The Carthaginians Read online

  The many administrative functionaries attested on inscriptions – not only the magistrates and the generals, but the accountants (mhšbm), members of the boards of ten and of thirty, and those working in other pentarchies – would have worked in buildings separate or shared. At least one can be identified. When the artificial ports in the old lagoon sector were created sometime around 200, the island in the circular port housed Carthage’s naval headquarters, described by Appian as a high building where the admiral in command could survey both the ships and shipyards below and the sea outside. As a result the island is now called the Îlot de l’Amirauté. The admiralty building can be recognised in the excavations of the long and narrow foundations of a six-sided building, about 80 metres long and 25 at its widest, surrounded by the traces of shipsheds for part of Carthage’s fleet. There would similarly be headquarters for the general or generals commanding Carthage’s land forces, located (at a guess) further inland for ready access to the outside world. Bomilcar, who in 308 began his coup attempt by marshalling troops in the ‘new city’ Megara, may have done so at his headquarters, for this would no doubt have a parade-ground alongside or surrounding it.

  THE LAND FORTIFICATIONS AND THE PORTS

  Some traces of the city’s earlier fortifications have been found, as noted earlier, and so have impressive remains of the sea-wall built in the 5th Century (Illustration 1). The great walls west of the city, which gave Carthage virtually impregnable security against attack, just possibly were also part of this 5th-Century effort but more likely followed the Libyan revolt and siege in 396: for this was the first great insurrection, and the land walls plainly aimed at guarding the city from just such a threat. Appian’s description of them as they stood in the mid-2nd Century is a classic, though it might give the impression that they bounded Carthage just beyond Byrsa and not four kilometres further west. The walls formed a triple line, each 30 cubits (about 13.5 metres) high plus parapets and towers standing at 2-plethra intervals (about 30 metres). The towers were four-storeyed and 30 Greek feet high (9 metres), while the walls themselves held two storeys with quarters for elephants, horses and troops.

  Some traces of the outer lines were revealed in the mid-20th Century, first through aerial photographs and then by diggings at various points. These revealed a broad trench on the landward side, then a built-up embankment with many post-holes (probably for stockades), and after this a narrower trench. The innermost wall is thought to have stood some metres east of these positions. According to Appian’s statistics the walls with their two storeys could accommodate 20,000 infantry and 4000 horsemen, the same number of horses, and 300 elephants – this last almost certainly a notional, or wishful, total since the Carthaginians are never recorded as having so many – as well as fodder and other feed for the animals. At the northern end of the fortifications, where these reached the gulf of Ariana, only a single line of wall seems to have run from there north-eastwards to cross the hilly terrain which becomes Cape Gammarth, and down to meet the sea north of that cape. Nonetheless it proved no less hard to breach, as the Romans found during the Third Punic War. It was the south side of the city’s defensive enceinte that was less certain. The weak point, Appian remarks, was ‘the angle which ran around from this [triple] wall to the harbours, along the tongue of land’ forming the shoreline south of the city. He and his source may have been writing from hindsight, for this was the direction from which the Romans launched their final assault in 146. His account of the Roman siege makes it clear that this southern line of wall left an open strand, at least several metres wide, between it and the lake.

  The harbours that he mentions were the two artificial ports built in the old lagoon area (Map 1A; Illustrations 8, 9 and 10). They continued to be used in Roman times and still survive as shallow lagoons. One was originally rectangular (then changed in Roman

  Illustration 9 Carthage c. 200 BC: artist’s reconstruction

  Illustration 10 The artificial ports area c. 1922

  times to a long hexagon), while just to its north the other is circular, with the man-made and equally circular Îlot de l’Amirauté in its centre. That these were Appian’s ports has been confirmed only in recent decades, thanks to excavations on the Îlot (earlier doubts had been due to their distance from the site of the original colony). As noted above, earlier the inlet from the lake of Tunis had been developed as a channel for shipping with dockyards extending into the lagoons area, as shown by finds of timber underlying the later works on the Îlot. It had always had a battle with silt – including effluent from the city – and was finally abandoned in favour of the impressive new constructions, which gave much greater room and safety to shipping and to the war-fleet.

  Appian calls the pair of artificial ports the ‘Cothon’. The water in them was 2 metres deep (in late Carthaginian times, the sea-level was about one metre lower than today). The rectangular port, originally 300 metres from north to south and 150 east to west, was entered from the Mediterranean via a new channel in a gentle arc, some 250 metres long, which reached the port at its south-eastern corner and could be closed off by iron chains. A millennium later Byzantine Constantinople’s Golden Horn would be protected in similar fashion, if on a vaster scale. Some of the south-western side of this entry channel has been found, nicknamed the ‘Mur Pistor’. Built of massive blocks of stone cut from the El-Haouaria quarries on the cliffs of Cape Bon – 50 metres of these have been uncovered on its western side – the port was used by merchant shipping and in turn was linked by a shorter channel to the circular naval port about 100 metres away.

  This port, 325 metres across, was the secure anchorage for Carthage’s navy, quinqueremes each crewed by three hundred oarsmen in groups of five and the dominant battleships of the 3rd and 2nd Centuries. Appian offers a vivid description that must come from an eyewitness, very likely Polybius. The circle of water was surrounded by ‘great quays’ and a double wall, so that no one even in the outer port could see what was going on, whereas the island’s tower overlooked everything. The quays could accommodate 220 ships, with magazines above to hold their sails, masts and other equipment. Every ship’s dock had a pair of Ionic columns before it, ‘giving a view of both the port and the island like that of a colonnade’.

  Excavations have revealed the nature of the docksheds on the Îlot, not mentioned explicitly by Appian but implied in his comment. There were some fifteen built in parallel rows on either side of the central building (the admiralty): each shed 30 to 48 metres long and about 6 metres wide, with a sloping slipway to allow a ship, or even two, to be berthed lengthways. The land circuit of the port has room for only some hundred and fifty or possibly hundred and seventy ship-sheds, not two hundred and twenty as Appian would seem to suggest. They and the island’s thirty, however, would be a total nearer to his, and some could receive two warships. His figure for the port’s capacity is therefore plausible, though it was no doubt a wartime – or even just a theoretical – maximum.

  The cost, effort and skilful engineering of the two ports match the great harbour projects at Rome’s port of Ostia under the early emperors. The quantity of groundsoil needing to be removed to create the naval port is reckoned at some 115,000 cubic metres, and for the merchant port about 120,000, while to build up the Îlot de l’Amirauté required about 10,000. When they were built is a question still unresolved. North African and Italian pottery fragments found on the island are of styles ranging from the 4th Century to the 1st, and mostly of the 2nd and 1st. As a result, most opinion favours the early to mid-2nd Century for their construction. This would make them a product of Carthage’s recovered prosperity after the Second Punic War – and, more darkly, would make the war harbour a deliberate violation of the peace with Rome, which had ended the war in 201, for this banned any Carthaginian war-fleet larger than ten vessels. Yet, when the Carthaginians surrendered all their existing armaments and munitions to the Roman forces outside the city in 149, Appian’s list of the quantities of armour and weapons for
soldiers handed over makes no mention of ships or naval stores. Nor did Carthaginian warships (unlike Roman) play a part against the ensuing siege until 147, and then it was a squadron of 50 triremes and smaller craft which that had been built out of old timber.

  A more plausible date for the ports would be sixty to seventy years before 149. The bits of 4th- and 3rd-Century pottery are compatible with a time earlier than the Third Punic War, as would be two coins found on site, one Carthaginian, one from Tarentum in Italy, dating to the later 3rd Century. Historical evidence may suggest a particular time. Whereas Carthage had an unimpressive navy when the second war with Rome began in 218 – about 80 ships, many of them unfit for sailing – over the next decade she sent large fleets to sea, while reports got back to Rome of vigorous shipbuilding going on. In fact the largest reported fleet, in 212, was a hundred and thirty ships strong. The degenerate state of the navy in 218 makes it very unlikely that the elaborate Cothon complex was already in being. By contrast, during the war’s first decade the Carthaginians had the wealth and manpower for such a project – and the fear, for from the start they not only faced a Roman navy of, as it happens, 220 warships but knew that their enemies planned to invade Africa as well as Spain. Even after Hannibal took the war to Italy, one damaging raid after another was inflicted on Carthage’s coastlands by Roman fleets and troops. The need for a secure war harbour, as well as one where merchant shipping could be safe from attacks, was surely acute after 218. After the war, on the other hand, with Carthaginian warships prohibited and prosperity gradually rebuilding, it is conceivable that an overhaul of the circular port was carried out, for instance to make it more suitable for merchant shipping. That could explain why the bulk of the pottery evidence belongs to the earlier part of the 2nd Century, with only a few items from earlier.

  The Cothon was not Carthage’s only impressive waterside project in her later centuries. Alongside the shore to the south-east of the ports, an exceptionally large platform of stone and rocks also existed. ‘Falbe’s quadrilateral’, now under shallow water and named after the 19th-Century Danish scholar who first studied it, is about 425 metres from north to south and, along its northern side, some 100 wide. There are some remains of walls along its seaward sides, while it narrows southward to project a short way beyond the entrance to the Cothon ports, thus sheltering ships’ access to these. Predating adjoining Roman structures, the quadrilateral or trapezoid can be identified as the choma or quay ‘which’, Appian records, ‘had long existed as a broad expanse in front of the [city] wall for merchants to unload their cargoes’.

  Its date is generally thought to be the same period as the ports. This has to assume that, around the same time as the massive Cothon project, the Carthaginians also built up the quadrilateral’s massive structure outside – even though its materials can hardly have come from the sandy and waterlogged ground of the lagoons alongside, but must have originated further afield – and did this for much the same purpose: to improve facilities for shipping. Another possibility, then, could be that the landing platform predates the Cothon. It might have been, for example, an earlier solution to the problematic silting-up of the inlet from the lake of Tunis; while one reason – as just suggested – for the Cothon project could have been to protect the navy and mercantile commerce from enemy attacks, which became a constant menace after the wars with Rome started.53

  VII

  RELIGION AND CULTURAL LIFE

  THE GODS AND GODDESSES

  ‘Before Zeus and Hera and Apollo, before the deity [daemon] of the Carthaginians and Heracles and Iolaus, before Ares, Triton, Poseidon, before the gods marching with us [or the gods of those marching with us], and the Sun and Moon and Earth, before [the gods of] rivers and harbours [or seas] and waters, before all gods who possess Carthage, before all gods who possess Macedon and the rest of Greece, before all gods of those in the army [or all gods concerned with warfare]’ – this imposing pantheon, in Greek forms, is invoked as the preamble to the oath sworn by Hannibal, his political advisers, and his army when making a treaty with Philip V of Macedon in 215. The historian Polybius quotes it verbatim in its Greek version, a copy of which had been captured by the Romans. Unfortunately it is just an excerpt in a Byzantine collection of texts; if Polybius added any commentary to it (as he did to his translations of Carthage’s treaties with Rome), it was not kept. Nonetheless, it is the most wide-ranging list of the divine beings worshipped by Carthaginians, at least in their later centuries. At the same time, its Greek form raises predictable questions: who these divinities were at Carthage, how they related to one another, and whether they had undergone any influences from the Hellenistic Greek culture which was now spreading over the Mediterranean world.54

  Like every ancient society, the Carthaginians had a very large number of gods and goddesses. Most of their major deities they had brought from Phoenicia. Zakarbaal had been high priest of Astarte at Tyre, Melqart was that city’s protecting god, and Baal Hammon was the most prominent aspect of the chief god, Baal, of Phoenicia. In turn Baal Iddir, Baal Marqod, Baal Oz, Baal Qarnem, Baal Sapon and Baal Shamim were other aspects – or in the eyes of many Carthaginians were other gods, as the word b‘l essentially means ‘lord’. In fact Baal Shamim (B‘l šmm), ‘lord of the skies’, had been the leading Baal in early Phoenicia, but at Carthage he held a place less prominent than Baal Hammon.

  Other leading deities were Eshmun, Reshef or Rasap (again in several aspects, like Reshef Hes, Reshef , even Reshef-Melqart), and Shadrap or Sadrape. All of these appear on Punic stelae, many too in Carthaginians’ religiously-based personal names. There were other lesser and fairly obscure ones, largely Phoenician again, such as Semes the sun-goddess, Hudis god of the new moon, Kese god of the full moon, Kusor god of intellect (who could take on a female aspect as Kusarit), Hawot goddess of the dead, Pumay to whom the Nora stone in Sardinia was set up, Sakun and the exceedingly obscure Arish, sometimes Baal ’Rš) and D‘m (Dom).

  Some other divinities at Carthage had important roles, unlike among the Phoenicians. The chief of these, and in later centuries perhaps the city’s paramount deity, was Tnt, usually transliterated Tanit (though Tinit may be a more accurate pronunciation). Tanit’s origins are disputed: possibly she began in Phoenicia as an aspect, or even servitor, of Astarte; or perhaps instead was a separate divinity, named on a stele as ‘Tanit of Lebanon’ (wltnt blbnn); or – least likely but occasionally suggested – a different Phoenician goddess, Anat, who under Libyan influence might have acquired a prefix ta. Tanit appears at Carthage quite late, on stelae from the 5th or even the early 4th Century, with some noteworthy aspects. She is almost always coupled with Baal, always is mentioned first and Baal next, and bears the name Tnt pn B‘l, Tanit pene Baal (or Phane-Baal) – ‘Tanit face of Baal’. She has a distinctive visual symbol or sign, essentially a triangle with a circle at its apex and a line drawn horizontally between the two, so that the ‘sign of Tanit’ looks like a geometric outline of a woman in a long robe and with arms outstretched. The sign appears in mosaics – a famous one adorns the threshold of a private home in Kerkouane (Illustration 11) – and on small items widely used, like figurines and pottery vessels. No other Carthaginian deity had this kind of visual recognition. A further sign of Tanit’s eminence is that in 146, as the siege of the city neared its climax, the Roman commander Scipio Aemilianus called on ‘Juno’, who must be Tanit, in the rite of evocatio: the ‘summoning out’ of an enemy city’s protective deity with promises of greater honours at Rome.

  Whether Tanit and Baal came to be seen as a married couple is not known, but ‘Zeus and Hera’ in Hannibal’s oath are thought to represent them and were a married couple (as well as being brother

  Illustration 11 Entrance to house at Kerkouane, with ‘sign of Tanit’

  and sister, not a feature ever suggested of the Carthaginian pair). The great majority of stelae dedicated to Tanit and Baal were in the ‘tophet’, the cremation-cemetery for infants. Even the site of their templ
e or temples is unknown, though conceivably Byrsa had room for them as well as Eshmun. Temples of many of the other gods are mentioned in inscriptions or literary sources; the city clearly had at least as many sacred places as Rome or Athens, even if the events of 146 and later have left it almost impossible to find any. Hannibal’s oath shows, too, that Carthaginians saw a divine presence or immanence in natural features like rivers and other waters, again an instinct of piety shared by Greeks and Romans.

  At least two deities at Carthage had no Phoenician background: the Greek Demeter and her daughter Kore, also called Persephone. In 396 the cult of these goddesses was initiated after their temple at Syracuse was destroyed by a Carthaginian army: for a series of disasters had followed, including the great Libyan rebellion mentioned earlier. Priests and priestesses of high-ranking families were assigned to their service (one Hannabaal, hkhnt š krw’, ‘the priestess of Kore’, is attested on a stele); leading Greek residents were also brought in to assist, and the proper Greek rituals were practised. The fine early-2nd-Century stele mentioned earlier – dedicated, probably at Carthage, by ‘thy servant Milkyaton the sufete, son of Maharbaal the sufete’ and depicting Kore in her shrine bearing a basket of fruit – vividly illustrates the continuity of the cult. It spread into Libya as well, to flourish in Roman times. The Egyptian goddess Isis also had a temple in the city, though little is known of it: she is best known now for the beautiful Greek-style sarcophagus of one of her priestesses (see Illustration 12).

  Illustration 12 The ‘Isis priestess’ from Ste Monique tomb: marble lid of sarcophagus