Carthaginian Empire

Carthage is situated on the coast of North Africa. The earliest settlement was established in around 800 BC. In the Aeneid Virgil immortalized the foundation myth of Queen Dido fleeing the Phoenician city of Tyre and the murderous designs of her brother to the shores of North Africa where she established her ‘New City’ in 814 BC.

According to the Roman historian Livy, the city was large, with protective walls that stretched for nearly 33 km.

The Carthaginians were a seafaring people and they had a large army. Soon the Carthaginian seafarers of Carthage began to colonize Andalusia, Malta, Sardinia and parts of Sicily.  Carthage also exerted control aver Malta and other islands in the sea lanes.

One group among the leaders of Carthage favored branching out into the interior where they occupied land in the Bagradas valley, and successfully practiced agriculture among the Berbers.

The high point of the Carthaginian hegemony may have occurred around 400 BC.

Carthage founded settlement which Greeks called emporia, along the entire coast from the Gulf of Sidra in present-day Libya, through present-day Tunisia and Algeria to the Atlantic coast of Morocco as well as on all the islands of the western Mediterranean, including the Balearics.

The Carthaginian trade continued to flourish, not only by sea but also across the Sahara Desert.

With Rome’s expansion, a series of wars against Carthage ensued in the third and second centuries over control of Mediterranean commerce and sea lanes.

For centuries Cartage had stood as the great rival to Rome. But after the conquest of the city in 146 BC by the Roman military leader Scipio Aemilianus, its walls were destroyed and only a ruin identified its location.

In that year the city was besieged, taken, plundered, its inhabitant exiled or enslaved, its wall demolished, its houses and public buildings burned to the ground.
Carthaginian Empire