Definition of Punic-Carthaginian Culture

If the Punic Wars had ended with the victory of Carthage instead of Rome, the face of the world would have changed.

This is not a gratuitous statement, taking into account the importance that, after these wars, Rome, its culture and its achievements acquired, for all the peoples of the city. basin Mediterranean.

But who were the public that inhabited Carthage?

With the Punic adjective we define what is related to the inhabitants of ancient Carthage, their achievements and their culture.

The etymology of the word is Latin, and has its roots in the Greek name phoiniks, from which the name derives phoenician, which could have been transliterated by the Romans to give rise to the denomination Punic (punicus in original Latin).

But, if Carthage is in present-day Tunisia, and Phenicia is located on the coast of what is now Lebanon, how is it understood that these peoples were related to so much distance in the middle?

Carthage was founded about 820 BC. C. by the Phoenicians from Tire as a commercial enclave on a route of interest to this town.

The Phoenicians were forced to go to sea by various factorsPerhaps the main one was the fact that the towns they had as neighbors were much more powerful militarily, which prevented them from expanding inland.

Thus, the various Phoenician city-states developed a powerful foreign trade, which found its maximum in sailing through the Mediterranean expression.

Said navigation reached points as distant (and more so for that time) as the Iberian Peninsula. It is logical think that, to travel such distances, it was practical for the Phoenicians to have supply points intermediate, and rather than relying on native populations, they preferred to intersperse their own populations with these.

The legendary founding of Carthage belongs to Princess Dido.

Said legend tells that the king of the gétulos, at the request of Dido, granted him the right to keep as much land as an ox hide would encompass. Ready, Dido cut her skin into very fine strips and spread it out to cover the maximum territory possible.

But legend is one thing, reality is another.

Like the city-states founded by Greeks, Carthage had a very wide autonomy, which would lead, in turn, to its own city-state status.

But, unlike the city-states of the current Lebanese coast, this one in particular was going to develop not only a series of trade routes and supporting enclaves, but would build a military empire similar to that of the fledgling Republic Romana.

This was made possible by the fall of Tire, the city that had given rise to it, in 580 BC. C. before the troops of Babylon.

The political organization of Carthage was also that of a republic, with a senate.

The Suffetes they were two magistrates, equivalent to the Roman consuls, with a little more power but who could not be homologated to kings. In any case, access to the Senate and the position of Suffer it was also restricted only to members of wealthy and influential families, as was the case in Rome.

The military power of Carthage was based mainly on the use of allied and mercenary troops.

Although, naturally, it also had native troops of Carthaginian citizens, its high dependence on allies and mercenaries was always a Heel of Achilles for the Punics, as said foreign troops were unreliable, and more than once they rebelled or betrayed their Carthaginian chiefs / allies, such as This was the case of the Numidians, a people that in the Second Punic War went from an ally of Carthage to an ally of Rome, contributing greatly to seal the defeat Punic.

When they began their expansion into the Mediterranean, the Carthaginians first encountered the colonies of the Greek polis, both in Sicily and Magna Graecia, and elsewhere.

After clashes that, together, smiled at the Punics, they took over a wide geographical area that covered everything that today is the coastal strip of Tunisia, Libya, and several enclaves on the rest of the North African coast, all of the south of the Iberian Peninsula (Andalusia, Extremadura and Murcia, currently in Spain), the Balearic Islands, Corsica and a part of Sardinia and Sicily, as well as other small islands distributed between the coast of the Italian Peninsula and North Africa.

This was the situation in their domains when the confrontation that, today, is considered to be inevitable sooner or later took place: the Punic Wars.

Carthage lost two wars against Rome, before facing the third that would be its final end.

In 146 a. C, and after almost three years of siege, the Romans entered Carthage by fire and blood. Six days it took them to conquer the city, having to fight the Carthaginian citizens house by house.

After this, the survivors enslaved and the city sacked, the legions of Scipio Emiliano (who would receive the nickname of "the African" for said victory), Following orders from the Roman Senate, they destroyed the city and sown the land it had occupied with salt, so that it would not grow there again. nothing.

Carthage, and with it all Punic culture, disappeared like that at a stroke. Although the Romans later built another city with the same name in a nearby place, and that this new Carthage would be the capital of the Vandal kingdom, it did not conserve Punic vestiges, a civilization that the Romans had eliminated, but not sent into oblivion.

Photos: Fotolia - Consuelo Di Muro / Pavel068

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