How to Survive in Carthage

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Hey guys, Tristan here, and I have an exciting announcement.

The Ancients will be returning to the London Podcast Festival.

Now, last year, tickets they sold out at record speed.

So, this time we've been upgraded.

We've got a bigger room.

And you, you can be there too, on Friday the 5th of September at 7pm at King's Place.

Now, I've invited friend of the podcast, the fabulous Dr.

Eve MacDonald, to join me on stage, where we will be exploring the gripping story of ancient Carthage.

Carthage, the Phoenician city that became a superpower, an empire that rivaled Rome for control in the Western Mediterranean, and ultimately had a terrible, traumatic demise.

Of course, the ancients is nothing without you, so we want you to be there in the audience, taking part and asking us your burning questions.

Tickets for the festival always sell fast, so book yourself a seat now at www.kingsplace.co.uk forward slash what's on or click the link in the show notes of this episode.

The team and I cannot cannot wait to see you there.

Hey guys, I hope you're doing well.

Welcome to today's episode of the Ancients, all about ancient Carthage, daily life and society in this great rival city of Rome in the western Mediterranean.

Forget Hannibal, forget Queen Dido.

We're exploring what we know about how people lived in this great trading cosmopolitan city, including the controversial question of whether the Carthaginians really did sacrifice children.

Our guest today is Dr.

Eve MacDonald from the University of Cardiff, who is also going to be our guest for our special live show in London on the 5th of September.

More information on that you can find in the show notes.

It's 210 BC, and you're walking through the streets of one of the wealthiest cities in the Mediterranean.

Overlooking the Bay of Tunis in North Africa, this was the flourishing cosmopolitan port city of Carthage.

People from far and wide sailed into its majestic port, they traded in its great market, and walked along streets in the shadow of towering apartment blocks and religious sanctuaries.

So what would it have been like to live in Carthage in its prime?

What glimpses can we get into the daily routines of those who called this metropolis their home before it was brutally destroyed by the Romans?

This is your guide on how to survive in Carthage with our guest, Dr.

Eve MacDonald.

Eve, it is such a pleasure to have you back on the podcast today.

Thank you, Tristan.

You know I love coming on this podcast.

We're chatting again.

Last time we did The Fall of Carthage, and what a story that was.

This is a bit less catastrophic.

It feels like with Carthage, you can cover the big topics like the fall of Carthage or Hannibal or Dido and so on.

But the story of everyday lives of Carthaginians is extraordinary, but that feels a bit more enigmatic, a bit more difficult to get a sense of what life was like for someone who lived in ancient Carthage.

I oh, it is so difficult because it was totally destroyed by the Romans.

We really don't have that long memory of daily life or what went on in Carthage.

And I think that to get a sense of it, you have to dig into literally what we found in the archaeological remains and little bits and pieces that are scattered all throughout Roman sources that talk about Carthage.

So it's bringing together these two ideas of the physical remains on the ground and then the

resonance in other tales about daily life or about how how Carthaginians looked or what they wore and that sort of thing that we pick up and sort of put together to make a story of day-to-day Carthage.

So can we get glimpses of it from Greek and Roman sources looking from outside, looking towards Carthage and then combining that with archaeological work on the ground?

Absolutely.

We can.

We make big assumptions by doing that, of course, as you know, and it's not necessarily absolute truth, but we get a feeling for certain aspects.

When you think about what an enemy might perceive as a common feature, what they might make fun of, what they make jokes about, all that sort of stuff turns up in Roman comedies, for example, from the times of the Punic Wars.

So we get little bits and pieces from that perspective.

And that's really interesting to figure out, you know, almost the familiarity between the Carthaginians and the Romans is a big part of that story too.

They knew each other really, really well.

And we don't always get that aspect perceived in Roman history.

So picking up on the knowledge of the two and then looking also at other places where Carthaginians were so influential.

So Sicily obviously is a really big part of the story.

We pick up pieces from the archaeology

in Spain and there's been tons of really interesting work done there.

on the Balearic Islands, work in Sardinia, all those sorts of things play into what we know about Carthaginians.

That's amazing.

And I didn't realize, because you mentioned it earlier, Roman comedy.

So Roman plays is also a source of information, Roman entertainment for learning about ancient Carthaginian society.

Yes, absolutely.

And in fact, it's a play by a late third, early second century playwright, Latin playwright named Plautus, who wrote a play called The Little Punic,

the Poignalis, so making fun, sort of demonizing the Carthaginian figure.

And it has tons of really interesting details about what Carthaginians wore, what they sounded like to people in southern Italy.

Plautus was from southern Italy, so he would have really understood the connection between the two cultures and also what life was like for people just after the Second Punic War and the reality of that pretty stark existence for many, many people on the ground.

So I was thinking for this chat, as it's going to be how to survive in Carthage, almost thinking as if we arrive in Carthage at its height and get a sense of like living, religious worship, what they wore, what they ate, and so on and so forth.

First off, with Carthage at its height, what time period do you think we should be talking about there that we know the most information about life in Carthage?

I think we really have to think about Carthage in the century before it was destroyed or...

you know, the 150 years, maybe the third century BC is probably our best documented physical Carthage.

You know, we can go a little bit further back into the fourth century as well, because we have some good evidence from that period too.

But really, it's what was left on the ground is mostly the material was there when it was destroyed.

So that's our best view of Carthage, when it was at its biggest, possibly, too.

So if we were sailing into Carthage at its height, I mean, first off, when you first see Carthage on the horizon, Eve, paint a picture for us.

What would we see?

Well, first of all, it's a beautiful landscape today to sail into the Bay of Tunis.

It's a big, huge bay on the north coast of Africa.

There's mountains on the left side of the bay, so the east side of the bay, beautiful mountains, Bukornin, they're called, and they're really dominant markers when you're coming into the bay or when you're looking from Carthage out to sea.

So that's what you would see in the landscape.

And then you would sail up to Carthage, and Carthage had big

sea walls, sea-facing walls with monumental gates.

So that would have been very, very impressive.

And then behind those walls, because there was the Versa Hill, which was the center of life, really, and the oldest part of the city would have stood up quite high behind the walls.

And then on top of that hill, was a big temple complex, which was where the Senate met in Carthage, that the temple of Eshmun, it was called.

And there was monumental architecture throughout the city, as well as these very big, tall, multi-story buildings that Carthaginians lived in.

And they were famous for this.

So they used a kind of masonry building technique called opus africanum, which is the Latin Roman word for it, but the Romans gave it this term and it's like the African masonry, basically.

and it allowed for the Carthaginians to build very tall buildings and it used these big ashlar blocks solid and then rubble fill on either sides and it was a way in which they could build up now what do we know about cities that build up not out

is that they have limited space for their urban environment so that i think is something that's really interesting about carthage that tells us something that they had a sort of restricted area in which their city existed in i was actually going to ask do we imagine it as being quite a sprawling city with that one high point being the Bursa Hill in the center?

But from what you're saying, I think it is quite compact because of the style of the buildings.

Yes, it was very, very dense.

And it was very, very dense in where it was occupied.

There was this the city walls were 17 kilometers though.

So they encompassed a big area of space that's called, we call the megara.

And that was all orchards and greenlands and agricultural lands.

So the city wall included an area that was the garden of Carthage, really, and is what allowed Carthage to survive for so long during the siege of Carthage at the end of the city's history in 149 to 146, and also the fact that they had these very sophisticated harbors and sea-facing walls.

So you're sailing into Carthage.

You would come in perhaps on a merchant ship, not on a military ship.

Hopefully, if you were coming in on a military ship, you were probably a war captive.

We'll do a merchant ship then.

We won't say we're a slave or captured.

Exactly.

we don't want to we don't want to be that person and you would come in and you would sail into what was a big rectangular harbor the entrance to the harbor was to the south so that was where it was most protected from winds and currents and things like that and you'd come in and pull up on one of these docks that lined the merchant harbor And the view would have been pretty spectacular from inside that harbor as well, because we know it was very well built.

So there were different shipsheds, there was a lot of industrial space around this area, but

there were also facades to kind of make it a more ornate and decorated experience.

And then in front of you would have been another wall around a big circular harbor, which was their military harbor.

And there was a big hill in the middle of that where the Admiralty sat on the top of and could direct traffic basically in and out of the ports and the entrances to the ports.

But the military and the commercial harbors were separated.

They could be joined, but there was a gate, so you couldn't actually see into the military harbor from the commercial harbor.

But it almost sounds like that tower in the middle is like an air traffic control tower, kind of guiding in ships and out in and out of the harbors.

It was super sophisticated.

So we, and we know, what does Aristotle tell us?

He talks about what kind of jobs people did at Carthage.

And one of the jobs that he mentions is the pilots for the boats in the ports.

So the, you know, the, they had little boats boats coming out and guiding in bigger ships and doing just what we do in ports today, which is really interesting.

So you would have been guided in with a pilot boat and that would have taken you to your mooring and then you would have you know unloaded and gotten off the ship and been in Carthage.

Signed your signature or whatever with the portmaster or something.

I'm thinking of Paris the Caribbean now or something like that, but to kind of Moor your vessel in the harbour, that idea can be.

The pirates and the Carthaginians?

Now, Tristan, we can't say anything about that.

Everyone was a pirate back then.

But no, actually, we do know that there was a fair bit of, as far as we can tell, not just at Carthage, all across the Mediterranean, individuals would pull up, you know, make ships and organize them, fund them, and perhaps man them as well.

And, you know, individual commanders were very, very important in sort of what their ships did.

And people...

Some people believe that we should be thinking about the Carthaginians a little bit more like a merchant navy when we're talking about them when they're fighting big sea battles out in the Mediterranean.

Is there a little bit more geared towards a merchant kind of navy?

So, even when you arrive in Carthage in its port, given the prominence of Carthage at the time and the importance of its port, can we imagine as soon as you get off the ship, there'd be people here, there, and everywhere doing lots of different jobs, speaking lots of different languages as well?

Yes, absolutely.

And I mean, we know so much about Carthaginian multiculturalism from, and that was one of the things the Romans always think about, and Carthage is criticized for, is that they speak many languages.

Carthaginians are multilingual and that they are not one ethnicity.

They're many ethnicities.

And all of our evidence points to that being true, that we know that there would have been the Amazir people of North Africa today, who we call Numidians, really, or Libyans in ancient sources.

they were a big part of Carthaginian culture, as were the original founders, the Phoenician people who spoke a Semitic language and that developed into Punic, what we called the Punic language.

But we know there were citizen groups of Greeks.

There were all kinds of people from Iberia.

There would have been people from all over the Mediterranean there and from

a big part of Africa as well.

So do we think that most Carthaginian citizens, do you think their education would have meant that they had to learn several different languages?

Well, I don't think we can really know for sure, but we do know that most Carthaginians spoke Greek if they were educated.

So Greek, as you know, at this time of history and in the ancient world, was the lingua franca of the Mediterranean.

And so anyone who was educated spoke Greek, and it was a language that would have allowed a lot of communication between different groups of people.

you know, Scipio and Hannibal both spoke Greek, but they chose not to speak Greek when they spoke to each other, but they both could have.

And most Carthaginians would have had an education in Greek if they were educated.

Now, they would have learned their own Punic language too, and that would have been the language probably of religion and ritual and culture.

But we know that there were Greek religions that were formally adopted into the Carthaginian pantheon, too.

So there were Greek rites, and we have authors who tell us about this.

Diodorus Siculus.

tells us that when the Carthaginians adopted the cult of Demeter and Corae into Carthage, the Greek citizens of Carthage or the Greek-speaking citizens of Carthage were the ones, the priests who administered the cult.

So we know that's part of it and we would imagine that there's all sorts of other cults and people as well.

So yeah, multicultural, multilingual.

The language that most people would have spoken,

we assume, was Punic.

from the inscriptions, the vast number of inscriptions that we have from Carthage are in the Punic language.

The official inscriptions that hung hung on temple walls are in Punic.

So that would have been the official language of the city.

And then people would have been able to communicate perhaps more internationally in Greek.

But if we go a little bit further back, because of course the Romans, you know, fight wars with the Etruscans and

really, you know, they take over that area.

Earth, northern Italy, Tuscany area today.

Quite early.

But we know that in the, say, fifth century BC, Carthaginians and Etruscans are allied together.

They're doing commerce.

We have these really cool little business cards found in tombs at Carthage and in the Etruscan language.

So we have an example of one business card that says, I am Punel from Carthage, but it's written in Etruscan.

It's found in a Carthaginian tomb in Carthage.

So and it's only half of one of these ivory business cards that would have been really beautifully carved.

And the other half went with somebody's shipload to wherever it was destined, somewhere in Etruria, so in the

north of Rome.

And that's where the other half of that card rested.

So that's, I love that story because we can see both how business was done, long-distance trade was carried out between merchants of different cultures, and the fact that they use these cards to express themselves to each other and to make sure that the goods met the buyer sort of thing when they do business deals.

But that's amazing.

That's almost kind of like with the tablets that have survived from Roman London and some of the earliest tablets, which I think the earliest surviving wooden tablet from London, which predates Boudicca, is a business transaction and it was found in the city of London of all places.

So it's really interesting that sounds a similar case there.

And also the multitude of languages makes me think of a previous chat I've done with Lloyd Llewellyn Jones about Babylon and the Tower of Babel, the Babel idea, this idea that all these languages were spoken in Babylon as well.

But do we get a sense then, just keeping on the port a little longer?

You mentioned the multitude of jobs that were available, that the trading bureaucracy must have been a monstrous task.

So many people involved, and maybe the official language for that was Punic.

And yet, all the people involved in that kind of huge trading network of the Carthaginians, they would have been speaking so many different languages.

But maybe when they come to the port of Carthage, they have to, for the official documents, write them in Punic?

Possibly, and that's something we don't really have any evidence for.

Most of the inscriptions that we have are more

ritually based.

And I think that's a super interesting idea to think about the possibilities.

So, if we go back to that business card, that's written in Etruscan.

So, it's really interesting to try and perceive how power and the politics of power would have played out into that.

So, I'm assuming that

perhaps translations had to be made.

You can imagine that if you arrived from somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean with some roads, say, because we know the Carthaginians loved Rhodian wine and they imported a lot of Rhodian wine.

They loved wine, we think, and of course grew a lot of really beautiful grapes in North Africa too and made good wine, but they imported a lot of Rhodian wine.

So when we get the amphorae that are imported with the wine in it, we have the

writing on those, and that's in Greek.

So that tells, you know, where they came from, what's inside, how much is in the amphora, what volume we're talking about.

So those must have arrived in the port, been unpacked by people who then would be able to note this down and possibly have them translated into Punic because taxes would have been involved in the Carthaginian state, the city itself, would have taken taxes off on goods coming and going.

And for the treaties that we have that exist between Carthage and Rome that Polybius records, we have really incredible detail about the fact that

what and where goods are allowed to be unloaded, which ports, and it often defines these kinds of ideas around trade.

So it was something that was very carefully regulated.

There you go.

Well, you mentioned imports and exports.

So if you're walking out of the port of Carthage, I mean, what are some of the big imports and exports that we hear about with Carthage at its height that you may well have seen?

going through the port of Carthage at that time.

Well, we can imagine that if you're walking out of the commercial port of Carthage, you would enter directly into the big space that was the market, the agora,

the Greek word we're using, not the Punic word, because we don't really know it.

But that was a really important part of this, the space, and it would let it was direct access from the ports into the marketplace.

So that's really telling, isn't it?

You can

and what's happening.

And all of the different things that get mentioned are all very, really interesting stuff.

So a lot of fish and my suspicion, not ever yet, and I'd love somebody to prove this for me, is that you know the Roman fish sauce that they're so famous for, the garum,

I'm almost certain that must have come from the Iberian Peninsula, the Phoenician cities like Cadiz and that were allied to Carthage.

Spain and Portugal today, that area, right?

Spain and Portugal, yeah, Spain and Portugal, because that was such an important fishing culture.

And, you know, they were Punic Phoenician-speaking people, West Phoenicians, we call them, and they developed, you know, fish as such an iconic part of their identity on coinage and things like that.

And then at Carthage as well, fish is really, really important.

And we have lots of evidence in various places of amphorae full of scaled fish and things like that.

And in fact, there's a house that was excavated in Corinth, of all places, another very, very important port in the Mediterranean, and in fact, destroyed by the Romans the same year that Carthage was.

And it was a house that's filled with amphorae that came from Carthage.

And the scales of the fish that were in the house were then limed over into the floor.

So there were so much fish arriving in this house.

There's so many fish scales and fish bones.

The smell must have been extraordinary.

So they limed it.

But yeah, so export from Carthage, we definitely know fish is involved.

So I always think the fermented fish sauce that the Roman becomes so important with the Romans may very well have originated either in the Western Mediterranean, Phoenician or Carthaginian places that they took over.

And in regarding imports, you mentioned wine earlier.

Should we also be thinking more infamously things like slaves or metals?

I mean, do we we know much what would have been brought in and sold en masse at the market as well?

Yes, all of the above.

And sheepskins we know about from, say, Plautus, we were talking about earlier.

The playwright talks about sheepskin from Sardinia being part of the merchant cargoes of the Carthaginians.

The enslaved is one of those really difficult issues because we really don't have evidence for unfree people in Carthage.

We don't have the same level of evidence that we do from the later Roman period.

And if we were looking at Rome in this period as well, we wouldn't have very much evidence from Rome either.

But so we assume, yes, that slavery was a part of Carthaginian culture, that slavery was a part of Carthaginian culture, and that it existed.

But like so many things that we see with the enslaved, is that they were almost invisible to us.

And again, in the archaeological record, they are very ephemeral, the enslaved and the and the process of that that being said we assume like all the rest of the mediterranean cultures that there were the unfree existed at carthage did jobs we we don't know a lot about what the carthaginians did with their war captives we know

much more about what the romans did we have a good idea about what hannibal did when he was in italy you know he would let go the auxiliary forces of the Romans and keep the Roman citizen soldiers who were captured as to be ransomed.

So that kind of engagement back and forth of being slaved and enslaved and then bought or freed that went on, but we don't really know and we have no idea whether they participated in the large-scale kind of enslavement and slave marketing that the Romans did.

We can't make that, but yes, we assume yes.

there were the enslaved.

We definitely know that there would have been metal traded and the Carthaginians go to Spain and Portugal because of the draw of their incredible metal reserves along the Guadalcavir River, the silver, the iron ore.

So that's very much a part of what would be bought and sold.

But there was a great deal of wealth in the landscape of North Africa.

And we see Carthage in the archaeological record very early becoming self-sustaining, growing enough food to feed itself and exporting food.

We see that really early on.

So we don't really know about what kinds of foods that they needed to import and what they produced.

We know they produced lots of olive oil, lots of olives.

They grew wine, but they imported wine from Rhodes, as I was saying.

They had big grain production, barley, all the different fruits and legumes, that sort of stuff was all grown in North Africa.

So those things may have come into.

But they were incredibly connected to Sicily, which also had a huge amount of resources.

And so those sorts of back and forth between Sicily and Carthage was happening all the time as well.

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Presumably, were there places then within Carthage, if we go a bit away from the market, were there places that you could visit?

Almost, I guess, the ancient Carthaginian equivalent of restaurants and places to get food.

Do we know much about that?

We don't know anything.

Oh, it's not like Pompeii, damn.

No, and that's again really too bad.

Of course, we're talking so many centuries before that.

Must have been, of course.

The idea of Carthaginian food and recipes only is preserved in bits and pieces in later stories and then in archaeobotanical remains in the archaeology.

And so we don't have a lot to connect the two.

Cato, the

great Roman who really wanted to destroy Carthage over and over again,

he did

have this really famous book of the Carthaginians translated into Latin and that was an agricultural treatise by a man whose name was Mago and so we know that agronomy and the science of growing things at Carthage was very well known and renowned so that is something that turns up in bits and pieces in later agricultural writers but

what we what and how the what kind of public engagement with food almost i guess we could call it we're not really sure.

We can say that bathing and there were public bathing spaces and public toilets.

So there was a public life.

And so along with all of the things that go with that, washing and using the loos, basically, you would have probably had food as well, we can assume.

One of the only recipes that we know about from the Carthaginians is a kind of porridge.

Yes, let's explore the porridge because you mentioned this when we were exchanging emails emails about this very topic.

Exactly.

So Punic porridge turns up in a couple of different places.

So we know, and Plautus, back to our friend Plautus again, the comedian, makes fun of the Carthaginians and calls them porridge eaters.

So think about how we make fun of other cultures today, and we can assume that they are pretty renowned for their

porridge.

And it was a kind of cheesy porridge.

It was a savory porridge that used barley, we think, and lots of cheese and salt.

And it was, yeah, would have been really nourishing.

It would have had protein and it would have had all the grains you needed and things like that, the pulses.

We don't think that the Carthaginians ate a lot of meat, as most people in the ancient world wouldn't have eaten a lot of meat, because meat was very expensive.

Animals were very expensive.

So it wasn't sort of vast general consumption of meat, but it would have been consumed at festivals.

The priests in ancient Carthage were in charge of the sacrifice of animals and animal sacrifices in most ancient societies were part of public banquets.

So priests, I always like to think of that dual role that priests played in the ancient world of being both in charge of ritual and like butchers too.

And so they would have been really good at cutting up the meat and leaving some for the gods and giving some to the feasts.

And so the proper distribution of an animal would have taken place.

They were definitely, you know, the nose to tail consumers of meat, but they wouldn't have eaten a lot of meat, or your average Carthaginian probably wouldn't have eaten a lot of meat.

It was very, very expensive, but they would have eaten fish.

Fish was readily available.

And then grains and pulses and vegetables and what people could grow as well.

Fish, do we think fish is a fish?

And a lot of fish, yeah.

So meat's special, fish less so, but fish is still important.

So if we could kind of keep on this idea of the everyday Carthaginian, well, actually, first of all, what should we be imagining with the everyday Carthaginian?

Should we get the Hannibal Barker out of our mind?

Well,

should we?

It's really interesting to think about how average the Barkid family were, because

we don't really know where they came from.

We've talked about the fact that there's a theory that they might have been of Greek or Greek and Libyan origin from the eastern part of what is Libya today,

that they would have certainly, and we know, been intermarried into Numidian royalty.

So, your average, they may have been actually quite typical in terms of ethnicity, is their

average Carthaginian,

but were they typical in terms of what they and how they presented themselves?

No, they were elites, right?

So, they had big estates outside of the city.

They probably had a home in the city as well.

Your average Carthaginian is really very, very difficult to get a grasp on.

The men wore long tunics.

We know that.

Again, descriptions from our friend Plautus makes fun of the fact that they wear very long, long robes.

They don't wear short ones.

There's also little jokes about them wearing underwear, which I find really interesting.

Bizarre, how could they, right?

Yes.

But why, how that plays out, we don't know.

And we know almost nothing about what women wore.

Assuming, though that people, because if we take the idea that they're renowned for being multicultural,

the assumption is that when you went to Carthage, that was visibly on display.

So not just the languages, but also what people wore.

And we see that, you know, that's something people comment on when they talk about the Carthaginian military.

Everybody's wearing their own distinctive dress.

And that must have probably been true in the city as well.

So it would have been sort of various different ethnicities were wearing whatever was their local garb.

Materials like linen, obviously, would have been used and hemp-type things and, you know, like sort of basic clothing.

The climate, hot and cold.

in the winters can be really cold and we hear about sheepskins being imported into Carthage from Sardinia again.

So bringing up the sheepskin.

So those must have been used in various ways.

And yeah, so.

Because is it quite an enigmatic topic?

Because I appreciate, as we've explored in this chat, there are these amazing little glimpses we get into the lives of people living in Carthage, but there's still so much which is mysterious and we don't know too much about.

But do we get a sense, any more idea about that whole social hierarchy idea at Carthage?

I mean, if it was so multicultural, do we think that foreigners actually outnumbered Carthaginians within the city and so on?

No, and I think, no, in fact, I don't think that's true.

I think that the the citizens were multicultural.

Oh, okay, right.

Thank you.

Yeah, I don't think that's the case, in fact.

And we know that what made you a Carthaginian was definitely not your ethnicity.

Interesting.

That is an absolute certainty.

There's a recent paper that's been published in

antiquity on the evidence taken from Carthaginian period cemeteries in various parts of the Mediterranean.

And the DNA certainly turns up no one ethnicity and lots of people from the Aegean who are buried in Carthaginian period cemeteries.

So

in fact, we know as well that Hannibal, for example, again, we know so much about Hannibal,

had many soldiers with him whose mothers were Greeks and fathers were Carthaginians.

We have absolute evidence that the Numidian people were a big part of the

genetic makeup of the Carthaginians.

So being a Carthaginian citizen was not your ethnicity.

it was

your relationship to the city, which is really interesting, but I think very common, especially in the Western Mediterranean, which are these colonial cities, you know, made up of people who are coming from all different places.

So you became a citizen in Carthage, not because you were of any sort of origin of Carthaginian, that may have happened, but also because you were part of the city and how you became a citizen.

We only know a little bit about that through military, of course, and that soldiers could become citizens after they had served in the Carthaginian army.

We understand that from the story of Agathocles' army.

But so is it potentially possible then, let's say if we are arriving in Carthage, let's say we're from Etruria, we're an Etruscan, or we're one of the lucky few who still count themselves an Etruscan at this time.

Although I'm sure that there were still some proud Etruscans out there.

But you had arrived in Carthage and you had a lot of contacts with the city already through many years of trade.

And then you decided to stay in Carthage and and maybe work in the market or somewhere else.

So, there is certainly, although we can't say for sure the exact details of it, your relations with Carthage are there, your contacts with Carthage are there, that you could become a Carthaginian in name.

You could become a Carthaginian.

Yes, you could become a Carthaginian, definitely.

And you could marry into a Carthaginian family.

That seems not to be a problem at all, as far as we understand.

Marrying between different groups of people is not at all restricted.

And so, you could become a Carthaginian by marriage.

You could become a Carthaginian by serving in their military.

We assume there are other ways as well.

Perhaps you, I don't know, they have a resonance, you know, how long you lived in Carthage.

You could apply to the temple of Eshmun, you know, on the on the Versa Hill and make an application to become a Carthaginian.

What were the advantages of being a Carthaginian is what is always really hard to know.

What made it worthwhile being a Carthaginian?

Because that's really what people become citizens, isn't it?

We see that today all the time.

And as a Canadian who lives in London,

I've been through the process.

Why do you choose to become a citizen?

And I think those are things to think a little bit more about and that

there must have been, or there was likely a mechanism for that.

But it was probably through personal relationships and intermarriage.

That seems to be the way that things worked.

I'd like to ask quickly, before we go on to religion and law and punishment and so on as the chat goes on a bit about residential areas in the city now do we know that carthage you've got the harbour you've got the market you've got the bursa hill the citadel area do we know whether the rest of carthage of course you've got that wide open countryside farming area as well the megara that you mentioned was it very much divided into districts would there be a clear residential district and other districts and so on Yes, and that evolves over the period of the history of the city.

We understand that too.

And there were all the way up the birse hill so were streets three main streets and along those streets were houses these multi-story we think they were six stories high houses internal courtyards

exits facing onto the streets and we know that As the city went on, and we archaeologically, we know this from the last, say, 50 years of the city, there were big urban villas on the hill of Juno, which is the hill beside the Birsa Hill.

So Carthage is made up of three big hills at least as well.

And that

this is a, these develop in the later period.

So we don't know if they're there before.

We just don't have the evidence and we can't access the archaeology because Carthage is today a really beautiful place to live with modern houses and a modern community and it's an absolutely stunning spot.

And so it's difficult to really get the full layout of the area in this period.

But we know there were these multi-story houses.

We know there were individual, larger villa-type houses within the city, or more, you know, stately homes, we might call them.

We know there were cemeteries in the early period that then

hemmed in the city

within the walls from the early period.

And then those were, they stopped using those when the city had to expand because of its population growth.

And so the walls encompassed a big, large area, but those early cemeteries were actually inside the later city walls.

And we also know that there would have been the urban poor, of course.

Like we always see, and certainly in the third century BC, we don't have very much evidence for urban poor, assuming they're living in rammed earth or mud brick kind of structures.

And we have evidence for mud brick use at Carthage as well, and that they're in areas that were perhaps not as well connected, perhaps not as well connected to the sewer systems and the irrigate, the canal systems.

Carthaginian houses had cisterns in them that collected water.

They were very sophisticated for third century BC housing.

The other really important thing, I think, for life at Carthage connects to the city walls.

and that those walls were what we call casemate walls.

So these have two, like an an exterior and interior wall, and then rooms in between.

And inside those case mates, inside these rooms in the urban, in the walls, where animals were kept.

That's where the Carthaginians kept their elephants.

That's where soldiers lived.

They kept their elephants within the walls

of the city of Carthage.

Yeah, they would have, of course, been sitting on to the exterior.

But yeah, that's what we're told anyway.

So we have to believe what we're told in these cases because we don't have them anymore but that yeah the the the big walls of carthage were living walls and this is true of many ancient cities who have these big casemate walls these double walls is that the space in between them is too valuable so they're part of the living entity of the city and so then people coming and going from the land gates would have been controlled as well in that area.

That's incredible.

And also to think that you would have probably, I mean, there's potential to see elephants when you're walking through the streets of Carthage at the same same time.

Exactly, this idea.

It's hard to imagine.

Now, of course, that's only

from the third century BC onwards once the Carthaginians started to use elephants, but their military engagement would have been part of the walls.

I must ask one other question on this is almost once again if you're arriving in Carthage, but also bringing in the idea of other big ports in the Mediterranean like Corinth.

I mean surely alongside the houses for the people who lived in Carthage all the time, even if we don't have evidence, archaeological evidence for it yet, surely there must have been the equivalent of inns or hotels or rooms you can rent and so on for people who are just passing through.

Must have been, and they must have been a key part of the landscape.

And we assume, you know, almost like diplomatic missions must have existed in some of these ports as well, even if they were, you know, not full.

I mean, I always think that we shouldn't use terms like, you know, full state function in this period because really it was much more lawless than that but i think a place like delos in the cycladic islands yes which was an amazing international port in its later phases is a really good example there's a house on delos the house of the carthaginian merchant and the reason that it's called that is because it has a mosaic of the sign of tanit which is the little stick figure round-headed looks like an egyptian ankh almost figure that we find in carthage as well But it's thought that a Carthaginian merchant lived in Delos and used that house.

So we can only make the same assumption going back and forth.

In Carthage, there must have been houses for merchants coming from other regions as well, maybe connected to religious cults, to guilds, to all those things that we know that way.

And we certainly know guilds existed at Carthage, too.

Well, you mentioned Tanet.

So what sorts of artwork would you see?

Or just, I guess we can call it artwork.

Maybe even, because I'm going back to Pompeii now, I'm thinking of graffiti and so on and things like that.

Do we get any sense from our surviving sources or from the archaeology what types of art you would have seen in Carthage?

Mosaic floors were part of the story.

Very little of the walls exist and so we don't know, but we assume they were decorated.

We have a bit of evidence from other sites that are better preserved.

Places like Kerkoan, which is up on the Katbon Peninsula across the bay from Carthage and up on the east side of what is modern Tunisia today is this incredible site that you can still go and visit.

And it is the closest thing that you can get to a Carthaginian period settlement.

Kerkuan.

Kerkuan.

Yeah, and it's really, really cool.

They seem to have processed the murex shells there, the purple dye, which, of course, the Phoenicians were very famous for.

And the name Phoenician comes from the Greek word for this purple dye.

And they fished and the agricultural land around there is really, really beautiful, this beautiful little walled town.

And so there's mosaic floors there, so we know that.

And the mosaic floors are very early.

They're third century BC, so very much at the same period as the Hellenistic cities in the East, much

probably a little more developed in terms of, I want to say, kind of visual.

unity perhaps in the city than we find at Rome, which develops a little bit later with a lot of that.

But I I think one of the things that you would have seen at Carthage that Rome was very famous for is loot from other cities.

And the story is, is that when Carthage fell, Scipio Aemilianus, who took the city of Carthage, found pieces of art and things like that around the city that were renowned to have come from places that the Carthaginians had sacked over their history.

And so they were, you know, given back or other cities were invited to come and take back their things.

So stolen loot was a big part of the ancient world.

So Syracuse, Rome, Carthage all had it.

And I'm sure it would have existed in a public space in Carthage.

We don't know very much about how people decorated their homes and things like that.

We just don't have that evidence.

What we have is very much the substructures only.

But we can make these assumptions from places like Heracoan that they were mosaic floor and they had painted walls and all that sort of stuff.

can you explain them what this tanit symbol is it's got like a triangle and a circle on it and then a hand like two arms sticking out like a triangular stick man or whatever it is like it's yeah or stick woman really because it's the triangle as the body absolutely that's the sign of tanit

we don't know if it was called the sign of tanit by the Carthaginians that's what we call it because it's associated with one of the really really important and famous religious sites at Carthage the the precinct of tanit as it's called, or the sanctuary of Tanit, otherwise known as the Tophet.

And so that sign, which appears in inscriptions and it appears on mosaic floors, at Kercoen most famously, and then as I said earlier, at

Delos, at the house of the Carthaginians.

So it seems to have been an important sign.

It is very, very close in decoration to the Egyptian Ankh symbol.

And so there is this possibility that it has the same kind of implications of being a life symbol almost, but it's called the sign of Tanit after the Carthaginian goddess Tanit, who's like the chief goddess of the Carthaginian pantheon next to her consort, who is Baal.

Yeah, which just means, as you know, lord in the Phoenician Punic language.

I had no idea.

So thank you for telling me that.

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So if you are at Carthage, How would you go about doing your worship of the gods?

Do we know much about that?

We have some idea

based on some inscriptions that have been found that are thought to have hung on the walls of the temples.

And this one inscription that's now, there's part of one in Toulon or in Marseille, that was an inscription that was being taken away during the French colonial period back to France that was preserved.

And it came from Carthage.

And there's another one, I think, at the British Museum that show the regulation of worship at a temple called Bal Saphon.

Bal Saphon, my colleague who I know you've talked to, Dylan Johnson, who's excellent and knows all sorts of things about Near Eastern gods, has told me

is a version of a sort of a sky thunder god, perhaps.

But the gods that are worshipped in the Near East that get transported to Carthage do not necessarily have the same meaning and function in Carthage, and you always have to remember that.

So Bal Saphon exists at Carthage in a temple, and the regulation of how people could worship

exists in these inscriptions.

And the inscriptions are great because they tell us about guilds.

So, guilds of people would get together to offer the sacrifice of an animal.

So, all the pilots in the port, or all the maybe seamstresses in the workshops.

So, guilds according to professions.

Yes, we think those are guilds according to professions.

We just know that's the sort of word.

So, but we assume that might be, but they might be religious guilds, they could be people who worship this goddess or that goddess but they're community connections anyway and so they exist and they get together and you can you know what price for a goat what price for a sheep what price for a pig what price for a cow and all the way down to birds and also the offerings of milk and honey and things that poorer people could have offered and that what the charges should be by the priests for the butchering of the different animals and all that sort of stuff.

So it was very regulated.

And I mean it would have been everywhere most likely that this was something that was part of a community process and it was adapted to you based on your own

your own personal circumstances, I guess.

Yeah, so that I think is really interesting.

So we know that happened.

We know that they sacrificed animals on an altar.

Usually animals are sacrificed outside of the actual temple space because the temples are where the gods live.

So you don't sacrifice the animals inside the temples.

You do it outside on an altar and then you offer the goods into the temple itself, which is the house of the gods.

So that's most likely what we understand.

And we do have some examples of remaining of altars and visuals of the sacrifice of a cow, a bull or a cow, with the

lying on its back on an altar.

So having been sacrificed.

So the butchering is probably taking place, you know, with the stomach opened up and things like that.

If you're, I mean, that's a little leap by me, but we know just the imagery is there.

So, that happened.

And

yeah, so everything and anything.

And then, I've already talked about the fact that there were Greek cults.

There would have been Egyptian cults, we assume too, because there is, when we've talked a little, we've talked just earlier about the visual presence in the city, certainly in the graves that have been excavated in Carthage from the earlier period, the presence of a very strong Egyptianizing style,

if that works, and things like scarabs,

a lot of faience objects, and Egypt culturally was very strong visual presence in the material culture of Carthage that we find in the tombs.

And so that I think is really key and might have been.

could have existed as well.

There's a really, really famous sculpture on the top of a sarcophagus.

It's called the priest and priestesses sarcophagus, but she's certainly not a priestess because she is lying face up on the top of this marble sarcophagus.

She's very, very beautiful woman, and she is

an Egyptian-styled goddess, like Nephithus.

We see with the

wings.

The Egyptian goddess Nephithus.

And the wings, these beautifully painted wings cover her legs, and she's got her head covered in.

She would have had the urea, you know, the symbol,

the snake symbol crown as well.

That's gone now.

But so we know from the existing visual culture at Carthage that there would have been that sort of strong Egyptianizing input, and that they were painted, these sarcophagy as well.

So, color, we have to think about color.

We should have way more color in the ancient world, as many, many people have done lots of research on.

Things were painted, things were bright, things were, you know, colorful and exposed.

And it's also really interesting there, very quickly before we move on, is the fact that when you initially said Egyptian elements, I would have thought, oh, okay, so probably from that, you know, the Ptolemaic Alexandria, so like third century Egypt and the idea of ships going from Alexandria on the coast, maybe past Cyrene in Libya, and then on to Carthage, back and forth.

But it sounds like the Egyptian artefacts there are even older than that.

Much older, sixth century BC even, and going through all the way through.

And that is, we know, for example, example, Phoenician sailors sailed, circumnavigated Africa for the Egyptian pharaoh Nico or Nebo, just the last of the native Egyptian pharaohs in the sixth century before the Persians take over Egypt.

So there's a strong connection between, and geographically, when you think about Egypt and the Levant, the cities of the Levant, and then all the way along the coast of Africa.

But that's something that you could also imagine as well, and I guess this is more imagination, but given the strong heritage of the Carthaginians as explorers and their Phoenician heritage, you could imagine stories being told in Carthage of previous voyages of Carthaginian ships, you know, going past the Straits of Gibraltar, circumnavigating, maybe in some cases, as you say, the whole of Africa and coming back up the Red Sea and, you know, that kind of area.

It's extraordinary.

Absolutely.

And yeah, Phoenicians, we've and Herodotus tells us was a Phoenician ship that does it.

We have Hanno the navigator, of course.

I think you've done a yeah, he goes,

does he go all the way to almost kind of a Burkina Faso area?

or maybe the gulf of cameroon perhaps maybe maybe we there are questions there are many questions and we know that he brings back skins of animals that there's wood exotic woods they bring back and collect and they would have had a big you know and of course carthaginians traded across the saha south too so that is an important part of the material culture although we have less evidence of for Carthage than we do for the later period with the Romans trading with Garamante.

So

we assume the Carthaginians did as well, because the region south of the Sahara needed salt and the Carthaginians needed the gold, and the Niger Delta existed, you know, was the home of a lot of gold.

And so there's a natural trading kind of connection there.

And the Saharan caravans were crossing the Sahara all the way through this period, so it would have definitely been part of it.

And ostrich eggs, we can't forget ostrich eggs, painted ostrich eggs, they're really important.

And they turn up in graves in Carthage as well.

These beautiful painted, decorated ostrich eggs.

If we go back to religion a little more, because you mentioned animal sacrifices.

And I find it striking this idea of, you know, you've got priests who are your gateway to the gods, but they're also your butchers at the same time.

But we've got to also ask, and I think we'll get to the name the Tophet now.

Could there also have been human sacrifice?

Well, yes, indeed.

I'm going to say that.

And of course, there was human sacrifice in ancient Rome as well.

So we're not, and many other cultures seem to have had or practiced human sacrifice that is eventually outlawed and banned.

And by the Romans in the first century BC, it is.

And so we have to imagine that human sacrifice at Carthage may very well have been eventually sort of phased out, and it seems like that was a possibility.

But yes, we have evidence certainly

for the sacrifice or dedication of children, children in particular,

very young children children now with the most recent work by an excellent tunisian archaeologist called imed ben-jurbania he's just done a recent excavation at the site that we call tofet or the sanctuary of tanit

and they've done analysis on the ages of the finds there and also on the sex and have been able to show us that it is both girls and boys, which I think is really important because the ancient sources say that it's only boys who are being sacrificed.

So the ancient sources that tell us that the Carthaginians sacrifice their children in mass numbers and do this sort of callous mass sacrifice say it's boys and it isn't.

It's both.

And also that they're very, very young.

So they're newborns, really, mostly.

Although

there is some evidence of a little bit later older children too.

And we have to add that not everyone agrees that this is a child sacrifice site and that the argument, which is very, very difficult to prove,

but perhaps may have some validity.

I'm not saying that we know for certain, for certain, what this site is.

The argument is perhaps that this is a place where the Carthaginians dedicated their stillborn children or the children who died almost immediately after birth because infant mortality would have been enormous in the ancient, well, in the pre-modern world.

And so there is this ongoing debate, although I think fairly convincingly the argument has fallen on this being a place where throughout the time that the city existed, children were dedicated to the gods Baal and Tanit, the two chief deities of the city, at this site.

And they were ritually deposited in urns.

They had been cremated and then deposited in the urns.

And then usually a little stone stele was set up to commemorate that.

This goes back to the very beginning of the city, so from the earliest, earliest phases, and goes right through to the end of the city and almost to the post-Roman period.

There's dedications made.

These dedications are not just made by Carthaginians, they're made by people with Greek names too.

and that they are obviously being made as individual deposits by individuals who sometimes leave an inscription in Punic that says, because

he or she heard our voice.

That is the most common inscription on the, and sometimes the name of the people as well.

So that's one of the reasons, and I think it's a pretty strong argument, that people think this is a sacrifice site because it's the fulfillment of a vow made to the God that the deposit is then placed.

If it is a place where you would deposit your children to die of natural death,

then

the kind of fulfillment of the vow doesn't seem necessarily as clearly explained by the inscriptions.

That's the argument that is most convincing to me, but I know that there are different there are very many people who feel very strongly about this and that we don't really have a clear answer.

We have to remember that Romans, Greeks and everyone else exposed their children, unwanted children,

to die.

And this happened all through the ancient worlds.

It wasn't a very nice process, but it is something that we kind of can't get our

heads around, of course, in the modern world.

But that this is ritualized in some way at Carthage is the difference, I think, between the Carthaginians and the other cultures.

I mean, it's gruesome, but still very important to highlight.

And so, as you say, you know, it's still very much

lots of people are debating this topic and it's very, very prickly topic.

The one thing I would say is the location of it, too, is really, really very key to what we were already talking about.

Because if you arrived at the merchant harbor, you could go in the military harbor is next door, the agora is right next door, but the toffet was found just behind the merchant harbor as well.

Now, whether you could access it or not, we don't know for sure, but it's very close to the very center center of the city.

So it was a very important place

for the idea of what Carthage was.

And

these sites don't just exist in Carthage either.

They exist in other sites in North Africa.

They exist on Malta, we think, because of inscriptions that are found there.

They exist in Sardinia.

And they exist in Sicily on the island of Moltia as well, which is just about the greatest place to go if you want to get a sense of a Carthaginian city as well.

It's really worth our late, you know, West Venetian city, worth going.

I'd love to go to Matia, yeah.

Let's go together, Tricia.

Oh, well, absolutely.

We'll do more on Carthage in the future.

And we can talk about Dionysius the Elder as well.

And the Siege of Matia.

The Siege of Matia.

That's another episode entirely.

We've got limited time, but I would also like to ask a bit about kind of crime and justice and crime and punishment, I guess, in ancient Carthage.

Obviously, getting rid of this idea that there was a police force that, you know, getting mugged, you could go to an authority and then they would help you out.

Probably not going to be that case, is it?

But was there certain cases where the Carthaginians could capture a criminal and then could punish them?

There could be

public showing of what not to do and how you'd be punished if you did wrong?

So, big, big questions we do not know all the answers to, but some interesting hints in some of the sources we've already discussed.

Aristotle, being well, there's pseudo-Aristotle.

It's called the document, which is about the comparative constitutions of other nations to the Athenians.

It's such an interesting source, basically.

He talks about Carthage, what's legal, what's illegal, and how the Carthaginians regulate themselves.

So there were sitting magistrates at Carthage.

There were two magistrates every year in the Republican period of Carthage, which we think is like sixth, like sixth century BC, maybe fifth, all the way through to the end of Carthage.

So two sitting magistrates called sufites.

So you were a sufit, and you were elected from a group of senator types called Edorim.

And you sat as a magistrate then in the city.

And that made you, the word Sufet comes from the Hebrew word, or is similar to the Hebrew word shofetim, which is a judge.

So interestingly, that the magistrate role in Carthage was connected to judge.

and that seems to be in the civic magistrates.

So that we know they sat in the marketplace, these judges, these sufets, or the sitting magistrates.

So Aristotle talks about who shouldn't drink in Carthaginian constitutional law, as it might be called, and the people who shouldn't drink, which is very wise, drink alcohol, are

if you think about this, it's very modern.

I'm always like, so are judges sitting in the coin markets.

So, and I think I would like my judge to be sober, so I'm pretty fond of that.

The pilots of boats in the ports.

That's probably a good one.

That's another one, too.

They absolutely should not be drinking.

And

couples who are trying to get pregnant.

So, you know, when we think about that, that's pretty wild.

I always think, wow, the Carthaginians knew a thing or two about who should and shouldn't be consuming alcohol.

Anyway, so what does that tell us?

That tells us there were judges sitting in the markets.

So these magistrates were obviously controlling.

what was happening within the public spaces at some level.

I guess you could go if so-and-so stole something from so-and-so, you go up to the magistrates.

All those sorts of things.

Yeah.

And then the other things that we know about crime and punishment at Carthage, of which we know very little, are that they used the punishment of crucifixion for people who were deemed to have committed treason.

So, and again, I've wondered, and maybe somebody out there knows, but my instinct is that the earliest evidence of crucifixion may be in the Carthaginian records or records of, and they're not Carthaginian self-expressed records.

Of course, these are records told to us by other sources about Carthage, but that the use of crucifixion as a punishment for treason is something that turns up in military stories where a Carthaginian general is thought to have failed, thought to have committed some sort of poor acts, and they are crucified.

Whether they're crucified with a trial or not, we're not sure, but other sources tell us that there are trials held.

So we know they have courts, we know they have judges, that we know they held trials.

Now, we don't know very much more about that.

And we know that crucifixion for the most extreme crimes in the state seems to have been used.

But

where and how that took place, we don't really know.

And if the Romans adapted crucifixion, which of course they're very famous for, mass crucifixions, in fact, obviously, then perhaps they took that from the Carthaginians.

We just don't know.

And again, I'm not claiming that as absolute fact, but it's my hunch.

It's interesting, very, very interesting to highlight that as well.

Eve, we've covered so much ground over the last hour.

Is there anything else you'd like to highlight about

the glimpses we have into life at Carthage, how to survive in ancient Carthage before we wrap up?

Music.

Music, of course.

Music.

How do we forget?

Exactly.

And I think that we always forget music and that we know from other cultures in the Western Mediterranean, and we know from the use of these, you know, like the big conch shells for military.

Oh, yes,

we know that Hannibal's army seems to have used that or people mention it.

And I think there's no question that music would have been a really important part of the culture and part of public life and part of the rituals around death and commemoration.

And I think that's something to think about: the sound.

We always forget sounds.

And I think to think about what it sounded like to land in Carthage and to have, you know, people speaking all sorts of different languages and calling out and this large sort of the sound of the sea.

And then also music and the importance of music in that story.

And I think we should always try and remember that.

And the evidence for it comes from various different places and graves.

And it's not a certain thing, but I think one of the later ideas, and I talk about this a lot, is this the girls of Cadiz,

that's what they're literally called, called, the Puelai Gaditanai, were famous in the later Roman period for as being dancing girls from the city of Cadiz.

And the Romans liked the women of Cadiz, these girls of Cadiz.

But the music from Cadiz, for example, seems to have been really important.

And we have these little figurines from graves in Ibiza, which was a Phoenician city, musical figurines and things like that.

So we can make assumptions that music was a big part of the story too.

So Ibiza, big for music back then.

Back then too.

Continues down to the present day.

Probably quite different.

Eve, this has been absolutely fantastic.

Last but certainly not least, you cover all of this and so much more in your all-encompassing book, which is called...

My new book is Carthage and it's

a new history of an ancient empire, the history of the city-state of Carthage, its rise, its fall, and as much as possible about a lot of the things we've talked about today, the new archaeology, the DNA, the science behind helping us understand who the Carthaginians were as people.

Amazing book.

And when is it coming out?

It's coming out August 7th in the UK and then in the December, January in the US.

Okay, fantastic.

So it will already be out in the UK by the time we release this episode.

Eve, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Thank you so much.

Pleasure.

Loved it.

Well, there you go.

There was Dr.

Eve MacDonald talking you through how to survive in ancient Carthage, street by street, building by building, really giving you a wonderful insight into Carthage at its height, as it was this rival of Rome.

I hope you enjoyed the episode.

And if you want more of Eve and myself, well you can come and see us in the flesh.

We'd love to see you because we are doing another special episode on Carthage for our live show on the 5th of September at 7pm at King's Place in London.

I really am looking forwards to it, as is Eve, she's brilliant.

I'd love to see you there, it's really good fun.

Let's see, we've got a link to where you can buy tickets in the description in the show notes of this episode, so I really do hope to see you there.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Ancients.

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