Nevertheless, being a new city which had sprouted like an American town, Carthage was also a melting pot. It was ‘American’ too, even more so, in its materialistic, down-to-earth, fast-moving civilization, preferring the sturdy to the refined. This was a powerful city, attracting sailors, craftsmen and mercenaries from far afield. Accepting many different cultures, it was by nature cosmopolitan. For seven centuries, it made its hard-felt mark on Mediterranean Africa, but at the same time it probably absorbed into its veins all kinds of African blood. The colonizing power was in its turn colonized, and this was what destroyed it in the long run, since it was the treachery of the Numidians and their cavalry which destroyed Carthage on the battlefield of Zama (202). But more of that later.
Carthage and Africa
The thing that most of all distinguished Carthage from Phoenicia was its relation to a dense hinterland which it could not ignore.
Of course Carthage lived on the sea and from the sea as adventurously as the sailors of Tyre. The Tyrians, setting off from the Red Sea in about 600, very probably circumnavigated Africa on the orders of the pharaoh Necho. Similarly, Carthaginian ships in search of tin setoff in about 450 BC under the leadership of Himilco, and sailed north up the Atlantic coasts of Europe as far as the British Isles (the Cassiterides). A quarter of a century later, Hanno was exploring southwards in search of gold dust, following the Atlantic coasts of Africa as far as present-day Gabon and Cameroon.
The new city could thus have followed the Phoenician example, turning its back on the desolate continent behind it, had it not been for the fact that its trading route was along the North African coast, dotted with obligatory ports of call. These ports of call gave birth to villages, and then to large towns (for instance, on the coast of what is now Algeria: Collo, Djidjelli, Algiers, Cherchell, Guraya, Tenes) which all gradually turned towards their hinterland to increase their prosperity. In due course, the economic downturn of the fifth century obliged Carthage itself to look to North Africa and to install on the plains surrounding it an efficient form of agriculture, to which we shall return.
There was thus an increasing symbiosis with the life of the native peoples. This part of North Africa, which had barely emerged from the stone age when the Phoenicians arrived, received almost everything from its new masters: fruit-trees (the olive, vine, fig, almond and pomegranate, all of whose fruits were exported to Italy), techniques of agriculture and wine-making and many craft processes. Carthage was its tutor, and the lessons went in deep. Many centuries later, in the time of Saint Augustine, when the Roman Empire was collapsing, the African peasants, Augustine’s compatriots, were still speaking Punic and calling themselves Canaanites: ‘Unde interrogati rustici nostri quid sint, punice respondentes: Chanani…’. E.-F. Gautier, a great historian now undervalued or rather misunderstood, claimed that this ‘orientalizing’ Punic influence had left an indelible mark on the divided continent of North Africa and Spain, so that when the Arabs invaded in the seventh and eighth centuries ad, this age-old complicity worked in their favour. Specialists have attacked this bold theory, pointing out that there is no immediate evidence based on events of the time. This is true, of course, but the history of civilizations is full of time-bombs. The light of distant stars sometimes arrives on our planet long after they have died.
This explanation is all the more attractive because Carthage, a genuine fragment of the Orient, was not contaminated by Indo-European influences. Its position preserved it from any invasion from the north. If people and cultures circulated, it was from east to west, by sea or westwards from the Nile by routes over the Sahara. Logically then, we find the Carthaginians dressed in oriental garb: long tunics with wide sleeves, long travelling cloaks, skull caps on their heads. E.-F. Gautier sees in these the prototypes of the fez, the gandoura and the burnous of today. On Punic steles, one finds the image of a right hand extended with open palm in a gesture of benediction (another eastern trait), something very like the ‘hand of Fatma’, a popular amulet often reproduced over house doorways in modern-day North Africa. Similarly, many aspects of everyday life in ancient Carthage are reminiscent of the life led today on the same spot. Excavations of the rustic tombs of poor people from the Punic period at Smirat in 1941 revealed a way of living much like that of the peasants of today: ‘A room, a few storage vessels, an amphora for water, and a mat to sleep on’ (G. and C. Picard).
Barter and money
Situated at the meeting place of the western and eastern Mediterranean, it was easy for Carthage to take advantage of the immense difference in their economic and cultural levels. The west was barbarian and under-developed. Carthage could obtain everything cheaply there, including metals: tin from the Cassiterides and north-western Spain; lead, copper and above all silver from Andalusia and Sardinia; gold dust from sub-Saharan Africa, brought north by caravans (of horses, not dromedaries at this period); and finally slaves, wherever they could be captured, at times even on the high seas.
All these dealings were transacted by barter. The Carthaginian merchants brought from the east their own manufactured products and those of others, or else spices and drugs which had come from the Indies by the Red Sea, and exchanged them for ingots of silver which they could sell back in the east. This is why actual money was late to appear in Carthage, not until the fifth century in Punic Sicily and the fourth century in Carthage proper, in order to pay the mercenaries. Should we share Sabatino Moscati’s surprise at this (1966)? No,because it was not a simple matter of ignorance. Tyre and Sidon had their own currencies. The only possible explanation is that Carthage had no need for money. The same thing was to happen, mutatis mutandis, in China, which, for all its inventiveness in this domain (money, even paper money, was known there very early on), was very slow to make use of it. Like Carthage, China was surrounded by economies in their infancy (Japan, Indochina, the Malay Archipelago), easy to dominate and well used to barter.
This does not mean that the absence of money was not in the end a weakness, when Carthage found itself in competition with other economies. If there was a Greek ‘boom’ beginning in the fifth century, with even Carthage buying the fancy goods produced by its rivals, a possible reason for this, though not the only one or the best, may lie in Greek monetary superiority. One is on safer ground in saying that backwardness in this field deprived Carthage of the advantages of banking and a credit system, which appeared very early in the Greek cities. Like ultra-rich Persia (though here coins marked with the head of Darius were in circulation), Carthage accumulated great quantities of precious metals, gold, silver, and even bronze, but without putting them to work.
In the same way, while some writers are rightly surprised at the undeveloped state of metallurgy in Carthage when the city controlled so many mines, can this really be attributed to the shortcomings of the labour force? All that was lacking was the will. But Carthage, absorbed in its extraordinary seafaring activity, chose here too the easy solutions offered by the undemanding routines of commercial life. In the struggles of history, early winners finish up by resting on their laurels and may lose everything if they persist in their old ways. So the arrival in the city of Greek merchandise in the fifth century seems to me to be attributable to the Carthaginian way of doing things rather than to any decisive commercial superiority on the part of the Greeks. From the beginning of the seventh century, Carthage had been importing Corinthian pottery, Etruscan bucchero vases and a variety of Egyptian manufactures. This was because Carthaginian trade was particularly active in Corinth, Etruria and Egypt. In the same way, in the sixteenth century ad, it did no harm to Venice to import and then re-export manufactured goods from southern Germany. The Dutch did the same thing in the seventeenth century, carrying merchandise over the seven seas, buying here, selling there, and engaging in primitive barter whenever possible in the Malay Archipelago. Like them, the Carthaginians were carriers, intermediaries, buying with one hand and selling with the other.
Does this mean that the intermediary is inevitabl
y in a position of weakness? Not necessarily, since Carthage was able to defend its essential assets, and in particular its ‘monopoly’ on mining in Spain: it succeeded in keeping the Etruscans, the Greeks and then the Romans away from most of the profitable part of the Iberian peninsula. It managed also to defend its most important maritime ports of call, its luxury industries (woven fabrics as renowned as those of Phoenicia, as well as ivories and furniture) and its day-to-day trading activities, notably the wholesale grain trade and the thriving salt fish industry. To this end it set up fisheries and salt-pans in many different places, and in particular at Cadiz and a whole series of little harbours along the west coast of Spain and Portugal, facing the Atlantic Ocean with its rich fishing waters. When the Roman salting industry came here subsequently, all it had to do was take over the Phoenician legacy.
Nor was the power of Carthage affected by the fact that neither the art nor the life of the great city was able to escape the influence of Greek culture, which to a greater or lesser extent permeated the whole of the Mediterranean, both east and west. It was a long-standing Phoenician tradition to adopt the dominant style of the moment (earlier it had been Egyptian). The influence of Greek art was felt on the Phoenician coast as well as in Carthage, particularly in funerary steles and in architecture, and all the Carthaginian colonies followed suit, in Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and on the African coast. The Greek impact on Spanish-Carthaginian sculpture, in the fourth century for instance, or even at the end of the fifth, shows clearly that one should distinguish between the cultural influence of Greece on the Punic world and its economic influence. Carthage was happy to import from Greece its town-planning, its characteristic houses with central courtyards, its ornamented vases, its cement and hydraulic concrete (see Chapter 8 for explanation), its sarcophagi, some of its gods (Demeter and Kore, around the year 396), but also its Pythagorean philosophy and some of its exponents. It was the example of Alexander the Great whichinspired Hamilcar, the father of Hannibal, to embark on the conquest of Spain. Hannibal himself was imbued with Greek culture, and even his use of elephants covered with brightly coloured trappings, which terrorized the Roman soldiery, was borrowed from the Hellenistic world.
The ebb and flow of history
Carthage, living off the Mediterranean, was inevitably affected by its fluctuations, its shifting fortunes. The history of the city was shaped by the rhythms of Mediterranean life.
In the seventh and sixth centuries b c, the Greeks were everywhere. In about 600, the Phocaeans founded Massalia (Marseille); they established themselves at Ampurias in Catalonia and perhaps also to the south of Mainake (Malaga). This represented a threat to the mining monopoly of the Phoenicians. But Carthage took things in hand, driving the Phocaeans out of Alalia in Corsica after a sea battle between the Greeks and the joint fleets of Etruria and Carthage (540–535). It was not the end of the struggle, but this time the Carthaginians came out on top.
In 5 25, Persia seized Egypt and consequently acquired the use of the powerful Phoenician navy which the pharaoh had fitted out. However, Darius was defeated at Marathon (490) and Xerxes at Salamis (480), and in the second of these battles at least, it was the Phoenician ships that were beaten. The same year, the Punic army and navy were crushed at Himera in Sicily, and a few years later the Greeks destroyed the navy of the Carthaginians’ Etruscan allies at Cumae (474). This was the beginning of a dramatic period for the Carthaginians; a crisis that was at once political, religious and economic. The ruling Mago dynasty was removed from office and the aristocracy seized power. Tanit, the tutelary goddess of the city (like Pallas in Athens), became the chief deity. Carthage reacted vigorously to its economic difficulties: imports were reduced, an austerity programme was put in place, and relations with sub-Saharan Africa and the Cassiterides were strengthened. Above all, Carthage fell back on North Africa, taking over a vast surrounding area for livestock-raising and orchards. The native Libyan peoples who had been driven out of this land continued to produce barley and wheat.
The long century when Carthage was on the defensive allowed the city to gain new strength and take advantage of the weakness of Athens following the failure of the Athenian expedition against Syracuse (415–409). Immediately, Carthage began to wage war ferociously against the Sicilian Greeks, attacking their towns, capturing the inhabitants and thus acquiring a slave labour force which was to transform the economy of the city itself. The conquests of Alexander (334-323) brought new alarms; the very life of the city seemed in danger. But the almost immediate disintegration of Alexander’s excessively large empire allowed Carthage to breathe again, since there was now less to fear from the divided empires of the east, which were too far away to do much damage. And indeed, was it possible for the east to do without the west? The Ptolemy who seized the eastern Mediterranean (including Phoenicia) after Alexander’s downfall adopted the Phoenician system of measurement and quickly restored the favourable situation of Carthage.
In the end the danger that was to prove most fatal materialized nearer home, at Rome, the ultimate catastrophe coming in 146 BC. It was a tragic ending. Who in his heart – and even the impartial historian has a heart! – can fail to grieve at the delenda est Carthago of Cato the Elder and the pitiless destruction ordered by Scipio Aemilianus? This was the final silencing of a very special voice.
A glimpse of the city
Carthage did not die in the usual way. As a result, it is difficult for archaeologists to reconstitute much of the life and society of the city. All we have is indirect knowledge, made up of random fragments.
Thanks to Aristotle’s curiosity, we know something of the Punic constitution. Originally ruled by kings, Carthage later adopted an aristocratic form of government. The principal families of the city provided two suffetes (etymologically, judges), chosen annually by popular suffrage, as well as the members of the Senate and of the committees who dealt with the actual tasks of government: a sort of Venice avant la lettre with a Council of 104 which was as much feared as the Venetian Council of Ten. How many generals were crucified on its orders!
It is hard today to imagine the city itself as it once was, on the hill of Byrsa (now the hill of Saint-Louis, plus the hill of Juno and the plateau of the Odeum), with its temples, the tophet, its narrow streets and tall many-storeyed houses, as in almost all Phoenician towns (Appian speaks of six-storey buildings between the forum and the acropolis of Byrsa), its water tanks and the freshwater spring known as the fountain of a thousand amphoras. The handsome vaulting over the fountain, although much altered by the Romans, is the only remaining piece of genuine Carthaginian architecture. Recent excavations have, however, uncovered, three or four metres below the Roman city (which was built on the ruins of Carthage), a part of the Punic city dating from the Hellenistic period. It is thus certain that at this time Carthage had straight and passable streets, linked by flights of steps, and a drainage system similar to that found in the towns of Sicily. The houses are simply identical groupings of a number of rooms.
On the beach of Salammbo there were two harbours, a rectangular one for merchant shipping, and linked to it a circular one where warships were often drawn up out of the water, under the vaults of the Arsenal. An island in the middle of the military harbour housed the headquarters of the admiral commanding the navy.
Enormous walls, double or even triple on the landward side, surrounded the city, with its fortress on the hill of Byrsa, and the crowded districts around the harbour. Halfway between the harbour and Byrsa was a public square, a kind of agora. Further north was the suburb of Megara with its gardens, orchards and aristocratic villas. From the top of the hill, one looked north to the salt-water lagoons of Sebkha er Riana and south to the lake of Tunis. The city had a huge population, perhaps as many as 100,000. Alongside the rich governing minority lived a plebeian mass of craftsmen, labourers, slaves, sailors and sometimes mercenary soldiers – all forming a distinctly volatile crowd. Carthage was often shaken by internal riots.
The city was
surrounded by a finely kept countryside. The rich clearly took pleasure in well-cultivated land, beautiful gardens, the grafting of trees and the breeding of animals. A Carthaginian agronomist, Mago, fragments of whose work have reached us indirectly, gives scores of methods for planting vines so as to preserve them from excessive drought, for making fine wines, cultivating almond-trees, keeping pomegranates in clay for export, choosing the right qualites in breeds of oxen, etc., etc. He adds a piece of advice to rural landowners which is not without significance: ‘The man who buys land should sell his house, lest he find living in the city preferable to living in the country.’ It seems that the Carthaginians of the third century resembled the Tuscans of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ad in their keenness to buy land out of town.
Under the sign of Tanit
Extensive excavations at the site of Carthage have found nothing but thousands of bodies, buried or cremated, and the objects which went to the grave with them. There are hundreds, even thousands, of funerary cippi or steles monotonously listing the names of the gods; scholars have even attempted a mathematical calculation of the most worshipped gods according to their frequency and the order in which they are named!
This is not much help if we are trying to get to the heart of a religion whose strangeness horrified the Romans (the horror was often quite genuine) and whose mythology, theology, structure and vision of the world remain unknown to us. If we knew better the Phoenician religion, from which that of Carthage derives, we might be able to make sense of the few details we have. Unfortunately this is not the case, in spite of the unexpected light cast on the matter by certain Ugaritic texts, some writings in Canaanite, and what we find in the Bible.
The Mediterranean in the Ancient World Page 28