The city of Carthage was established by the Phoenicians late in the ninth century B.C.E. as a stopping place for eastern Mediterranean traders plying their business with the inhabitants of Spain and the western Mediterranean. Tyre was the parent city to Carthage, which is the Latinized version of the Phoenician Kart- Hadasht, or New City. The trading empire of Phoenicia, dealing in various metals, was well established in Spain; it also had settlement/trading posts in Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia. 15 Carthage represented the first major attempt to settle along the North African coast outside the Egyptian sphere of influence.

The inhabitants of Carthage lived peacefully for more than two centuries because the local Libyan population was not organized enough to resist them and whatever military action was necessary was directed from Tyre. When Phoenicia came under Babylonian control, however, Carthage lost its connection with the homeland and came into its own. While Babylon was conquering the Levant, the Greeks stirred up trouble in Sicily, where their colonies attacked Phoenician settlements around 580 B.C.E. Carthage provided the defensive forces for Sicily and for threatened towns in southern Sardinia. In 553 B.C.E. Carthage allied with the Etruscans of Italy; together, they inflicted a major defeat of a Greek fleet off Corsica. That battle made Carthage master of the western Mediterranean and gave it dominance over the Spanish trade.

Like Phoenicia, Carthage’s major expansion was in the form of settlement and trade. The society was so involved in trade that its military forces were almost always mercenaries. After a defeat of its army and navy at Himera in Sicily in 480 B.C.E., Carthage focused its attention on expansion in North Africa, spreading its influence from Libya to the Atlantic coast of modern Morocco. The Carthaginians made little attempt to enter the interior, so their dominance was almost exclusively along the coastal strip. Though Carthage maintained settlements in western Sicily after the defeat at Himera, it took as small a part as possible in the island’s politics, rising only to defend its settlements from attack by Syracuse in the east.

Carthage’s relationship with Rome proved its ultimate undoing. Though the two cooperated against Greece, they had little other contact because their spheres of influence did not overlap. That came to an end in 264, when both Carthage and Rome sent forces to save a band of Roman mercenaries, employed by Carthage, fighting around Syracuse. The result was the First Punic War, which lasted 23 years and was followed by two more Roman-Carthaginian wars, the latter of which resulted in Carthage’s utter destruction.

Carthage was unique in ancient history for having its wealth built almost completely on trade. Carthaginians became the middlemen for almost all Mediterranean trade west of Sicily, reaching as far as Cape Verde on the Atlantic coast of Africa and possibly as far as the Atlantic coast of France. Carthage displayed little in the way of culture that was particularly their own, but they served as disseminators of eastern cultures to the western reaches of the known world. The language and sciences of the East were made available to the West, and the Carthaginians established urbanization in northern Africa, where before only tribal villages had existed. The transformation to “modern” civilization in northern Africa, Spain, Corsica, and Sardinia was due to Carthaginian merchants.