Carthage

Carthage began as a Phoenician colony on the North African coast near modern Tunis, traditionally settled from Tyre. Ancient writers dated Carthage's founding to 814 BCE and credited the legendary Queen Dido, though the earliest archaeological occupation layers recovered so far date only to the eighth century BCE, leaving the precise founding date unresolved. Carthage grew into the capital of a Punic trading and naval empire dominating the western and central Mediterranean, governed by a mixed constitution that Aristotle described as combining monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, with elected suffetes and a council of elders. Carthage fought Rome three times in the Punic Wars; the Roman Republic destroyed the city after a nearly three-year siege in 146 BCE, ending Carthaginian independence. Carthage's wealth rested on Mediterranean trade, controlling the narrow sea lanes between Sicily and the Tunisian coast that most shipping had to pass through, and on an agricultural hinterland renowned for its orchards and market gardens; the Carthaginian general Mago wrote an influential twenty-eight-volume treatise on agriculture, covering olive and fruit cultivation, viniculture, beekeeping and livestock management, that Rome had translated into Latin after the city fell. Carthaginian craftsmen were noted for embroidery, carpets and the purple dye extracted from the murex sea snail. Punic, the Carthaginians' Phoenician-derived language, was written in the Phoenician alphabet. Modern archaeological investigation of the site began with Christian Tuxen Falbe's topographical survey in 1830, continued through nineteenth century excavation by Charles Ernest Beule and Alfred Louis Delattre and French-led work from 1921 onward, and the site was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979.