The Historians' History of the World 02 [Israel, India, Persia, Phoenicia, Minor Nations of Western Asia]

Besides this the dominion of Carthage was finally extended over the rest of the Phœnicians in Africa, the so-called Liby-Phœnicians. These consisted partly of the smaller bands of settlers which had been led from Carthage to places along the whole northern and part of the northwestern coast of Africa, and cannot have been without importance, since at one time thirty thousand such colonists were settled on the Atlantic shore alone; and partly of ancient Phœnician settlements, which were especially numerous on the coast of the modern province of Constantine and of the Beylik of Tunis, and included, for example, Hippo, later called Regius (Bonah), Adrumetum (Susa), the lesser Leptis (south of Susa),—the second city of the African Phœnicians,—Thapsus, and greater Leptis (near Tripoli). How it came about that all these towns placed themselves under the command of Carthage, and whether they did so voluntarily to shelter themselves from the attacks of the Cyrenæans and Numidians or under compulsion, cannot now be discovered; it is certain that they were described in official documents as subjects of the Carthaginians, were obliged to pull down their walls and had to pay taxes and render military service to Carthage.

Thus the Tyrian factory had become the capital of a powerful North African empire, which reached from the desert of Tripoli as far as the Atlantic sea, and though it is true that in the western half (Morocco and Algiers) it contented itself with a somewhat nominal occupation of the coast, on the other hand in the wealthier East it ruled over the modern districts of Constantine and Tunis, as well as over the interior and was continually advancing its southern frontiers; the Carthaginians, as an ancient author significantly remarks, had changed from Tyrians into Libyans.

The period in which this transformation of Carthage into the capital city of Libya took place is all the more difficult to determine since the change was doubtless effected by degrees. The author just referred to mentions Hanno as the reformer of the nation; if this is the same man who lived in the time of the first war with Rome, he can only be regarded as the perfecter of the new system, which was presumably worked out in the fourth and fifth centuries of the city of Rome.

Side by side with the rise of Carthage went the decline of the great Phœnician cities in the mother-country, of Sidon and especially of Tyre, whose prosperity was ruined partly as the result of internal commotions, partly by pressure from without, in particular the sieges by Shalmaneser in the first century of Rome, by Nebuchadrezzar in the second, and by Alexander in the third. The noble families and the ancient commercial houses of Tyre removed for the most part to the secure and flourishing daughter-city and brought thither their intelligence, their capital, and their traditions. When the Phœnicians came into touch with Rome, Carthage was emphatically the first Canaanite city as Rome was the first Latin community.

But the dominion over Libya was only one-half of the Carthaginian power; their maritime and colonial supremacy had, at the same time, developed not less formidable proportions. In Spain the chief seat of the Phœnicians was the ancient Tyrian settlement in Gades (Cadiz); west and east of the latter they also possessed a chain of factories, and in the interior the territory of the silver mines, so that they occupied the modern Andalusia and Granada, at least their coasts. Ebusus and the Balearic Isles the Carthaginians had themselves colonised at an early period, partly for the sake of the fisheries, partly as advance posts against the Massaliots with whom, from this base, they carried on an eager war. Similarly by the end of the second century of Rome the Carthaginians had established themselves in Sardinia, which they exploited in exactly the same way as Libya.

[450-350 B.C.]

In Sicily, finally, it is true that the roads from Messana and the eastern and larger half of the island had early fallen into the hands of the Greeks; but by help of the Carthaginians the Phœnicians maintained themselves, some in the smaller islands in the neighbourhood, the Ægates, Melita, Gaulos, Cossyra, of which the colony in Malta was especially flourishing; some on the western and northwestern coasts of Sicily, where, from Motya, and later from Lilybæum, they kept up relations with Africa and from Panormus and Solœis with Sardinia. The interior of the island remained in possession of the native Elymi, Sicani, and Sicels.

All these settlements and possessions were considerable enough in themselves; but they were of still greater importance as the pillars of the Carthaginian dominion of the sea. By the possession of the south of Spain, the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, the west of Sicily and Melita, in union with the prevention of Hellenic colonisation on the eastern Spanish coast, as well as on Corsica and in the neighbourhood of the Syrtis, the lords of the North African coast closed their seas against the foreigner and monopolised the western waters. The Phœnicians had indeed to share the Tyrrhenian and Gallic seas with other nations; but this might be tolerated so long as the Etruscans and Greeks counterbalanced each other there, and with the former as the less dangerous rival, Carthage even entered into an alliance against the Greeks.