Carthage, known in its own language as Qart-Hadast meaning the New City, rose from a Phoenician colonial outpost on the northern coast of Africa to become one of the most powerful and prosperous cities of the ancient Mediterranean world, before being systematically demolished by Rome in 146 BC following one of the ancient world's most celebrated sieges. Its story spans more than a thousand years, touching empires, trade routes, religious practice, and the very foundations of Mediterranean civilization.
According to tradition, Carthage was founded by the legendary queen Dido, also known as Elissa or Alyssa, who had fled from the Phoenician city of Tyre following a dynastic conflict in which her brother killed her husband. Ancient sources tell that upon arriving at the north African coast near the Lake of Tunis, she negotiated with local Berber rulers for as much land as could be enclosed by an oxhide. With characteristic resourcefulness, she had the hide cut into thin strips and laid out the perimeter of a substantial hilltop site. While the historicity of Dido herself remains debated among scholars, the Phoenician origins of Carthage are well established, and the city was almost certainly founded as a waystation and trading post in the ninth or eighth century BC in what is now Tunisia.
The geographic setting of the city was brilliantly chosen. Carthage stood on a promontory with sea inlets both to the north and south, commanding a position directly astride the central Mediterranean at its narrowest passage between Sicily and the Tunisian coast. Any ship crossing from the eastern to the western Mediterranean, or sailing between the north African and European coasts, had to pass near Carthage. This location gave the city natural control over Mediterranean maritime commerce, and the Carthaginians exploited this advantage with exceptional skill. The city developed from a colonial trading post into the capital of a Punic empire that dominated large portions of the southwestern Mediterranean during the first millennium BC, including territories in northern Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, Sardinia, Sicily, and the Balearic Islands.
Carthaginian power rested on commerce. The city accumulated enormous wealth through control of trade in silver, tin, copper, gold, textiles, timber, ivory, and agricultural products. Carthaginian merchant vessels sailed as far as the British Isles in search of tin and reportedly beyond the Pillars of Hercules down the Atlantic coast of Africa. The city also became agriculturally productive through the intensive farming of its Tunisian hinterland, and Carthaginian agricultural manuals were considered authoritative enough that Rome later had them translated into Latin after the city's destruction.
Carthage's power inevitably brought it into conflict with Rome, the rising power in the central Mediterranean. Three devastating conflicts known as the Punic Wars dominated the western Mediterranean from 264 BC to 146 BC. The First Punic War, fought largely at sea around Sicily from 264 to 241 BC, ended with Carthage ceding Sicily to Rome. The Second Punic War, which began in 218 BC, produced one of antiquity's most celebrated military campaigns when the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca crossed the Alps with an army and war elephants to invade Italy directly. Hannibal devastated Roman forces at the battles of Trebia, Lake Trasimene, and Cannae, the last of which is still studied in military academies as a masterpiece of encirclement tactics. Despite these victories, Hannibal was unable to capture Rome, and the war ultimately ended with Roman forces under Scipio Africanus defeating Carthage at the Battle of Zama in 202 BC.
The Third Punic War, from 149 to 146 BC, culminated in the nearly three-year siege of Carthage itself. After the city finally fell, Roman forces conducted a systematic destruction of the urban fabric, demolishing buildings and reportedly salting the earth, though modern historians debate the scope of this legendary salting. The survivors of the city were killed or sold into slavery. A century later, Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar sponsored the establishment of a new Roman Carthage on the site, which grew to become one of the largest and most important cities of the Roman Empire in its African province, a major center of early Christianity, and a rival to Alexandria and Antioch in cultural and economic significance.
After Rome's decline, Carthage continued to play a significant role. It remained a major city during the Byzantine period until Arab forces of the Umayyad Caliphate captured and destroyed it after the Battle of Carthage in 698, deliberately demolishing its defenses to prevent reconquest by the Byzantine Empire. During the medieval period, regional power shifted to Kairouan and the Medina of Tunis. By the early twentieth century, the site had developed into a coastal suburb of Tunis, formally incorporated as Carthage municipality in 1919. Archaeological excavations beginning in 1830 with Danish consul Christian Tuxen Falbe and continuing through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have revealed the remarkable extent of the ancient city. The Carthage National Museum was founded in 1875, and UNESCO-sponsored excavations from 1975 to 1984 produced important findings. The site is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site, attracting visitors from around the world to walk among the ruins of one of antiquity's greatest civilizations.
