The Carthaginians Page 13
TEMPLES AND OTHER SACRED BUILDINGS
Naturally the city held temples of its many gods and goddesses. The most magnificent, the temple of ‘Aesculapius’ (Asclepius in Greek, and usually identified as Eshmun) as Appian calls it, stood on the top of Byrsa itself and was reached by a great flight of sixty steps from the foot of the hill. Nothing survives even of its foundations because in Roman times the summit of the hill was completely taken off, levelled and replaced by new structures (some broken remnants found on Byrsa’s slopes have been tentatively suggested as from the destroyed temple). On the Byrsa side of the marketplace was another grand temple, that of ‘Apollo’, who seems to have been Reshef, lavishly decorated in gold. It may be that the remains of an early 2nd-Century temple, recently discovered near the suggested site of the agora and only a short distance north of the circular port mentioned earlier, was its final version, but this is uncertain.
The other major divinities like Tanit, Baal Hammon, Baal Shamim, Baal Sapon, Melqart and Astarte must have had their own temples, not to mention places of worship for the many lesser deities of the Phoenician and Punic pantheon, but where they lay is not known. We might wonder whether Tanit and Baal Hammon at least, perhaps Melqart too, had their seats on Byrsa with Reshef. At the same time, Tanit and Baal Hammon were the chief deities offered votive stelae in the ‘tophet’.
The flat-roofed temples of Phoenician and Egyptian traditions were standard in the Phoenician west, too, including Carthage. This is inferred from carvings on stelae and small sculptures. For instance a 6th- or 5th-Century representation from Sulcis in Sardinia and another of similar date from Motya in Sicily present a temple’s goddess standing between the two columns of its porch, just as a 5th-Century stele from Carthage’s ‘tophet’ again has a worshipper (or the god) in the entrance porch between columns. Another stele found at Motya represents a small temple with the usual two-columned porch, the interior cella with a niche for the deity’s image at the back, and an Egyptian-style entablature (its lower part adorned with a sun-emblem and a half-moon curving over this) – complete with the dedication to Baal Hammon by one Mnms son of Hqm. Most notable of all is a fine model or naiskos of a handsomely decorated, seemingly square temple or shrine, found at the Libyan town of Thuburbo Maius (some 60 kilometres south-west of Carthage, on the river Mellane) and perhaps 2nd-Century in date. This may represent a small shrine or ‘chapel’, again with a porch between two fluted columns in front of the interior cella of the building.48
The entablatures of temple roofs were carved in complex geometric patterns like egg-and-dart moulding and Egyptian-influenced motifs; their fluted columns, round or square, could be adorned with Greekderived capitals or sometimes with patterns like palm-tree fronds. Within each chapel and temple, there would be an inner room or rooms with an altar, the deity’s image and pious offerings, cheap or costly, such as statuettes, jewellery amulets and small carvings. A large sacred precinct would include a courtyard where priests and attendants would gather for ceremonies.
Temples in full Greek form, with a two-sided sloping roof and triangular pediment façade, were few at best and left no recognisable archaeological trace. If any did exist, they would probably have been ones dedicated to Greek divinities adopted by the republic – most famously Demeter and Kore (also called Persephone), adopted in 396 – or ones permitted to the resident Greek community. A pleasing white marble stele, now in Turin, depicts Kore or Demeter standing with a horn of plenty in the columned porch of a Greek-style shrine of mixed Doric and Ionian styles, with a crouching lion sculpted in the pediment. The stele is generally judged Carthaginian-made from the 2nd Century, though a dissident view sees it as from Sulcis in Sardinia and dating to around 300. Significantly, its dedicatee was ‘thy servant Milkyaton the sufete, son of Maharbaal the sufete’ – clearly a leading aristocrat, Carthaginian or Sulcitan – and the depicted temple surely stood in his city.
An impressive structure – not at Carthage, but in Carthaginian-influenced Libya – can cast added light on Carthaginian architecture. On the hillside just below Thugga (Dougga, 110 kilometres south-west of Tunis) stands the 21-metre-high tower-like mausoleum of Ataban ‘son of Yofamit son of Filaw’ (these transliterations are approximate), seemingly the Libyan lord of the region around the late 3rd Century. His inscription, now in the British Museum, is in both Punic and Libyan; one of his stonemasons, along with his own son Zimr, is ‘Bd’rš (perhaps Abd’rš, like the Carthaginian sufete mentioned earlier; but interpretations vary) son of Abdastart, while among other specialist workers was an iron-maker named Safot son of Balal or Baalal. These men and their fathers had Carthaginian names, indicating though not proving that they were Carthaginians in Ataban’s service. The mausoleum consists of three tiers. The first is cubic in shape resting on a podium of five steps, with a relief sculpture of a quadriga (a four-horse chariot) in each vertical face; the second also cubic but of narrower dimensions, with engaged square Ionic columns on each face and on a three-step podium; the third a rectangular, still narrower structure resting on a squared pedestal that originally had a horseman at each corner; and topping the whole a low pyramid on a pedestal with a sea-nymph at each of its corners (Illustration 2).
This grandiose erection is unlike anything built by Greeks or Romans (except, perhaps, lighthouses on a much more massive scale) but is strikingly like another monument, this time at Sabratha
Illustration 2 Mausoleum at Thugga (2nd Century BC)
on the coast of Emporia, which can be reconstructed from the ruins that remain: a triangular two-tiered structure, with a pyramid much steeper than Thugga’s, on a podium standing on five steps – but with the extra refinement that on both levels all three sides were concave in shape.49
The design was popular. There is for instance another, though smaller and much plainer, rectangular two-tier mausoleum, again topped by a pyramid, at Henchir Jaouf near Segermes (south of Carthage and about 25 kilometres inland from the gulf of Hammamet); it has been dated by pottery fragments to around 175–150. A one-metre-high and half-metre-wide rectangular stone marker or cippus found in or near Carthage’s ‘tophet’ has stylised columns carved to frame each of its four faces and is topped by a gabled roof, to resemble a similar structure (Illustration 3); on each of the two narrower faces is carved, in skilful style, a gourd or bottle crowned with a triangle – a religious symbol strongly resembling the ‘sign of Tanit’, to be met below. At Clupea (Kelibia) south of Kerkouane, the stone-cut entrance down to the underground tomb of one Mago has, on its lintel, a plain outline of a pyramid-topped mausoleum; Mago’s family perhaps could not afford a real one, which of course would have been hugely expensive.
More striking still are paintings in a tomb in Kerkouane’s Jebel Mlezza necropolis, each depicting in some detail a single-tiered and pyramid-topped mausoleum, with a ritual fire burning on an altar alongside. Such monuments were (we should note) well established by the mid-3rd Century, for as noted earlier Kerkouane was
Illustration 3 Stone cippus from Carthage: rectangular tower design and ‘bottle’ symbol on side
destroyed then and never rebuilt. If Carthage’s urban terrain was too constrained for similar impressive works, they may have stood in places in the necropoleis on the hillsides of Byrsa, Junon, Dermech and the others, perhaps elsewhere. The ‘tower’ which the Romans found close to the outer side of Megara’s wall in 147, when trying to break into the city, was perhaps one such – not in a necropolis, but neither is Ataban’s.50
A kilometre south of Byrsa hill and just a few dozen metres east of the shore lagoons was the so-called ‘tophet’, an entirely different type of sacred site first discovered in 1922 (Illustration 4). A narrow and elongated tract of walled but open-air ground eventually covering some 6000 square metres, it was the place where the cremated remains of very young children were deposited, in pottery urns and often (not always) with an accompanying stele and grave-offerings, with dedications to the goddess Tanit and to Baal Hammon
. Cremated animal remains also occur, sometimes in the same urn as those of a child. The earliest deposits can be dated to the late 8th Century; over the ensuing centuries, nine levels of deposits built up. On an informed estimate, about twenty thousand such urns were placed there in the two centuries from 400 to 200. The word ‘tophet’ is not Punic but has been borrowed by archaeologists from the Hebrew Bible, where it is a valley outside Jerusalem in which
Illustration 4 View of the ‘tophet’ at Carthage
Canaanite children were sacrificed to please the Phoenician Baal until the later 7th Century. Carthage was only one of many Phoenician colonies in North Africa, Sardinia and Sicily with a ‘tophet’: the site was always outside the settlement, though in her case the city later expanded around it, and hers is by far the largest of them all. What was done in the ‘tophet’, or in preparation for the deposit there, is one of the most debated – and perhaps insoluble – questions in Carthaginian studies, as will be outlined later (Chapter VII).
HOUSES AND SHOPS
Secular buildings are not often pictured on stelae or in other Punic art, but just enough evidence survives for glimpses of the rest of Carthage’s cityscape. In the same well-decorated Jebel Mlezza tomb, one wall shows a neat and naive painting of a walled city open to the shore (Illustration 5). The city is painted between a niche with a symbol of the goddess Tanit and, on its own other side, a rooster with sharp spurs (apparently a symbol of the soul), so the wall may depict the ‘other-world’ city receiving the soul of the deceased. Its semicircular crenellated wall and the square buildings inside would be based on familiar views of coastal towns – maybe, it has been suggested, of Kerkouane itself. Such views would, conceivably enough, be rather like those of many Greek islands’ small towns
Illustration 5 Painting of city in Jebel Mlezza tomb VIII
today, although stuccoed instead of whitewashed. Carthage in turn may have resembled an enlarged version of a city like this when viewed from a ship or from the hills on its north side, or – more distantly – from the Cape Bon coast opposite.
Diggings further inland in the old city show evidence of big dwelling-places even in Carthage’s early centuries. Similar early houses have been identified at Phoenician sites in south Spain like Toscanos and Cerro del Villar, and later ones at Kerkouane on Cape Bon. They would be flat-roofed, with access by stairs or ladders: cool for sleep in high summer, warm for taking sunshine on winter days. Although there was nothing like standardised floor-plans, many larger houses had interior courtyards reached by narrow corridors from the street and giving access to surrounding rooms, thus letting in light and air. Some large buildings housed apartments, often with the ground-floor rooms let out as shops. On the southern slope of Byrsa hill, diggings have unearthed a sector datable to the early 2nd Century, preserved through being covered over by a deep layer of rubble when the Romans a hundred and fifty years later razed away Byrsa’s summit. This is the so-called ‘Hannibal quarter’, so named because the famous general became sufete in 196 to carry out a number of progressive measures in politics, government and finance which had lasting effects – including perhaps this extensive urban improvement project in what previously was an industrial site (Illustrations 6 and 7).
The long-established workshops were replaced with carefully built structures on streets laid out on a grid plan. The streets, 5 to 7 metres wide (wider than in the old city) and of rammed earth, have drainage holes every so often feeding water and other liquids from the buildings lining the streets down into stone-lined wells (soakaways), with the runoff coursing through a basic type of drain made from pottery amphorae fitted together. When rain did fall on the streets, it soaked into the ground or ran off. The excavated street which climbs the hillside is fitted at intervals with short flights of steps: the whole sector, and no doubt much of the rest of Carthage’s crowded terrain, was a pedestrian (and of course pack-animal) precinct.
The buildings form rectangular blocks, opening on all sides into the streets and subdivided into houses, apartments and shops. In Roman towns they would be called insulae, ‘islands’. Those excavated measure either some 15½ by 31 metres (a 1:2 ratio), or 15½ by about 10½ (a 3:2 ratio), with the larger buildings lining one side of a street running north to south and the smaller on the opposite side facing them. Each building, small and large, was subdivided into
Illustration 6 View of the ‘Hannibal quarter’ on Byrsa’s southern slope
Illustration 7 Another view of the ‘Hannibal quarter’
separate dwellings with walls that are mostly very solid – 50 centimetres or so. Several are quite narrow at just over 5 metres wide, and while some extend the full depth of their block to the street at the other end, others were subdivided into cramped little units that might serve as lodgings or shops. At least two other dwellings are a contrast: twice as wide as the narrow-fronted ones, and at least one of them handsomely equipped with a stylish entrance of half-columns in white stucco and with stuccoed pillars flanking its marble-mosaic courtyard.
Every subdivided house has its own well-made underground cistern for water, sometimes two, and all of them sizeable. Rain, when it did fall, could be collected in wells, basins, and perhaps from rooftops via downpipes to feed into the cistern, while the relatively high underground water-table could also be reached by wells. In the houses, the only adornments surviving are certain floors with patterned mosaic or terracotta-fragment pavements (decorations that the Romans called pavimenta Punica) and pillars covered with white stucco; nor, it seems, have traces turned up of the neat bathrooms fitted with ledge-seats that have been found in some Kerkouane dwellings. The buildings’ size and the strong walls capable of carrying upper floors lend support to Appian’s mention of buildings being six storeys high in precisely this area. The upper storeys would be reached via wooden stairs; there is evidence at Kerkouane again, for staircases in houses (although of course those storeys must have been many fewer). We may recall Strabo’s reference to Tyre’s lofty buildings too.
Given the variety of dwelling sizes revealed by the foundations – we have no evidence of how upper floors were divided – it looks as though the population of the quarter must have been quite varied. Its nearness to the crest of Byrsa and its complex of rich shrines surely made it, from the start, an attractive area to many different types of resident. Merchants and priests, scribes, goldsmiths and jewellers (fragments of a jeweller’s cutting implements have been identified, such as obsidian and pieces of coral), architects, road-builders, fullers, butchers and bow-makers might all live in the district. Butchers and other shopkeepers, as well as skilled artisans like a bow-maker or statue-carver, could have their shops in rooms opening onto the street while they and their families lived upstairs. Propertyless workers, not to mention visitors to the city, would lodge in rented rooms or whole apartments.
A site excavated near Cape Gammarth, in the Megara district, is a contrast: a semi-rural residence with a section for pressing olives probably from nearby olive groves, along with an unpretentious but affluently adorned house which had stuccoed sandstone columns and floors with Punic-style mosaics. Further investigations in both the city area and Megara will, in time, bring these lively varieties of Carthaginian dwellings and their amenities into sharper focus.51
PUBLIC BUILDINGS
Not much is known about Carthage’s non-religious public buildings save their names. As noted already, in later centuries there was a marketplace or square (agora in Greek) near the shore south-east of Byrsa, for Appian describes it as near the city’s famous artificial ports and these occupied the transformed area of the old lagoons sector (Illustration 8). Investigators have noted, in fact, that somewhat north of them the terrain shows a marked absence of finds later than the archaic period (thus after the 6th Century): this would of course be typical in a broad open space. Diodorus’ account of the coup attempted by Bomilcar in 308 describes the marketplace as surrounded by high buildings while the streets ar
ound it were narrow. So does Appian when reporting its final capture by the Romans in 146. Besides its role as a market, it would be the obvious place for magistrates to assemble the citizens for elections and lawmaking. That would explain why Bomilcar’s first move was to try to seize it.
Illustration 8 Carthage 1958
In the original colony, the agora must have been well to the north, since the urban area included only Byrsa and the level ground eastwards down to the shore (compare Map 1A). Even if replaced as the main square in the 5th or early 4th Century, the earlier one may have remained a subsidiary focal point, for quite likely there were other, smaller marketplaces around the city. Kerkouane has a number of small squares, for example, providing extra space for movement and maybe tradesmen’s stalls; in a city of Carthage’s size and complexity, lesser market sites would hardly be surprising.
Where in the city the senate, the adirim, met is unknown, but there was (it seems) a senate-house – bouleuterion in Greek – very near to or even alongside the agora. A reference to it by Diodorus seems to put it there, just as in Rome the senate-house opened onto the Forum. Appian, like Diodorus telling of events in 149, writes of returning Carthaginian envoys going to the bouleuterion while a massive crowd waited outside: this also sounds like nearness to the agora. On the other hand, Livy twice reports the adirim holding sessions in the temple of Eshmun (Livy calls him Aesculapius) on Byrsa, in 174 and again in 172 – at night, allegedly for secrecy. Livy’s account seems to imply that it was an unusual venue, but it is worth recalling that the Roman senate too could meet in a temple – or a theatre, as on the famous Ides of March. Just possibly Eshmun’s temple, or another building within Byrsa’s citadel, had been the senate’s original meeting-place and continued to be a venue from time to time.52