Destroy Carthage (7 page)

finding that the people of those parts were well disposed to
strangers, and liked buying and selling, she agreed to buy a
piece of land, so much as could be encompassed by the hide
of an ox, on which to rest her weary companions. This hide
she cut into narrow strips that they might encircle a large
plot, which was called Byrsa, that is the Hide.

Like Utica, a colony already thriving on the coast to the
west, Dido's foundation prospered. But so great was the re­putation of the princess's beauty (runs the fable) that one native
chieftain insisted on marrying her, failing which he promised
to make war on the settlement. At this, Dido had a huge pyre
built on the outskirts of the colony, climbed on to it sword-in-
hand, and, swearing faithfulness to her dead husband, took
her own life.

Thus Dido burned. The story, owing much to Greek elab­oration, need not be taken literally. Dido, or Elissa, are not
historically authenticated persons, deriving respectively from
Semitic words meaning 'beloved' and 'goddess.'

The ox hide anecdote appears repeatedly in founding
legends, being told of Assassin settlement in Persia, Saxon set­tlement in England, and even of English settlement in America.
Again,
byrsa
meant an ox hide to the Greeks, but the Phoenic­ian colonists, presumably christening the camp site in their
own tongue, more likely used the word
bozra,
a stronghold -
this corrupted in time by Greek usage.

Yet there are points of factual interest in the legend. Though
traditional dates for Phoenician settlement are suspect,
archaeological evidence suggests that Utica was indeed older
than Carthage; nor is there reason to doubt that the settlers
were Tyrians. Indubitably, they hailed from that land of which
Tyre was a leading community, Phoenicia, or Canaan as its
own people knew it.

The Phoenicians, a Semitic people closely related to the
Hebrews, had turned to seafaring early in their history, when
they migrated from the Negeb to a narrow strip of coast in
the region of modern Lebanon and Palestine. Afflicted by
powerful land enemies, the Phoenicians depended heavily on
maritime skills for survival and prosperity. Tyre, a rocky island
a few hundred yards off-shore, was able to survive long sieges
thanks to her many ships.

When the fall of Cnossos in the 14th century ended the
long-standing danger posed by Cretan fleets to traffic in the
sea lanes south of Greece, Tyrian captains ventured further and
further west. The merchandise they brought back increased
the city's wealth and influence. Ezekiel described Tyre as 'the
renowned city which wast strong in the sea,' a brilliant market
for commodities from all parts of the known world.

Isaiah called her 'the crowning city, whose merchants are
princes, whose traffickers are the honourable of the earth.'

To Tyre came spices from Arabia, amber from the Baltic,
foodstuffs from Judaea, linen from Egypt, copper from Cyprus
and, increasingly as her ships reached the limits of the western
sea, precious metals from Tarshish, or Tartessus, in the south
of Spain. Here, on the very brink of the unknown, the ocean
without end, were the fabulous mines, rich in gold, silver, tin
and other minerals, familiar to Solomon and his neighbours.

Here berthed the biblical 'ships of Tarshish,' the long-dis­tance freighters which plied a 4,000-mile return journey from
the Levant. At Phoenician Gadir (from which stemmed the
Roman
Gades,
hence Cadiz), the easterners established a colony
handy for the silver mines of the Sierra Morena, and other
works. Acquired cheaply from the natives, sold expensively in
the east, the metals not only brought wealth to Phoenicia's
home cities but helped finance settlements in Africa, Cyprus,
Sicily, and elsewhere.

Intermediate stations between Phoenicia and Spain were
imperative. Ancient seafarers of the Mediterranean, vulnerable
to rough weather in their narrow oarships, primitive in navi­gation and reluctant to sail at night, seldom ventured far from
land. Their method of traversing seas was either to follow the
most suitable coast, or to hop from island to island. Normally,
they anchored during the late part of the day, often looking
to the shore for rest and refreshment.

In the circumstances, the obvious course to Tarshish from
the Levant was along the relatively direct coastline of North
Africa rather than by the devious boundary of Europe. Island-
hopping was only practicable in the eastern part of the
Mediterranean. It was also true that the pirate swarms of com­peting maritime states, especially those of Greece, were less
prolific in the south than in the Ionian, Aegean and Cretan
seas.

Feeling their way along the northern rim of the sub-con­tinent, the Phoenicians discovered immense stretches of shore
untouched by eastern progress, or by the tides of human
migration disrupting much of Europe. Time had stood still in
North Africa, a world isolated by formidable deserts to land­ward, to seaward by a face of inhospitable cliffs and dunes
with few natural harbours.

It was a wild, awesome realm abounding in great animals:
elephants, lions, bears, panthers (now extinct in the north,
but prolific on the coastlands in antiquity). The people of the
region, living in small tribes, largely nomadic, remained in the
stone age of material development. At first, disunified and
amenable to enticement with cheap commercial products, they
were less an obstacle to settlement on the whole than the land
itself.

Vast tracts of barren and parched coast encouraged no
more than the establishment of small communications posts.
These were frequent. The Phoenicians organized anchorages
at regular intervals, possibly every thirty miles or so. But few
became places of any real permanency. Only in limited areas,
where scope for cultivation coincided with harbourage, would
settlement prosper. Outstanding among these was northern
Tunisia.

In this region, reaching fondly toward the toe of Italy, fertile
lands and an equable climate soon attracted the attention of
the voyagers. Coastal conditions were suitable to the growth
of a variety of fruit trees; corn, though susceptible to inter­mittent droughts, grew well on the inland vales. Halfway be­tween Tarshish and the Levant, the gulf of Tunis plainly
beckoned the early Phoenicians.

Strategically, its proximity to the Sicilian narrows, dominat­ing the passage between eastern and western spheres, was
portentous.

Of the Phoenician settlements which attained any size in
North Africa, most were in this area. The site of Carthage, the
'ship at anchor,' was typically Phoenician in its choice; indeed,
remarkably similar to that of Tyre. Its most sheltered beach,
on the bay of Kram, probably served as the earliest anchorage.
Nearby, the settlers placed their sacred enclosure, the sanctu­ary of Tanit; built their first defences on the plateau of the
Byrsa; planned their man-made harbours.The name Carthage (Greek
Karchedon)
derives from the
Semitic
Kirjath-Hadeschath,
or 'New Town' - new in relation
either to the motherland of the migrants, or the neighbouring
and older settlement of Utica. The time generally accepted by
the ancients for the birth of the city was thirty-eight years
before the first Olympiad, that is 814, though the earliest re­mains found on the site post-date this by a century.

It is yet another hundred years before Carthage begins to
appear in written history. By then, the colony was already
prosperous. Herodotus, harking back to 650, offered the tradi­tion of a then mature Carthage, rich and envied. Before the
close of the 6th century, her fame was such that the Persian
emperor Cambyses, having conquered Egypt, dispatched an
army from that country to seize the jewel of the coast for his
diadem. Heading optimistically west, the Persian troops
marched into the Libyan desert and vanished - as the early
years of Carthage were to vanish from record
-
without trace.

While the 'New Town' grew, the old Phoenicia declined.
Tyre, repeatedly menaced by the warlords of Assyria and
Babylon, had weakened long before Carthage was strong
enough to bring relief. Instead, she succoured refugees from
the motherland and prepared to defend
herself,
not from the
distant land-powers of Asia, or even primarily from local
tribes, but from an insidious seaborne peril which, from about
750, threatened to overwhelm Semitic settlement in the west.

Benefiting from the misfortunes of metropolitan Phoenicia,
Greece had edged steadily to the fore in westering colonization.
Generation by generation, fleets of hardy, resourceful Greek
migrants, impelled by overcrowding in mainland Hellas, by
Persian encroachment on Ionia, by their own questing spirits,
descended on the shores of Italy, Sicily, Provence. Some even
settled in Spain and Cyrenaica.

Everywhere, Phoenician colonization was endangered. The
Greeks were as adroit at sea as the Semites, readier to turn to
piracy and war where commercial competition failed. One by
one, the Phoenician settlements gave way until Tunisia, en­circled, at last produced a challenger. Alone against the ubi­quitous enemy, Carthage was to come of age violently.

Of
the incentives urging Carthage to militant leadership of the
western Phoenicians, the most immediate was Greek encroach­ment in Sicily. Phoenician control of the Sicilian ports, hence
guardianship of the narrows between the island and Carthage,
had long held the eastern approach to a select, if somewhat
unscrupulous, sailing club.

Greek geographers looked back on the western Mediter­ranean as a Phoenician lake, a vast preserve on which foreigners
trespassed at their peril. To be caught there, declared Strabo,
recalling Eratosthenes, was to suffer instant death by drowning.
The
Odyssey
gave the early Phoenicians a bad name. They
were, in the eyes of the western Greeks, 'famous for their
ships,' but 'greedy men,' robbing stealthily, ingloriously.