Who founded Carthage?

Settlers from Tyre

Carthage began as a colony of Tyre, an island city off the coast of today’s Lebanon and the busiest port of the Phoenicians. These Canaanite seafarers sailed west over the 800s and 700s BC hunting for silver, tin and new markets, leaving trading posts at Gades, today’s Cádiz in Spain, on Sicily and Sardinia, and along the African shore (where Tyre is today).

The settlers called their town Qart Hadasht, “New City” in Phoenician. Greek speakers bent the name into Karchedon, Latin speakers into Carthago. It stood on a peninsula in the Gulf of Tunis, with a sheltered anchorage and a hill for a citadel (what is left of it).

The princess who fled her brother

The founding legend survives best in Justin’s summary of Pompeius Trogus, a historian of Augustus’s time. Elissa, a princess of Tyre, married her uncle Acerbas, priest of the god Melqart and keeper of a hidden fortune. Her brother, King Pygmalion, had him murdered for his gold. Elissa loaded the treasure onto ships in secret and sailed away with nobles who hated the king.

In Africa she asked the local people for as much land as an oxhide could cover. Then she cut the hide into strips so thin that they ran around a whole hill. The hill was the Byrsa, and byrsa means hide in Greek, a pun that works only in Greek. Later a neighboring king demanded to marry her, on pain of war. Elissa built a pyre, as if for a rite, and stabbed herself on it rather than betray her dead husband. Justin says Carthage honored her as a goddess for as long as the city stood unconquered.

Virgil’s Dido

Romans knew her as Dido, and the Dido everyone remembers is Virgil’s. In the Aeneid, written under Augustus, the Trojan hero Aeneas is shipwrecked on the coast while Dido is still building her city. They fall in love. Then the gods send him on to Italy, where his descendants will found Rome. Abandoned, Dido curses his people, calls for an avenger to rise from her bones and dies on a pyre with his sword. Roman readers heard Hannibal in that avenger.

It is poetry, not history. By Greek reckoning Troy fell around 1184 BC, more than three centuries before Carthage. Virgil gave the Punic Wars a cause out of myth, and Henry Purcell later turned the story into the opera Dido and Aeneas.

Was Dido real?

Nobody can say. No inscription names her. The traditional date comes from the Greek historian Timaeus, writing some five centuries later, who set the founding 38 years before the first Olympic Games, which works out to 814 BC. He gave Rome the same year (how Rome was founded).

Her brother has a better claim. The Jewish historian Josephus copied a list of Tyre’s kings from Menander of Ephesus, who said he worked from Tyrian records: in the seventh year of Pygmalion’s reign, his sister fled and built Carthage in Libya, the Greek name for Africa. The oldest remains dug up at Carthage date from the 8th century BC, within a few generations of the traditional date. Most historians see a real colony from Tyre behind a legendary queen.

Were the Carthaginians Phoenicians?

Yes, and they kept the bond for centuries. They spoke Punic, a form of Phoenician close to Hebrew, wrote it in the Phoenician alphabet, and prayed to Baal Hammon and the goddess Tanit. They kept sending gifts to Melqart in the mother city: when Alexander the Great besieged Tyre in 332 BC, Carthaginian envoys were inside, there to honor the god by an old custom.

Romans called them Poeni, from the Greek word for Phoenicians, hence “Punic” and the Punic Wars. Their enmity coined Punica fides, “Punic faith,” a Latin byword for treachery. Yet the language outlived the city Rome razed in 146 BC: in the AD 400s, Augustine of Hippo still met country people who, he wrote, spoke Punic.