Founding of Carthage
Carthage was founded by settlers from Tyre around 814 BC and became the greatest commercial power in the western Mediterranean. The Phoenician cities had been planting trading stations along the North African and Iberian coasts for a century before that, at intervals of about a day's sail, to service the metal trade from Spain — silver from the Rio Tinto, tin brought down from the Atlantic. The foundation legend is Dido's. A Tyrian princess flees her brother, who has murdered her husband for his money, lands on the African coast and asks the local ruler for as much land as an oxhide will cover, and then cuts the hide into strips fine enough to enclose a hill. The hill is the Byrsa, and the Greek word for hide is what the name was thought to come from. Virgil put her in the Aeneid seven centuries later and made her Aeneas's abandoned lover, which is chronologically impossible by about three hundred years and is why Rome and Carthage were enemies in Roman literature. The city's advantages were the harbours and the hinterland. It had a circular naval basin with covered berths for over two hundred ships, a commercial harbour beside it, and the agricultural plain behind Tunis. It fought Greeks in Sicily for two centuries and then Rome for one, and was destroyed in 146 BC. The excavated tophet has produced thousands of urns of cremated infants, which is still argued about. Almost everything written about the city comes from its enemies, since its own literature was destroyed with it. The Roman senate had the Carthaginian libraries distributed to African kings and kept one book, a treatise on agriculture, which it had translated into Latin.
- Year: 814 BCE
- Category: Cultural
