Reviewlet of MacDonald, Carthage: A New History

PUNIC WATCH: The Story of Carthage Isn’t Necessarily What the Romans Committed to History. A new book by historian and archaeologist Eve MacDonald paints a more complete portrait of the once-great African society destroyed by Rome (Brandon Tensley, Smithsonian Magazine).

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.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Review of McCarter, Women in power

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Women in power: classical myths and stories, from the Amazons to Cleopatra.

Stephanie A. McCarter, Women in power: classical myths and stories, from the Amazons to Cleopatra. New York: Penguin Classics, 2024. Pp. 352. ISBN 9780143136361.

Review by
Francesca Rohr, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. rohr@unive.it

This book aims to illustrate, through a selection of ancient sources, how certain elite women exercised considerable power and influence in the public sphere and the way ancient historiography and literature represented women when they held positions of power.

[...]

Notwithstanding the "Classical" focus, this book deals with many ancient women of interest to PaleoJudaica, including Semiramis, legendary queen of Babylon (and actual Assyrian queen), Dido, legendary queen of Carthage, Salome Alexandra, queen of Judea, Cleopatra VII, queen of Egypt, Boudicca, queen of the Iceni, and Zenobia, regent (and de facto empress) of Palmyra.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

More on Tunisian coinage

NUMISMATICS: Tunisian Coinage Part 2 (Bob Reis, Numismatic News).

This article gives an overview of the mytho-history of Carthage from Dido to the Vandals, and even to the Byzantines. It surveys the coinage in a general way up to the time of the latter. There are some nice photos of Carthaginian coinage.

For Part 1 of the series, see here. For some PaleoJudaica posts on the coinage of Carthage and Tunisia, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here (cf. here and here) Cross-file unde Punic Watch.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Review of Giusti, Carthage in Virgil's 'Aeneid'

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Elena Giusti, Carthage in Virgil's 'Aeneid': Staging the Enemy under Augustus. Cambridge classical studies. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 334. ISBN 9781108416801. £75.00. Reviewed by Claire Stocks, University of Newcastle (claire.stocks@newcastle.ac.uk).

Chapter 4 focuses predominantly on Books One to Four of the Aeneid, which we are to view as a unit within the epic (if we assume a tripartite structure for the work). Throughout this chapter, Giusti offers examples of Virgil’s allusions to all three Punic wars, arguing that when read as a whole, Virgil’s Carthage episode serves an historical allegory for that conflict and thus looks beyond the obvious association between the pairing of Carthage and Dido with Egypt and Cleopatra. ...

Cross-file under Punic Watch.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Tunisian tourism

TRAVEL: TUNISIA HOLIDAYS: WHY TOURISTS SHOULD LOOK BEYOND THE BEACH AND DISCOVER ITS ANCIENT ROMAN HERITAGE. After terrorist attacks scared away the sun lounger crowd, visitors to Tunisia are now rediscovering its rich Roman history (NICK REDMAYNE, The Independent).

We’re in Carthage, Tunisia’s best known and most visited Roman site. Perched on the Mediterranean coastline, a visit is worth it for the spellbinding views alone, but in truth, the development of the modern city, combined with centuries of neglect, hasn’t left Dido’s ancient citadel in its best possible state.

Instead, [tourguide] Chaouki [Latrache] wants to show me some of the country’s lesser known ruins, all within a couple of hours of Tunis, meaning you can comfortably manage them in day trips from the capital. We start with Dougga, a Unesco-designated site in the north-west of the country, and find we have the place almost to ourselves. Chaouki reckons it’s seven years since he last brought an English tourist here.

Cross file under Punic Watch.

Some past posts on Phoenician and Punic antiquities in Tunisia, and the current dangers there, are here and here and links. I don't think I'll take my holiday there this summer either, but maybe someday.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Delēta est Carthago

PUNIC WATCH: In Carthage (Josephine Quinn, London Review of Books Blog).

Earlier this month a double celebration took place at Carthage, once the greatest city in the Mediterranean, destroyed by the Romans at the end of the Punic Wars and now a seaside suburb of Tunis. The anniversary of Hannibal’s defeat of the Roman army at Cannae in southern Italy on 2 August 216 BCE could be commemorated on the same day (2/8) as the beginning of the 2828th year since the foundation of the city by the Tyrian princess Dido in 814 BCE. Scholarly talks on Carthage and its heroes were followed by a carnival, including a parade from the acropolis to the amphitheatre with Carthaginian and Roman soldiers.

The Tunisian embrace of Dido, Hannibal and their city might seem surprising. ...

[...]

I'm sorry to have missed that party.

Ancient figures associated with Tyre

A ROLL CALL of ancient classical and biblical figures associated with the Phoenician city of Tyre appears in an American Spectator travel piece:

With its expensive purple dye made from a local mollusk, the murex, Tyre was the center for the Versaces and Givenchys of the ancient world. Paris took Helen of Troy here on a shopping expedition to drape in sumptuous fabric the frame and face that launched a thousand ships.

King Hiram of Tyre was an ally and trading partner of Jerusalem's King Solomon. Hiram sold Solomon the cedar timber for the great Temple.

The Jerusalem-Tyre relationship was rocky then as now. The old Hebrew prophets inveighed against the wealthy city and its neighbor, Sidon, as hotbeds of heathenism and vice. Jezebel, a Tyrian princess (and Dido's great-aunt) who married Israel's King Ahab, came to an unhappy end.

Egypt's pharaohs many times made war against Tyre. Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar battered Tyre in the 6th century B.C. Some 250 years later, Alexander the Great already had established effective mastery over the entire Levant when he demanded to offer sacrifice at Tyre to its principal god, Melqart. Alexander maintained that he himself was divine because, he said, he was a descendant of divine Herakles, of whom Melqart was only an avatar. The Tyrians didn't cotton to that.

When diplomacy failed, Alexander mounted a costly siege whose success resulted in the slaughter of thousands of Tyrians, deportation into slavery for the survivors, and ruin of the splendid city. Modern historians say there was no strategic rationale for Alexander's destruction of Tyre and its people. The impulse for the genocide was something like the rage of a deranged, spurned lover. Is "education" the answer to war and the world's other problems? Consider that the Macedonian sociopath had for his personal tutor the serene and rational Stagirite who wrote the Nicomachean Ethics.

When Jesus walked up the short road from Galilee to Tyre, preaching to the people and driving a demon out of a local woman's daughter, he saw what Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander had done to the place, fulfilling the prophecies of, inter alia, Amos, Ezekiel, Zechariah and Jeremiah. He instructed his disciples to say to Galilean towns that rejected them and their preaching: "It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment, than for thee."

Tyre, its glories, and its devastations have inspired much English-language poetry, not all of it great. The shakiest entry in the Shakespeare canon is Pericles: Prince of Tyre, a weak work slapped together in a regrettable collaboration between the Bard and some London hacks from a mediaeval tear-jerker, Apollonius of Tyre. The Gnostic Necromancer Simon Magus and his paramour Helen of Tyre, who lived just after the time of Jesus, are themselves the figures of fascinating legend. Longfellow was obsessed with Tyre, but being no Dante with Paolo and Francesca, he spoiled the story of Simon and Helen in a tedium of moralistic stanzas -- "pious gurglings," as Mencken put it.

Review of Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed

A BOOK REVIEW of Richard Miles's Carthage Must Be Destroyed has been published by Daniel Metcalfe in the Guardian. Excerpt:

When most people think of Carthage, they picture Hannibal and his elephants or Dido, the suicidal queen, cursing her perfidious lover, Aeneas. But as every schoolboy used to know, Carthage is inextricable from the Punic wars – its very own 100-year conflict with Rome (264-146 BC). Almost all our stories of this once-great north African empire, says Richard Miles, come to us through a biased Roman filter. Carthage never had a chance to tell its own tale – its library was lost to its Numidian neighbours. But drawing on archaeological and written sources, Miles helps to fill in the blanks with this thoughtful and meticulous book. Carthage was rather more sophisticated than history gave it credit for, and its people were certainly no more war-mongering than their regional neighbours.

For more reviews, go here.