Carthage Part I: More than a Colony
Being both a Historian and of the museum world, I overhear many of the same ideas about the colony turned empire. Those who feel a specific way about Carthage may say something to the effect of "Carthage was just a weaker Rome", "Carthage had one good general", and my favorite "Carthage lost because Rome was a Republic" all of which are wrong. In reality, the 9th-century colonial city-state from the Levant had always been separated from the rest of the Mediterranean. In subsequent entries, I will be going in-depth about the military history, economic history, political history, and religious/cultural history of Carthage but this article will serve as a basic primer to this topic.
While the descendants of Phoenicians, the people of Carthage began to express a new identity away from the home-cities as soon as permanent settlement was established on the cape of modern-day Tunisia. Citizens of the trading port began to see themselves as Carthaginians rather than Phoenicians. The physical distance from their overlord's culture created what is referred to now as Punic ethnicity. A term created by Rome and their Latin allies about the cities Phoenician past. While to a modern Linguist this term merely refers to a dialect of Phoenician, in the ancient world this term created racial tension.
Eventually, by the 7th-century B.C.E, the belief of separation from the Levant drove the city to seek passive autonomy. This resulted in much of Carthage’s early leadership sending expeditions westward for new trade routes and to contact new trade hubs. Thus creating a need for a larger organized military, achieving this by securing financial backing through trade, and creating alliances with non-Phoenician states. Doing so would allow them not only to be capable of self-rule through their trade but expand Carthage's influence over the Mediterranean. While they favored Latin states such as the Etruscan city-states and Rome, Carthage at this time established numerous defensive alliances with Numidian tribes, Greek colonies, and Celtic-Iberian clans. Many of the aforementioned groups also would serve as mercenaries in various Carthaginian Armies over the next 3 to 4 centuries. While many of these treaties were token gestures, Latin cultures (including Rome) accepted Punic diplomats with honors as they entered cities.
By the beginning of the 6th Century B.C.E, there was no longer any confusion about who ruled the city of Carthage. Punic citizens and the powerful noble families that had created over 70% of the cities wealth through trade were now their own masters. While in the next articles I will be going into full detail about this political system and its changes over time; for this article, it is easiest to compare these aspects to other Mediterranean societies of the era. Now with a professional army and experienced navy, the lone city-state begins to expand into the Tunisia prairie, across the Algerian ports, and finally to the Sicilian coastline to besiege Greek enclaves.
More to come soon. Thank you for reading!
