How much do we actually know about Carthage

So, I have always wondered this, with the majority of Carthaginian books be destroyed or lost after the Third Punic war how much do we actually know about Carthage?
 
The short answer is: not much. I'd suggest taking a look at Carthage Must Be Destroyed, by Richard Miles - IMHO, it does a very good job of marshalling non-Roman material as well as trying to see through the bias of Roman sources.
 
We know Carthage better than most ancient cultures that are not Greece and Rome. The problem is that still isn't very well. A comparative lack of interest by the wider public hasn't helped - you can sell grand exhibitions and weighty, illustreated coffee-table books about the Celts, the Germanic tribes or even the Thracians, but most of the new material on Carthage is hidden away in specialist journals and libraries.

And then there's trhat thing with too many scholars who read Carthaginian having trained as biblical archeologists.
 
The short answer is: not much. I'd suggest taking a look at Carthage Must Be Destroyed, by Richard Miles - IMHO, it does a very good job of marshalling non-Roman material as well as trying to see through the bias of Roman sources.

Which is the big problem, as far as I know there is not one Carthaginian written source!
Everything we know about Carthage was written by somebody else, and the Roman accounts are uniformly biased. The Greeks are a little better, and are even occasionally complimentary, such as Aristotle, but most Greek material is from the perspective of an enemy.
For example, the classic condemnation of their religious practices, ie. the child sacrifices, does not stand up well to testing.
 
Which is the big problem, as far as I know there is not one Carthaginian written source!
Everything we know about Carthage was written by somebody else, and the Roman accounts are uniformly biased. The Greeks are a little better, and are even occasionally complimentary, such as Aristotle, but most Greek material is from the perspective of an enemy.
For example, the classic condemnation of their religious practices, ie. the child sacrifices, does not stand up well to testing.

Roman sources contain value judgments in regards to the Carthaginians, but I suspect the actual information is likely to be at least broadly correct. This is speculation, of course, but the fact that Romans never attempted to obfuscate how closely matched they and Carthage were as well as a lot of the accounts presenting the Romans in a bad light rather than the Carthaginians (such as with the fighting in Italy) suggests to me that there will be relatively few deliberate falsehoods in the Roman accounts. Honestly, for how much they tended to gossip about each other, it's surprising that the Romans didn't usually tell outright lies in their versions of events.

In addition, live sacrifices were a thing in many ancient cultures. If the children used as sacrifices were, say, captured slaves and/or prisoners of war rather than their own people, I wouldn't exactly be shocked.

To be honest, the Romans were very thorough in getting rid of Carthage, so you mostly have to take the Roman accounts (with a grain of salt, of course) as your best source.
 
at least for roman sources i would be more willing to trust them if they were from before First Punic War, where it was rather a healthy competition between the two states, than a outright Hatedom from the Roman side
 
That whole "Child sacrifice was just a blood libel" idea doesn't really stand up to scrutiny IMHO. After all, the Romans were quite capable of conquering other peoples without accusing them of human sacrifice.

Also, for what it's worth a recent study has come down in favour of the child sacrifice side:

http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2014/140123_1.html

From what I've read, this is probably right - the Carthaginians almost certainly DID sacrifice children. IIRC, one of the authors I've read on the subject argued that it was something that only the richest people would do in Carthage when they REALLY needed good luck - like a major farmer who desperately needed a good harvest, or a wealthy merchant who couldn't afford another shipwreck to sink his wares or else he was ruined. According to the theory they sacrificed their own children, not slaves. This was the theory as I recall it anyways, I'll have to double check and provide the author's argument at some point tonight if anyone's interested.

Roman sources contain value judgments in regards to the Carthaginians, but I suspect the actual information is likely to be at least broadly correct. This is speculation, of course, but the fact that Romans never attempted to obfuscate how closely matched they and Carthage were as well as a lot of the accounts presenting the Romans in a bad light rather than the Carthaginians (such as with the fighting in Italy) suggests to me that there will be relatively few deliberate falsehoods in the Roman accounts. Honestly, for how much they tended to gossip about each other, it's surprising that the Romans didn't usually tell outright lies in their versions of events.

I've seen people argue that the Romans played up the strength of the Carthaginians in order to make Rome's victory that much more impressive. I'm not sure I buy that, but it's just something I thought about reading this post. Hard to say what really happened.


Anyways the OP seems to be fairly well answered at this point. We don't know much about Carthage, since they didn't leave any written histories about themselves, and their history was written by their foremost enemies, the Greeks and Romans. That's not to say those accounts are useless though; it just makes the archaeology especially important in this case. I'll second Richard Miles' "Carthage Must be Destroyed" as a great book on the subject, and I'll add to that Serge Lancel's "Carthage: A History" as another phenomenal book on the subject.
 
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