stager concluded that child sacrifice took place on the site �almost continuously for a period of nearly 600 years,� from the mid-eighth to mid-second centuries B.C.(4) The Carthage Tophet is a huge precinct of at least 54,000 square feet. Between 400 and 200 B.C. alone, as many as 20,000 urns containing the remains of children offered to the gods may have been deposited in this sanctuary.

From the archaeological evidence and numerous literary references, it seems that infant children were sacrificed regularly in small numbers. They were sacrificed in larger numbers, perhaps up to 500 at a time, in times of dire emergency that required appeasing the gods�though this was rare. (One such emergency came in the fourth century B.C., when Carthage was invaded by Agathocles [361-289 B.C.], the tyrant of Syracuse on the east coast of Sicily.) The bloodthirsty Carthaginian god who required slaughtered infants may have been Ba�al Hammon, lord of the great mountain, whose consort, Tanit, was identified with the Canaanite/Phoenician Astarte, goddess of love and war.** The Carthaginians made divine offerings of incinerated children right up to the end of Punic civilization and into the Neo-Punic period (designating the survival of Punic culture after 146 B.C.). According to the Church father and Carthaginian Tertullian (c. 160-225 A.D.), for example, �In Africa infants used to be sacrificed to Saturn, and quite openly ... Yes, and to this day that holy crime persists in secret.�(5)

**Many of the stones marking the burial niches where the urns were laid are inscribed with the triangular symbol of Tanit. The disk (or double disk) with extended lines on top of the symbol of Tanit may be the symbol of Ba�al Hammon.

That holy crime, for us moderns, was murder. But we should not be surprised to learn of human sacrifice. It wasn�t the idea of human sacrifice that shocked the ancients. It was the sheer quantity of Punic sacrifices. The Romans themselves did not always save sickly newborns; sometimes they drowned or strangled them, exposed them to the elements or deposited them at a crossroads. The sacrifice of infants or even adults (such as vestal virgins or Gauls) was occasionally mandated for religious and political purposes by the Greeks as well as the Romans. What is so shocking about the Tophet is its direct, visible evidence that tens of thousands of children, over hundreds of years, were sacrificed by burning.

At first, the Carthaginians seem to have considered the sacrifice of a child as sealing a special covenant between the ruler and the god, a covenant sealed with the execution of the ruler�s child�perhaps, but not necessarily, the first born. There is also evidence that surrogate mothers were used to bear children that would be adopted as replacements by the parents of sacrificed children. As Carthage aged and grew, the practice of offering children to Ba�al Hammon and Tanit ceased being a privilege merely of royalty. By the fourth century B.C., Carthage was a democracy praised by Aristotle (Politics 2.2). This meant that almost anyone�carpenters, schoolteachers, average citizens�could now sacrifice their children and receive the blessings of the gods. Carthage is a rare, perhaps unique, example of a society that became a democracy while the practice of human sacrifice was becoming ever more prevalent.

For many centuries the Carthaginians struggled against native populations and Greek city states to keep a dominant foothold in Sardinia, Corsica and Sicily, but the most prolonged and fiercest enemy of Carthage was Rome. In the third century B.C. Rome expanded throughout Italy and had designs on the Straits of Messina, the narrow waterway between Sicily and Italy. Control of the straits eliminated the need to sail around Sicily�s west coast, which added several days to a sea voyage.

War broke out between the Messinans (led by a ruling caste of Greek mercenaries who occupied South Italy), who were backed by Rome, and the Carthaginians, who were supported by Syracuse, though the Syracusans quickly defected to the Greek-Roman side. Carthage had a brilliant general named Hamilcar, a member of the distinguished Barca family, but he could not get a free hand to run the army. Squabbling at home and professional jealousies crippled the Carthaginian forces and led to their defeat. Excavations off the northwest coast of Sicily in the 1970s revealed remains of two sunken Punic ships likely from this period. That engagement, from 264-241 B.C., is known as the First Punic War.

The peace terms were severe, the Punic navy was in shambles, and Carthage was forced to abandon Sardinia. When unpaid mercenaries revolted (the subject of Flaubert�s Salammb�), Carthage lost her foothold in Sicily. Hamilcar, bitter and determined to destroy Rome, infused his son with hatred of the dreaded enemy. That son was Hannibal.

Hannibal Barca was one of the greatest military strategists who ever lived. His failure was largely the result of two errors: He overestimated the support he would receive from the Greek-speaking citizens of southern Italy in his campaigns against Rome, and he assumed he would have complete financial and military support from his own Carthaginian government. This double miscalculation could not be offset by tactical genius, though Hannibal almost defeated the Romans anyway. Perhaps the Romans� greatest strength was perseverance; although they lost battle after battle, they simply continued to levy new troops. After 16 years, Hannibal, with few reserves, was worn down. Finally, he met his match in a Roman soldier who was his equal in military tactics: Scipio Africanus.

We do not know much about Hannibal. He was, however, noted for his wry sense of humor, of which one example survives. Apparently, many Carthaginians were named Gisco. When Hannibal found himself outnumbered and preparing for battle, one of his lieutenants ran in and warned him of the tremendous numbers of Romans. Hannibal replied: �Yes, and I�ll bet none of them is named Gisco!� This kind of humor may explain why there is no legacy of Punic standup comedy.

It is widely believed that Hannibal crossed the Alps with enormous numbers of elephants to terrify the Romans. However, these beasts�there were only 37 of them�were probably intended to scare superstitious local tribes in the Alps rather than to intimidate the Romans, who were familiar with the use of elephants on the battlefield. In any case, very few of the elephants made it through the mountains. And Hannibal himself lost an eye in the Italian campaign.

Hannibal won battle after battle by outwitting, outflanking, and intimidating the Romans. What defeated him was Roman resolve and a lack of Carthaginian reinforcements. Roman Italians of Italy refused to defect to him, preferring the devil they knew, Rome. Time finally ran out for Hannibal in 202 B.C.; outmanned and depleted, he was defeated by the Roman general Scipio Africanus on the plain of Zama in North Africa.

Another common mistaken belief is that Hannibal was killed by the Romans at the end of the Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.). He still, in fact, had a lot of damage to do. He returned to Carthage, where he tried to stir up deep-seated resentment against Rome. Eventually he was arrested by the Romans in order to be tried for insurrection. But Hannibal escaped and fled to the court of the Roman-hating King Antiochus in Syria. There Hannibal took command of a naval expedition against the pro-Roman isle of Rhodes off the coast of Anatolia. When his fleet was overwhelmed, he fled to the court of King Prusias of Bithynia, on the south coast of the Black Sea. But Prusias soon lost a series of skirmishes to the Romans and was about to deport the 63-year-old Hannibal, when the proud commander took his own life by swallowing poison.

But Carthage wasn�t destroyed. Its economy, despite heavy reparations paid to Rome, slowly recovered and the city-state built lavish new ports�which were excavated in the 1970s by Lawrence Stager, then with the Oriental Institute, and Cambridge University archaeologist Henry Hurst. These excavations revealed a sizable commercial harbor and a military port, complete with a central islet for the admiral�s quarters and sheds for dry-docking shallow-draft vessels. Forbidden to raise a large army, the Carthaginians found themselves menaced by another threat: rampaging Berber tribes in the hinterland. To protect Carthage and other Punic settlements, the Carthaginians rearmed. A movement in Rome, spearheaded by the venerable statesman Cato the Elder, damned Carthage as an evil empire dangerously near Rome. Despite opposition from another Roman statesman, Publius Scipio Nasica, who urged peace and leniency, Cato called for Carthage to be destroyed once and for all (Carthago delenda est!). This was accomplished in the last war between Carthage and Rome, the Third Punic War (149-146 B.C.). After this war, the Roman general, Scipio Aemilianus, grandson of Scipio Africanus, scattered salt over the ruins of the levelled city.

Even this, however, was not the end of Carthage, though the city was no longer the center of Punic civilization. Its location at the mouth of the Medjerda River (known by the Romans as Bagradas) made it a byway to the fertile, grain-rich inland. Julius Caesar planned to revive Carthage as a Roman city, but he was assassinated (in 44 B.C.) before he could execute his plan. It was not until the reign of Tiberius (14-37 A.D.) that a new Carthage�a Roman Carthage�rose from the ashes, becoming a splendid commercial and university town with rebuilt ports and with a magnificent new Roman forum built on the Byrsa. They also built numerous villas, whose floors were covered with some of the finest mosaics in the world (there are more ancient Roman mosaics in Tunisia than in all of Italy). So completely did the Romans absorb and rebuild the earlier settlements, in fact, that today very little remains of Punic civilization; the ancient remains in Tunis and Punic North Africa are almost all Roman. Carthage remained a prominent Roman community for almost 400 years until it disintegrated under Vandal, Byzantine and Arab conquests.

Given this colorful history, why have the Carthaginians been largely forgotten? Unlike the Greeks, who left us a legacy of theater, philosophy and artistic innovation in temple building and sculpture, and unlike the Romans, who left us dynamic engineering, creative architecture and a fascinating literature, the Carthaginians were merchants whose art and architecture were an amalgam of the cultures with which they traded. They made attractive jewelry with filigree and granulation, but it is not as distinctively lovely as Etruscan work. Their art is too eclectic, too multicultural, to allow them a place in art history textbooks. And their religious beliefs forbade them showing their gods except in aniconic form, such as the simple triangle used to represent Tanit. Only in ship-building were they innovative, in the sense of producing something completely original: They inherited sophisticated techniques from their Canaanite/Phoenician predecessors and then refined them, allowing them to breach the Strait of Gibraltar and head out into the open sea.

Carthaginian eclecticism is illustrated by a three-story tomb at Dougga, a Punic settlement southwest of Carthage. It was signed by a Punic architect (Ateban) but was likely built for a Berber ruler in the second century B.C. Its form is vaguely Near Eastern, resembling a fusion of Persian and, possibly, Carian Anatolian (from southwest Turkey) structures, though this is disputed by some scholars. Its decoration includes Assyrian-style royal lions, Hellenistic Greek Ionic capitals, Egyptian cavetto moldings (which curve sharply inward above the lintel) and perhaps an Egyptian pyramid on top. Carthaginian architecture is too much of a hodgepodge to be taught to beginning students of ancient architecture. It has every style but its own, or, put another way, every regional style is its style. It is safer in textbooks on the history of art and architecture to pretend Carthage never existed!

But Carthage did exist. Its stories of human sacrifice and Hannibal�s arduous mountain-crossing assured it a place in, of all things, popular cinema. The discovery of Carthage�s Tophet, for example, inspired German film director Fritz Lang and his screenwriter wife, Thea von Harbou; their 1926 science fiction thriller Metropolis compared the death of factory workers in a futuristic city to the sacrifice of Carthage�s children. Victor Mature assayed the role of Hannibal in a torpid 1954 production, which makes viewers feel that they will never get across the Alps. Hannibal�s greatest moment in film, however, occurred a year earlier�in a musical! Rugged leading man Howard Keel played �the conqueror� in the lavish 1953 production, Jupiter�s Darling. Riding his elephant into battle, Keel�s Hannibal croons:

Fiercely I abominate
The Rome that tries to dominate
And so myself I nominate
     to make the Romans crawl.
Death to the Romans,
     Romans one and all.
This is the day that Rome must fall.

These may not be lyrics worthy of Cole Porter but they were good enough to seduce a noble Roman lady, played (and swum) by Esther Williams. This was Hannibal�s finest hour since 218 B.C.

 

1 See P.G. Mosca, Child Sacrifice in Canaanite and Israelite Religion: A Study in Mulk and Molech, Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University (1975), p. 22.

2 Byron Khun de Prorok, Smithsonian Annual (1925), p. 571.

3 De Prorok, In Quest of Lost Worlds (London: Frederick Muller, 1935), p. 4.

4 Lawrence E. Stager and Samuel R. Wolff, �Child Sacrifice at Carthage�Religious Rite or Population Control?� Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 1984.

5 Tertullian, Apology 9:2-4, trans. T.R. Glover (Loeb Classical Library, 1931).
 
http://www.bib-arch.org/aond00/carthage2.html November/December 2000 issue of Archaeology Odyssey