Carthage

A Phoenician colony that became the commercial power of the western Mediterranean, and is known almost entirely through the writings of the city that destroyed it. Tyre founded Carthage traditionally in 814 BCE, and it grew into a maritime republic governed by suffetes and a council of elders, with trading posts from Sicily to the Atlantic coast of Morocco - Hanno's voyage down West Africa survives in Greek summary. Its wealth was trade and North African agriculture, and its wars were fought largely with mercenaries, which is a structural weakness Rome exploited. Three wars with Rome spanned a century. Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants in 218 BCE and destroyed Roman armies at Trebia, Trasimene and Cannae, where perhaps fifty thousand died in a single day, then could not take Rome itself. Scipio's invasion of Africa forced his recall and beat him at Zama in 202. Rome destroyed the city in 146 BCE, and the story that it salted the ground is a nineteenth-century invention. Child sacrifice at the tophet is attested by Roman writers and argued over by archaeologists. Punic survived as a spoken language for centuries afterwards. The city stood on a peninsula near modern Tunis and its ruins are a World Heritage site. Its circular military harbour could shelter over two hundred warships. Carthaginian ships used prefabricated hulls with numbered parts. The Latin word for treachery, punica fides, was Roman propaganda about Carthaginian faith. Rome refounded a colony on the site a century after destroying it, and it became one of the largest cities of the later empire.

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