Debriefing Memo: Tunisia #3 (Carthage)

I'm a little late posting on this, but then I'm a little late in finding out. That is--all this stuff about how the Romans destroyed Carthage and then salted the earth so nothing would never grow there again. Turns out it is in urban legend, in the classical-Latin sense of the term. Well, okay, so they "destroyed" it, more or less, but that was in 146 BC, and within a couple of generations it was back--refounded, to become a major metropolis in the Roman empire. The ones who finally did it in were the Muslims, in 698 AD, as part of their epoch-making conquest of North Africa. But by that time, Carthage had pretty much collapsed of its own senescence, and administering the quietus was almost an afterthought.

And that stuff about salt: never happened. apparently. A false conclusion to "a series of misunderstandings," as Wiki says (with a learned citation). Or, as I heard elsewhere, a fantasy cooked up by an early modern German scholar who wanted to fit it into a pattern of Biblical correctness (the Wiki, by the way, is remarkably thorough: somebody put a lot of love into it).

One way or another, it survives today as a first-class archaeological site. Well: not so elegant or ambitious as Pergamom or the Parthenon, but with lots of stones to kick from the Romans and also from their Carthaginian predecessors.

Afterthought: seeing Phoenician Carthage made me reflect again on the "irony" (as I thought it was) that the Phoenicians who, after all, gave us the alphabet, shoud have left no literary culture behind. But I had it wrong again, or so it seems. Evidently the Phoenicians did have a literary culture (evidently there are references in surviving texts). But this part the Romans did destroy. So I was wrong about the Phoenicians. But we are still left with the fact that the progenitor of all writing comes into the modern age mute.