Carthage

The ancient city of Carthage is famous for two particular things. Firstly there is the great general, Hannibal Barca, who led his army over the Alps to attack Rome. And secondly the city was utterly destroyed by the vengeful Romans who deemed that the Carthaginians should never again be able to challenge Roman supremacy in the Mediterranean.

Neither of these things are of much interest to me, but Eve MacDonald’s new history, Carthage: A new history of an ancient empire, covers much more than the Punic Wars. MacDonald wants to help us understand the Carthaginians as a people, which is hard because the Romans did such a good job of wiping them off the face of the planet. For example, we know that the Carthaginians wrote books. Only traces of one survived the sack of the city: a treatise on agriculture which a Roman writer deemed useful enough to quote from. Almost everything else we know about Carthage comes from archaeology, or via hearsay.

Not that the Romans were very good when it came to Carthaginian history. The third most famous thing about Carthage is the doomed romance between the Carthaginian queen, Dido, and the refugee Trojan prince, Aeneas. We know that Carthage was originally a Phoenician colony. We even know that it was founded by a woman called Dido (actually Elishat, the Romans got that wrong too) who fled Tyre due to some political unpleasantness. But we also know that this happened in the 9th century BCE. That’s some 3-400 years after the sack of Troy. Aeneas must have been sailing west very slowly indeed for that timeline to work. Sorry, Vergil, mate, you messed up there. But I guess you made Augustus happy, which is all that really mattered.

One piece of Carthaginian writing that has come down to us, because it was so famous it got copied a lot in antiquity, is The Periplus of Hanno the Navigator. Periplus is a Latin term for a story of a voyage. Explorers, both at sea and on land, would write reports of their adventures to sell their own legend, and as a potential guide book for those who would follow them. Hanno, a Carthaginian nobleman, took a fleet of ships through the Pillars of Heracles and down the African coast, at least as far as modern-day Cameroon. Bear this in mind next time you see some twat complaining that the recent DNA testing that found the bodies two Anglo-Saxon burials in England to have West African descent must be wrong.

I was vaguely aware of Hanno’s journey. What I did not know was that he was not the first Phoenician sailor to explore Africa, nor the farthest travelled. Forget about Prince Henry of Portugal, the real patron saint of maritime explorers was Pharoah Necho II of Egypt.

Necho II is an interesting chap. He belongs to the 26th dynasty, a family which took control of Egypt after the 25th (Nubian) dynasty came unstuck thanks to endless wars with the Assyrians. They were the last native African dynasty to rule the country, though they may have been Libyans rather than Egyptians. Our man Necho was big on trade, and he had some outsized ideas as to how to improve it. His biggest idea was to dig a canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. Sadly he died before it could be completed, and future pharaohs saw no value in the grand design, so the world had to wait 2500 years for Necho’s dream to come to fruition.

The other amazing thing that Necho did was commission a group of Phoenician sailors to head as far as they could down the east coast of Africa to see if they could reach the end of the continent and come back up the other side. Miraculously, they managed it. Their voyage is reported by Herodotus. Like many of his contemporaries, he wasn’t convinced by the story. Indeed, he thought he had proof that it was all made up. You see, the foolish sailors reported that, when they rounded the southern tip of Africa, they could see the sun on their right at midday; that is, to the north. As every ancient Greek knew, the midday sun is only ever seen to the south. Herodotus did not know that the Earth was round, and had never been to the southern hemisphere. But we know that the sailors told the truth, bizarre as it must have sounded to anyone who had not been where they had travelled.

There is much more in the book. For example there is quite a bit of material about Carthaginian religion, which is of great interest to me but probably not to you. There is also a lot about Hannibal, the Barca family, and the Scipio family from Rome who became their nemesis. MacDonald writes entertainingly while presenting a lot of recent historical research. If the ancient world is your thing, you will enjoy this book too.

Title: Carthage
By: Eve MacDonald
Publisher: Ebury Press
Purchase links:
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Amazon US
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