Rome wrote Carthage's history after burning its libraries
Founded by Tyrian merchants around 814 BC, Carthage grew into the west Mediterranean's richest naval power. Almost no Punic books survived the Third Punic War, so the city that rivaled Rome is remembered mostly through Greek and Latin enemies—and a queen who measured land with an ox hide.
Punic Qart-Ḥadašt means New City. After Assyria swallowed Phoenicia in the seventh century BC, Carthage stood alone and built a web of colonies and vassals. By 300 BC it dominated North Africa's coast and contested Sicily, Sardinia, and Iberia. Strategic farmland plus trade lanes to West Asia and Northern Europe funded one of antiquity's strongest fleets; armies leaned on mercenaries and auxiliaries—Iberians, Gauls, Numidians, Greeks, and more. Conflict with Sicilian Greeks foreshadowed the Punic Wars with Rome (264–146 BC). Carthage barely survived the Second War; in 146 BC Rome destroyed the city.
Indigenous records nearly vanished. What remains is inscriptions, archaeology, and hostile historiography written during or after the wars. Augustine later claimed North Africans still answered Chanani—Canaanites—in Phoenician, though Josephine Quinn doubts that testimony. Foundation tales disagree: Philistus names Tyrian brothers Azoros and Karkhedon; the famous Elissa/Dido cycle has King Pygmalion murder her husband Sycharbas, after which she flees, tricks chieftain Iarbas by slicing an ox hide into strips around Byrsa hill, and reads omens in an ox or horse skull. Virgil's Aeneid retooled Dido to bind Carthage's myth to Rome's and justify later hatred.
Even museum fragments speak of craft: rock-crystal lions and temple-shaped dishes from later North African Carthage show luxury long after the metropolis fell. The larger lesson is evidentiary. Without Punic voices, every judgment about ritual, politics, or cruelty arrives filtered through rivals. Recovering Carthage means reading against the grain of the winners who burned it.
Source: Ancient Carthage
