Founding of Carthage: Phoenician Tyre's Colony in North Africa

The founding of Carthage by Phoenician settlers from Tyre, traditionally dated to 814 BC, created what would become the greatest city of the ancient western Mediterranean. Built on a peninsula in the Gulf of Tunis, in modern Tunisia, the “New City” grew from a trading post into the capital of a maritime empire that rivalled Greece and Rome. Its origins are wrapped in the legend of the exiled princess Elissa, better known as Dido.

Background: Phoenician trade in the west

The Phoenicians were a Semitic-speaking people of city-states on the coast of modern Lebanon, including Tyre, Sidon and Byblos. From the 10th and 9th centuries BC they became the leading long-distance traders of the Mediterranean, shipping purple-dyed cloth, glass, ivory and metalwork, and seeking silver, tin and other metals in the west.

To support this trade they founded harbours and settlements along the routes, in Cyprus, Sicily, Sardinia, North Africa and southern Spain, where Gadir (Cádiz) controlled access to the rich silver mines of the Tartessian region. Tyre, under its powerful kings, led this expansion. The wider network is described in Phoenician colonies and trade.

The site of Carthage was ideal for such a network. It lay on a defensible peninsula with sheltered anchorages, close to the narrow strait between Africa and Sicily that divides the eastern and western Mediterranean.

The legend of Elissa

The fullest account of the founding comes from the Roman historian Justin, who summarised the lost history of Pompeius Trogus. According to this story, the king of Tyre left his throne to his son Pygmalion and his daughter Elissa. Elissa married her uncle Acherbas, a wealthy priest of the god Melqart. Pygmalion had Acherbas murdered to seize his treasure.

Elissa escaped by sea with a group of nobles and her husband’s riches. On the way, at Cyprus, the party took on board a priest of Astarte and some 80 young women to be wives for the settlers. They landed on the African coast, where the local people welcomed the traders.

Elissa asked the local ruler for as much land as could be covered by an ox hide. She then had the hide cut into very thin strips and used them to encircle an entire hill, which became the citadel of Byrsa. The city grew, and a local king, called Hiarbas, demanded to marry her, threatening war if she refused. To keep faith with her dead husband, Elissa built a great pyre and killed herself on it. The Carthaginians later honoured her as a goddess.

Myth and history

Parts of this story are clearly legendary. The ox-hide trick is a folk tale found in several cultures. It probably arose because the hill’s name, Byrsa, sounded like the Greek byrsa, “hide”, although it is more likely derived from a Phoenician word for a fortress.

The best-known version of the story is Roman. In Virgil’s Aeneid, written in the 20s BC, Dido welcomes the Trojan hero Aeneas, falls in love with him and kills herself when he leaves for Italy. This romance is poetic invention: the Trojan War was traditionally dated to around 1200 BC, centuries before Carthage existed. Virgil used it to give a mythical origin to the later hatred between Rome and Carthage.

Some details may contain historical memories. A king Pygmalion of Tyre is known from other sources, and the Jewish historian Josephus, quoting the Hellenistic writer Menander of Ephesus, says that in the seventh year of his reign his sister fled and built Carthage in Libya. Carthaginians kept close religious ties with Tyre, sending annual offerings to the temple of Melqart there for centuries.

The date of the founding

The traditional date comes from the Greek historian Timaeus of Tauromenium, who placed the founding 38 years before the first Olympiad, that is in 814 or 813 BC. Other ancient writers gave different dates, some much earlier.

For a long time archaeologists found nothing older than about 750 BC at Carthage, raising doubts about the tradition. Excavations since the 1980s, especially by German and Dutch teams in the area of Bir Massouda near the coast, have found early pottery, including imported Greek wares of the mid-8th century BC. Radiocarbon dates from animal bones in the earliest layers have been calibrated to the late 9th century BC, roughly 835–800 BC, supporting the traditional date, though the precision of these results is debated.

The early city

Early Carthage was a compact settlement on the lower slopes of Byrsa hill and along the coast, with houses of mud brick on stone foundations, workshops for metalworking and pottery, and cemeteries on the surrounding hills. Tombs from the 7th and 6th centuries BC on Byrsa and nearby slopes contain Phoenician pottery, Egyptian amulets, Greek vases and jewellery, showing wide trading links.

From the 8th century BC there was also a sacred precinct, now called the Tophet of Carthage, where urns containing the burned bones of infants and young animals were buried beneath stone markers dedicated to the gods Baal Hammon and Tanit. Whether these were child sacrifices, as Greek and Roman writers claimed, or burials of children who died naturally, is still debated.

The city was governed by an aristocracy of merchant families. In later centuries it was led by two annually elected chief magistrates, the suffetes, and a council of elders, with a citizen assembly. Aristotle praised its constitution as one of the best balanced in the known world.

Language, gods and neighbours

The settlers spoke Phoenician, a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew, and wrote it in the 22-letter Phoenician alphabet. Over time the language of Carthage and its colonies developed into a distinct form called Punic, from the Latin Punicus, “Phoenician”. Punic remained in use in North Africa for centuries after Carthage fell; Saint Augustine, writing around AD 400, still mentions rural people who spoke it.

The chief gods of the early city were Phoenician: Melqart, the city god of Tyre; Astarte; Eshmun, a god of healing; and Baal Hammon. Over time a goddess called Tanit, often shown by a simple symbol of a triangle with a horizontal bar and a disc above, became Baal Hammon’s partner and the most prominent deity of Carthage.

For its first centuries Carthage stood on land rented from local Libyan (Berber) peoples, to whom, according to Justin, it paid an annual tribute. Relations with these neighbours were a mix of trade, intermarriage and conflict. Only in the 5th century BC did Carthage stop paying and begin to build a territory of farmland in its hinterland, which made it a landed as well as a maritime power.

Rise to power

Carthage’s importance grew as Tyre weakened. Tyre came under heavy pressure from Assyria and then Babylon, whose king Nebuchadnezzar II besieged it for about 13 years in the 580s–570s BC. As the mother city declined, Carthage took over leadership of the Phoenician settlements in the west.

In the 6th century BC, under leaders of the Magonid family, Carthage built a powerful navy and army and extended its control over western Sicily, Sardinia, parts of North Africa and southern Spain. Around 540–535 BC Carthaginian and Etruscan fleets fought Greek colonists from Phocaea off Alalia in Corsica, limiting Greek settlement in the west. Polybius records a treaty between Carthage and the new Roman Republic, which he dates to 509 BC, defining trading zones.

Carthage’s wars with the Greek cities of Sicily lasted for centuries, beginning with its defeat at Himera in 480 BC. In the 3rd century BC conflict with Rome led to the Punic Wars, beginning with the First Punic War in 264 BC. The city was finally destroyed by Rome in 146 BC, as told in the Third Punic War, and later refounded as a Roman colony.

Myths and facts

Myth: Carthage was founded by Dido and Aeneas. Aeneas belongs to Roman poetry; he had nothing to do with the founding.

Myth: the Romans sowed salt on Carthage’s ruins. No ancient source says this. The story appears only in modern times, probably by analogy with biblical passages about salting conquered land.

Fact: Carthage was a daughter city of Tyre. Its language, gods, alphabet and institutions were Phoenician, and it kept ties with Tyre long after it became independent.

Timeline

• c. 900–800 BC: Phoenician trading activity expands into the western Mediterranean.
• 814/813 BC: Traditional date of the founding of Carthage by settlers from Tyre.
• c. 835–800 BC: Radiocarbon dates from the earliest excavated layers at Carthage.
• c. 750 BC: Earliest burials in the Tophet; Greek pottery imported to Carthage.
• c. 585–572 BC: Babylonian siege of Tyre weakens the mother city.
• c. 540–535 BC: Battle of Alalia off Corsica.
• 509 BC: First treaty between Carthage and Rome, according to Polybius.
• 146 BC: Destruction of Carthage by Rome.

Why it matters

The founding of Carthage brought Phoenician culture permanently to North Africa and created a power that shaped the western Mediterranean for six centuries. Its rivalry with Greece and Rome, and the legend of Dido, became central to European literature and history, while the Punic language and culture survived in North Africa long after the city fell.