MacDonald takes us from the Phoenicians who founded the city in the ninth century B.C.E., through the myths, and possible truths, about a canny political dissident from Tyre who came to be known as the queen Dido; we learn of the rise of Carthage as a formidable naval power, and, yes, of its eventual sacking. But we also learn about the first century afterward, when the Punic language of the city’s institutions permeated North Africa. “It is believed that Africa was never so Punic as it was after Carthage was destroyed,” MacDonald writes, as surviving Carthaginians “created a kind of Punic diaspora.”This is a brief review of Eve MacDonald, Carthage: A New History (W. W. Norton & Company, 2026), which is new to me. For another book by Dr. MacDonald, about Hannibal, see here and links.
As I think I've commented somewhere before, few realize how close Europe came to having Punic as its lingua franca instead of Latin.
Oddly, the first paragraph of this review seems to say that there is no physical evidence for child sacrifice at Carthage. Or does that only refer to that specific episode in 310 BCE, for which there's not much evidence in the first place? In any case, for the debate about child sacrifice at Carthage, see here and many links, with my own overview comments here, with links.
Cross-file under New Book. And this seems like a good time to link to this post, which explains why PaleoJudaica pays attention to the Phoenicians, the Phoenician language, the Carthaginians, and Punic and Neo-Punic.
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