According to legend, the Phoenician queen Dido, also called Elissa, fled her brother the king of Tyre and secured the Byrsa hill by cutting a single oxhide into thin strips to encircle it. The city, Qart Hadasht or new city, sat on a promontory at the narrows between North Africa and Sicily, protected on its landward side by walls 13 meters high and nearly 10 meters thick. Its hand-dug cothon led from a bustling commercial harbor through an angled channel to a hidden circular military harbor with covered docks for up to 220 warships around an island command post. The retired general Mago wrote a 28-volume agricultural treatise that the Roman Senate later ordered saved and translated into Latin.
Aristotle praised Carthage’s mixed constitution: two suffetes elected yearly with no military power, a council of elders, popular assemblies, and a Tribunal of 104 Judges that audited generals and could crucify them. After the Second Punic War Hannibal served as suffete and reformed taxes so reparations were paid early. In 146 BC Rome burned the libraries, leaving the Tophet’s urns of infant and animal remains to be argued over as sacrifice or an infant cemetery. Roman Carthage, founded after Julius Caesar’s decision a century later, became a great city, hosted the Council of Carthage in 397 AD, and was finally wrecked by the Umayyads in 698.
- Some residential districts had apartment blocks six stories high, with cisterns and soak-away drains in almost every home.
- Carthaginian shipwrights numbered timbers on standardized parts so warships could be built and repaired quickly.
- During the final siege, according to Strabo, the city made 140 shields, 300 swords and 1,000 catapult missiles a day.
- Carthage built 120 decked warships in two months inside the hidden harbor.
- A few Carthaginian texts passed to Berber kings such as Juba II, who used them to write histories.
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