The Rest Is History - 421. Ancient Carthage: Lords of the Sea (Part 1)

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

“Carthago delenda est.” Carthage must be destroyed: this was the rallying cry of Cato the Elder, the senator endlessly pushing for war against Rome’s sworn enemy, Carthage. But what are the origins of this supposedly decadent and sinister city, and did the Carthaginians really sacrifice their children? Starting as a crafty, seafaring people called the Phoenicians, a mighty mercantile civilisation emerged, who would eventually come to be known as the Carthaginians. But who were the Phoenicians, and why are they so mysterious? From the Bible, the Iliad and the Odyssey, to Herodotus’ account of the Persian Wars, and the conquests of Alexander the Great, their shadow haunts Antiquity… Join Tom and Dominic as they investigate the Phoenicians, the first masters of the Mediterranean. Pioneers of seafaring, craftsmanship and writing, these were the people who gave birth to Rome’s most feared enemy, Carthage. Myths, legends, child-sacrifice, and the rise and fall of civilisations abound. *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London!  Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishist trial of the arms of the god. Slender chainlets stretched from his fingers up to his shoulders and fell behind, where men, by pulling them, made the two hands rise to a level with the elbows and come close together against the belly. They were moved several times in succession with little abrupt jerks. Then the instruments were still. The fire roared.

People flung into the flames pearls, gold vases, cups, torches, all their wealth. The offerings became constantly more numerous and more splendid. At last, a man who tottered, a man pale and hideous with terror, thrust forward a child. Then a little black mass was seen between the hands of the colossus and sank into the dark opening. The priests bent over the edge of the great flagstone and a new song burst forth celebrating the joys of death and of new birth into eternity. The children ascended slowly and as the smoke formed lofty eddies as it escaped, they seemed, at a distance, to disappear in a cloud.

The brazen arms were working quickly now. Nevertheless, the appetite of the god was not appeased. He ever wished for more. In order to furnish him with a larger supply, the victims were piled up on his hands with a big chain above them which kept them in their place. It was impossible to distinguish them in the giddy motion of their horrible arms. This lasted for a long, indefinite time until the evening. Then the partitions inside assumed a darker glow and burning flesh could be seen. Some even believed that they could descry hair, limbs and whole bodies. So Tom, that is by Gustave Flaubert, the author of Madame Bovary. It's a very different book. It's his book Salonbo, which was published in 1862. Very much not set in

provincial France. No, not the story of a young woman who's been reading too much in French romantic periodicals. This is very different. This is set in Carthage. And I remember reading this when I was at university and being stunned that it was so different from Madame Bovary, because what Salambeau does is it plunges you into this incredibly violent, lurid, Orientalist fantasy of ancient Carthage, doesn't it? It does. And this is set against a very particular episode. And it's not one of the most famous episodes in Carthaginian history. It directly follows on from the first great war that the Carthaginians fought against the Romans, the first Punic War, as it's called. And the Carthaginians have been defeated and they've had to pay reparations to the Romans. And as a result, they can't pay their

mercenaries, which they've been employing to conduct the war. And so the mercenaries have turned on Carthage and put it under siege. And it looks like the city may be about to be captured. And the great Carthaginian general, the commander who had remained undefeated in the war against the Romans, Hamilcar Barca, has been summoned to join the rest of the Carthaginian elite to pay the ultimate sacrifice, which is to give their firstborn to the great god Moloch. So it is the god Moloch whose hands have been moving up and down with the great golden chain. It's very Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, isn't it? I mean, it's the sacrifice scene in the Temple of Doom. Yes, it is. And that, of course, I guess, would be playing on exactly this scene. And Hamilcar does not want to sacrifice his son called Hannibal. And so he has got a slave boy

instead and swapped them. And of course, this means that Hamilcar's son Hannibal survives. And Hannibal will go on to grow up and become the most famous of all Carthaginians. The man who leads elephants over the Alps brings Rome almost to its knees. And the story of Hannibal's war against the Romans is probably the most famous war actually in the whole of ancient history. But we are not going to be focusing on Hannibal's war, but on the early history of Carthage in this series. So Tom, that war that you described with the mercenaries, that's 238 BC. So we'll be getting sort of towards that, but just on the Orientalism and whatnot of Carthage. So even people who know nothing about ancient history will have heard the name, won't

they? I mean, there are Carthages in the United States, for example, named after the city. And I guess the reputation of Carthage, even among people who don't know much about it, is that Rome is disciplined, formidable, clean-shaven, all of that stuff. And Carthage is exotic, cruel, luxurious, decadent. Yes. As you said, unbelievably cruel. Child sacrifice is obviously a massive element of that. These incredibly weird and terrifying gods, but also rich and entrepreneurial.

So the French, after the French Revolution, when they thought that they were the Romans, they used to say that the British were the Carthaginians because all we cared about was making money. But also because Carthage was a great maritime power. And of course, Rome is a great land power. And so their war was often characterized as the war between the elephant and the whale, that kind of thing. And so the French were very keen to brand the British as Carthaginian, both because they were seen as being treacherous mercantilists, but also, of course, because ultimately Carthage loses and gets obliterated, but is commemorated by the Romans as her greatest enemy. And Hannibal is seen as the most forbiddable opponent that the Romans

ever fought. And so that's a crucial part of why the memory of Carthage endures. And so we'll be covering the first of those great wars in the fourth of Carthage endures. And so we'll be covering the first of those great wars in the fourth of our episodes. But before that, we want to look at what the origins are of Carthage. What's the characteristics of our civilization? Did they really sacrifice their children or is that just kind of Roman propaganda? To try and kind of bring back to life this extraordinary civilization, which has been, I think, kind of blackened so repeatedly over the course of history. And Tom, just for people who don't know, so Carthage is effectively on the site

of present-day Tunis, the capital of Tunisia in North Africa. And almost all the traces, I mean, if you've ever been to Tunis, I've been to Tunis, I actually thought it was a bit disappointing because almost every single trace of ancient Carthage, apart from your little bit of stone, has been erased. Well, we might come to that in a minute, but this isn't the first episode that we've done on Carthage. So in the World Cup, we did one. Tunisia were playing in the World Cup. And so our episode was on the founding of Carthage, which is a kind of famous legend because it was enshrined by Virgil in the Aeneid. It described how Aeneas, who is a prince fleeing Troy, who is fated by the gods to go to Italy and their father,

the line of kings that will culminate in the founding of Rome. But he stops off in what is now Tunisia, and he sees there the founding of a city by a woman from a city called Tyre. And this woman is called Dido, but she's also known as Elissa. And she has come from what is now Lebanon. So in ancient times, it was called Canaan. So she is a Tyrian princess. And the story goes, and this is a story that doesn't feature in Virgil's account, but was kind of repeatedly told by Greek and Roman historians, that she had been married to her uncle, a guy called Akerbas. And Dido's brother, a man called Pygmalion, was the king of Tyre, was very, very jealous of Akerbas because Akerbas was so rich. And so he has Akerbis murdered. And he then wants to seize Akerbis' wealth.

But before he can do that, Dido makes an offering of it to the gods by putting all the gold into sacks and throwing it into the sea. But in fact, Dominic, the sacks are full of sand, not gold. What an amazing trick, Tom. And she has taken the gold and she sails off, heads west to found Carthage. And this is clearly a myth. I mean, it has a myth all over it. But what's intriguing is that there are echoes of authentic Tyrian names in the classical names. So Pygmalion, Pomeaton, Elissa, Dido, Elishat, and Akerbis, Zakabal.

These names do seem to come from genuinely Tyrian sources. And the other thing, of course, that thing of throwing gold away, of making it as an offering to the gods, I mean, that is kind of echoed a little bit in Salambo. Before they start sacrificing the children, they are hurling in their jewels and their necklaces and their gold to the flames. So perhaps there's kind of elements there. And one thing that is absolutely certain is that Carthage really was founded by colonists from Tyre. From Lebanon. Yes. So the city in Lebanon. And we know this from a very famous detail that is recorded by

Herodotus. So Tyre ends up being conquered by the Persian kings and the son of Cyrus the Great, the first and most formidable of all the Persian kings, a guy called Cambyses, he conquers Egypt. Then he wants to press on westwards and conquer Carthage. To do that, he needs the assistance of a Tyrian fleet, because Tyre is a great city of sailors. The Tyrians refuse to participate on the basis that the Carthaginians are their children and that the Carthaginians still come to Tyre to make offerings. And in fact, Dominic, you'll remember that Alexander the Great goes on to besiege Tyre and to capture it.

He does, yeah. And the story goes is that when he captures Tyre, there is a contingent of Carthaginian ambassadors there who've come to make offerings to Tyre. Oh, nice. A special relationship, Tom, between Carthage and Tyre. A special relationship. We know that from the Greek sources, but we also know it from Carthaginian sources. Actually, things have survived from Carthage. Not everything was destroyed. There are quite a lot of inscriptions, and on these inscriptions, you will read references to sons of Tyre, to the Carthaginians

as sons of Tyre. I suppose a bit like saying that your ancestors came over with the Mayflower, that to be able to claim a Tyrian heritage, even in the second century BC, is a real marker of status. Yeah, that makes sense. So I think that to know about Carthage, we first of all need to know about Tyre. Sure. And so that is going to be the subject of today's episode. So Tyre is simultaneously fabulously ancient and a parvenu. The earliest reference to it is the 19th century BC. So that's almost kind of 4,000 years ago. But relative to other cities on the coast of what's

now Lebanon, it's actually quite a parvenu. So we have Byblos, which is the city that gives its name to the Greek word for book and ultimately to the Bible. And Sidos, which is the city that gives its name to the Greek word for book and ultimately to the Bible, and Sidon, which is its near neighbor, arrival. And these are much older than Tyre, but Tyre, when it starts to emerge on the scene in the second millennium BC, it has a lot of advantages going for it. And so it very rapidly comes to take over the older cities. So the reason for this is that it has a lot of natural advantages. It's situated on an island about half a mile off the shore. It's got a rock which can serve it as a fortress. It's got fresh water, so it's got springs,

so it can be supplied and withstand a siege. It's got two great natural harbors, which are considerably enhanced over the course of its history. And it has quite a fertile hinterland. So the soil of mainland Lebanon is very fertile. But the problem is that it can't expand to become a great empire in the way that, say, Egypt had or Assyria or Babylon will, because its expansion eastwards is blocked by the great range of Mount Lebanon. And this is true of all the cities. Yeah, it's quite a narrow stretch, isn't it, where you can sort of farm and stuff, and then you get to the mountains. Yeah. And because of this, they periodically come under the influence of the great powers in the region. So Egypt in particular to begin with, and then in

due course, Assyria and Babylonia. And the role that Tyre and the other cities along Lebanon play is essentially that of sailors, people who go out and source material, raw material, which they then turn into kind of high-end products, which they then sell on or pay as tribute to the Egyptians or to the Assyrians or whoever. And so to do this, they need to develop maritime skills. And they can do this partly because they have to, but also because they have a lot of wood. Cedars. They have the cedars of Lebanon, the famous cedars of Lebanon. And so without that, they would be as denuded of timber as Egypt is or Mesopotamia. But because they have that,

and because they have no choice but to go out and earn their keep on the waters, they very, very rapidly push the limits of navigation further than they've been pushed by anyone else. So, I mean, as early as the third millennium, the people of Byblos are developing ships with kind of curved hulls, whereas the Egyptians, for instance, had only had flat hulls. So basically never really mastered the art of venturing out into the Mediterranean. But the people of Lebanon are really doing this. And it's this that enables them to survive the great catastrophe that overwhelms the really formidable Bronze Age powers in the 12th century, which is called the Bronze Age Collapse, when essentially mysterious

people called the Sea Peoples, and at some point we might do an episode on them, they cross the seas, Egypt almost falls, all kinds of major powers do fall. One of them is a city called Ugarat, which is a neighbor of Tyre. That gets destroyed. Tyre survives. And there's a kind of breathing space then for the cities of Lebanon, particularly for Tyre, because both Egypt and the Mesopotamian empires are pretty prostrate. And so the Tyrians can go out there, they have all this kind of naval expertise, and they don't need to pay tribute. And so really, this is the kind of the golden age, really, of Tyre. So they're going out, they're getting raw materials, they're coming back, they are taking it to workshops, the raw materials are being processed, and they're then deliberately

making it for foreign markets. So they're constructing things in Egyptian styles or Mesopotamian styles, flogging it on. So these people are craftsmen, traders, middlemen, merchants. I guess your classic kind of Middle Eastern, Levantine maritime power, aren't they? Yes. I suppose serving a role slightly analogous to maybe Hong Kong did to China in the 20th century. Or Singapore before that. Or Singapore. It's that kind of thing, that kind of role. I mean, that's very anachronistic, I guess, but it gives you some kind of flavor. Now, you may be wondering how we know about this. Archaeological evidence is very, very sparse because Tyre has been destroyed and built

over so many times. We do have king lists, which have been preserved by Josephus, the Judean writer in the first century AD. But I mean, you know, that's a thousand years on, so not entirely reliable. But we do have sources for the ancient history of Tyre. Oh, that's exciting. And one of them is nothing less than the book we've already mentioned, which is the Bible. Oh, Tom, you love it.

We love the Bible. So in the book of Kings, which describes the rise of the kingdom of Israel in its golden age, so David and Solomon, the king of Tyre, a man called Hiram, plays a very key role. So David has captured Jerusalem. He is preparing the way to build his great temple. He wants to build a palace, doesn't have the raw materials and the expertise that the people of Tyre have. And so they kind of strike a deal, basically, that David will allow Tyrian merchants access to the Red Sea, and in return, Hiram will give wood and material and craftsmen to David. It's really in the reign of David's son, Solomon, that this starts to pack a massive punch because, of course, Solomon wants to build the temple and does so. He couldn't have done this, so the Bible tells us, without the assistance of

Hiram. And what Hiram gets in return is what a city perched on the edge of the sea always needs, which is the possibility to grow its own food. So Solomon sells Hiram some cities that have excellent agriculture, so both of them benefit. And so the Bible goes into some detail about what this means in practical terms. So Solomon builds a Red Sea fleet, and I'll quote from the Book of Kings, and Hiram sent him ships commanded by his own officers, men who knew the sea. These, with Solomon's men, sailed to Ophir and brought back 450 talents of gold, which they delivered to King Solomon. Now, we have touched on these expeditions already in one of our episodes, namely King Solomon's mines, because the location of Ophir

is a great mystery. And of course, Ryder Haggard situates it in Africa. And we know that it's a real place because a fragment of pottery was found in 1946, kind of 8th century BC, sometime like that, which makes a reference to it. So it definitely existed. Probably not Africa, maybe Arabia or India or Sri Lanka. I mean, all of those have been proposed. We'll probably never know. But it kind of gives a sense of the excitement of it, the sense that there are new worlds of possibility and wealth out there and that the Tyrians want a bit of it. I mean, more than a bit of it, they want a lot of it. And of course, Tyre has direct access to the Mediterranean.

And the Bible tells us that Solomon and Hiram are also sending fleets across the Mediterranean. And they travel to a mysterious place called Tarshish, a great fleet. And every three years, this fleet would return. And I quote the Bible again, carrying gold, silver and ivory and apes and baboons. Again, the location of Tarshish is uncertain. People have suggested it might be Sardinia or perhaps going beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, the Pillars of Hercules, a settlement founded by the Tyrians called Gardes, which will go on to become the Spanish city of Cadiz. But more likely it's a place called Tarshish, which kind of approximates to Andalusia today, so southern

Spain. Okay. So Tom, if the Tyrians are having all this contact with the people of the Bible, are there kind of religious contacts and things, cultural contacts and things like that as well, like gods and rituals and all of that stuff that kind of feeds into what becomes Judaism? Yes, there are congruities because the Israelites and the people of Canaan, as the people of Tyre would have probably described themselves, they're very close. And it's precisely the fact that they are close that makes the writers of these stories, and these stories are being written many centuries later, anxious about the Tyrians. So there's definitely admiration for Tyre. It's not just in the Book of Kings, but Isaiah and Ezekiel, they are stupefied by the wealth

of Tyre. The sense that essentially treasure itself is in some way Tyrian. So Fergus Miller, the great ancient historian, he pointed out that in Jerusalem, right up to the final days of the temple, the standard currency that's being paid in the temple is Tyrian shekels. So, I mean, that's kind of massive witness to just how significant Tyre is as a kind of model of trade and wealth. But you're right that there are also huge causes for anxiety. So the name Moloch,

which Flaubert draws on for his novel, this comes from the Bible. And we're told in the Bible that Solomon builds a temple to Moloch, who is described as the detestable God. And we're told also later on that Moloch has a sanctuary to him in a valley outside Jerusalem, and that this sanctuary is in a particular place called Tophet. And this Tophet is described as a place where men sacrifice, and I will quote the Bible, their sons and daughters to the fire of Moloch. Like in Flaubert's book, Salambo, like the Carthaginians. Exactly like in Flaubert's book.

And we are told as well that two kings of Judah offer up their sons to Yahweh there, offering them up presumably in the fire before going to war, which absolutely is a kind of echo of the scene in Salambo. And although this isn't explicitly associated with Tyre, there is also a sense after the kind of the glory days of Hiram and Solomon building the temple together, that Tyre's reputation is darkening. And this darkening of the reputation is focused on a particular woman who is the daughter of a king of Tyre in the ninth century called Ithabal. And this woman is Jezebel. Ah, and I wondered if we get to Jezebel. Now, she's a great character, Tom. She is. I mean, she's become a noun. She has. So a painted Jezebel. So a woman of ill repute, a seductress, someone who lures people off the straight and narrow. Intriguingly, Dominic, according to

Josephus again, writing in the first century AD, she was the great aunt of Dido. So it's a kind of brilliant crossover. Yeah. The Carthaginian cinematic universe, Tom. Exactly. So according to the Bible, Jezebel marries Ahab, who is the king of Israel. And it's kind of one of the famous passages in the Bible that Ahab devotes himself to Baal, and he's opposed in this by the two great prophets, the Israelite prophets, Elijah and Elisha. And of course, biblical writers hate this. They hate the idea that an Israelite king might have been seduced by the worship of Baal. And so after Ahab's death, Elisha comes to an Israelite king might have been seduced by the worship of Baal. And so after Ahab's death, Elisha comes to an Israelite chariot officer called Jehu and anoints him as king. And Jehu

gets in his chariot and he drives furiously, the Bible says. And he kills Ahab's sons, who are respectively the king of Israel and the king of Judah. And then he goes to find Jezebel. And Jezebel sees him coming and she adorns her hair, paints herself, puts on her finest robes, looks down at Jehu from her window and condemns him as the murderer of his master. And Jehu looks up and sees her surrounded by her eunuchs and orders the eunuchs, throw her down. And the eunuchs know which side their bread is buttered on.

And so they do throw her down. And the Bible then says that Jehu went in and ate and drank. Take care of that cursed woman, he said, and bury her, for she was a king's daughter. And so his servants go out to find Jezebel's body and bury it. But all they find is her skull, her feet, and her hands. All the rest of her has been eaten by dogs. And this is the fulfillment of a curse that had been delivered by Elijah that Jezebel would be eaten by dogs. It's a great story. I'll level with you. When I did do scripture at school,

back in the mists of time- You were team Jezebel, were you? I just thought it was a brilliant story. I think I wrote an essay on that story, maybe even an illustrated essay. I just think people being eaten by dogs is always good box office. There are some great illustrations of it. Anyway, so in the Bible, you get a mixture of admiration of Tyre and hostility to her. You also get the same in the writings of the other ancient people who bear witness to the glory of Tyre, which is the Greeks. So it's a bit like with Persia. Basically, the narratives we get about Persia come from the Greeks and biblical accounts. It's the same with the people of Tyre. And Tyre plays a very important role in Greek mythology because the princess Europa, who gives her name to the continent of Europe, comes from

Tyre. She's a beautiful princess. She has a father, usually called Agenor, but in some accounts called Phoenix. And Europa is playing on the beach. A great white bull appears. Europa clambers onto the bull. The bull swims out to the sea and Europa vanishes. And this bull, it turns out, is Zeus. But agonor or Phoenix, whatever you want to call him, doesn't know this. And so he sends out his sons to go and find Europa. And the most famous of these sons is a guy called Cadmus, who ends up traveling to Greece. There he kills a dragon. He's told by Athena to sow the teeth of the dragon. Men grow from these teeth.

Cadmus throws a stone in among them. They all start kind of crashing into each other, chopping each other up, falling on each other's swords. Only five of these mysterious men survive, and they help Cadmus to found a very, very famous Greek city, namely Thebes. And the Acropolis of Thebes is called the Cadmea. And at the end of his life, Cadmus and his queen are turned into serpents. So this all sounds mad. Implausible, Tom, I would say. Implausible. But in the opinion of the Greeks, there's a sense in which the story of Europa and Cadmus is the absolute fountainhead of history because it is with Europa that Herodotus

begins his history, the first work of history that we have, because he is trying to rationalize this myth. And he says that actually it wasn't Zeus who abducted Europa, it was Greek merchants. And they were doing it because Tyrian merchants had abducted a Greek princess. And so there's this kind of reciprocal princess rustling going on. And this culminates in the sack of Troy and then in due course with the Persian invasion of Greece. So that's bad, Tyre behaving badly, but there are also positives because Herodotus attributes to Cadmus a really major, major innovation without which he wouldn't be able

to write his histories. And this is the invention of writing. So Herodotus says, the Greeks, in my opinion, had not possessed an alphabet up until that point. To begin with, the letters were the same as those Cadmus had used in Tyre, but in due course, as time went by and the language of the Greeks evolved, so too did the form of their script. So there's that sense that this is how Greek has evolved from the Tyrian script. And is that plausible? Well, we'll come to that in the second half, when we look at what these myths and stories might actually tell us about the historical reality. So Herodotus also gives us quite a lot of other information about Tyre. He says that he's visited it in person. He says that he's seen a fabulously ancient temple that according to the priests who minister there is 2,300 years old.

So this is kind of a bit like the Egyptians. The Tyrians and the Egyptians look at the Greeks as children. Herodotus says that in this temple, there are two pillars, one of pure gold and the other of emerald, which gleams very brightly in the dark. And Herodotus also confirms that Carthage was founded by Tyre. So it's from Herodotus that we get the story that the people of Tyre wouldn't sail against Carthage, even when commanded to by the Persian king. And there's a sense in which, although the Tyrians are kind of committed not to fighting the Carthaginians, they're very keen about fighting the Greeks because in the great war that the Persian king Xerxes launches against the Greeks, it's the Tyrians who provide a key naval contingent because they are still master mariners. So there's a sense there, again,

of a kind of rivalry between the Greeks and the people of Tyre and the otherers. So there's a sense there, again, of a kind of rivalry between the Greeks and the people of Tyre and the other people. Because I should add at this point that Tyre is not the only city to be providing a squadron to the Persian king and fighting at the battles of Artemisian and Salamis. So Herodotus also names the kings of two other city-states. So one of them is Sidon, which we've already mentioned, the great port north of Tyre. Another is a port called Arados. And these are all different cities, but according to Herodotus, they are a single people. So rather like, say, Athens and Sparta and Thebes are all Greeks, Herodotus assumes that Tyre and Sidon and Byblos, that they are all a single people. And he names this people as Phoenicians. I wondered if we get to the Phoenicians. So they're named after Phoenix,

right? Who is the brother of Cadmus. Have I got that right? Or it might be the other way around. So, I mean, there are kind of various traditions. Phoenix might be the father of Cadmus. He might be the brother of Cadmus. It's confused because obviously he didn't really exist. Okay, yeah. I'd forgotten that he didn't exist. And the likelihood is that he's invented to explain who the Phoenicians are. Yeah.

Herodotus is not the first Greek author to mention the existence of Phoenicians. So Homer does. So in the Iliad, the funeral games that are held for Patroclus, the beloved of Achilles in the Iliad, the first prize in the foot race is a kind of beautiful silver mixing bowl that has been made in Sidon and brought by Phoenician merchants. He's met by Athena and he lies to Athena just because that's what Odysseus does. He always lies, even to Athena. And he claims that he's a fugitive from Crete and that he's paid passage to Phoenicians who have brought him to Ithaca. And Athena laughs because she knows that Odysseus is always lying and she loves it. So the Phoenicians are, they're kind of slightly shadowy figures in Homer, but Herodotus gives us a lot more detail.

So he tells us that originally they came from the Red Sea. Again, he confirms that they're amazing sailors. He talks a lot about their ventures westwards into the Mediterranean, but also he tells this famous story about how a pharaoh had employed Phoenician sailors to sail down the coast of the Red Sea, keep going, and ultimately they go all the way around Africa, come up through the Straits of Gibraltar and through the Mediterranean back home. Herodotus himself says he doesn't believe this, but because he gives details about where the sun is rising that demonstrates that the Phoenicians had gone beyond the line of the

equator, it's clear that actually this story is true. Herodotus acknowledges that it's the Phoenicians who are the best sailors in Xerxes' fleet. Now, Greek attitudes to the Phoenicians harden in the wake of the Persian Wars, because obviously the Phoenicians have played this key role in attempting to defeat the Greeks that gets defeated at Salamis. So the Greeks hold grudges, right? They're not going to let this go. Yes, they do. Thucydides, the great historian of the Peloponnesian War, describes the Phoenicians as barbarians. He says, actually, it was the Phoenicians who'd originally settled Sicily, but then they'd been forced out by Greek colonizers. He thinks that this is absolutely tremendous. I think there's a sense there that the Phoenicians are,

unlike the Persians, are kind of sinister doppelgangers of the Greeks, that they're simultaneously alien and similar, and that's what makes them unsettling. And I think you get the same thing actually in the Bible, that the biblical writers are alarmed by, let's call them the Phoenicians, because they are so recognizable. They are so similar. And that's why the hostility develops. Because they're big rivals, right? I mean, they're commercial rivals, cultural rivals. Yes. But because they're so similar, that in a way accentuates the hostility. So there's no question that the Phoenicians are the rivals of the Greeks in this early period, going from Homer up to, I suppose, the time of the Persian Wars. And then Carthage inherits that mantle, and Carthage fights against the Greeks in Sicily, and then, of course,

against Rome. And the Romans inherit the suspicion of the Phoenicians and particularly the Carthaginians. So they have this phrase, punica fides, so punic faith. Punic derives from the Latin word for Phoenician. And it's the Greeks and the Romans who major in this story about child sacrifice. So there are over 30 Greek and Roman writers who refer to it. 30? Yeah. And so Flaubert, I mean, he gets the idea for child sacrifice from the Greek writers and he gets the idea specifically that they are being sacrificed to Moloch from the Bible

and he blends it to create that extraordinary passage that we opened the show with. So I think we should take a break at this point. And when we come back, we should see, well, what are we to make of all this? Okay. So there's a lot going on there, Tom. There's a lot of different sources, lots of different traces. And the second half, why don't we try to pull it all together and say, who were the Phoenicians and what was their influence on Carthage and what's Carthage all about? So come back after the break and we'll find out. Very exciting. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment.

It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking about Carthage, the great rival of ancient Rome. We started with Gustav Flaubert talking about child sacrifice and the kind of lurid, blood-soaked reputation of Carthage.

And Tom, in the first half, you traced Carthage's origins back to Lebanon, to the city of Tyre, and to these people called the Phoenicians. Now, the Phoenicians are one of the great historical mysteries, aren't they? So my question to you very simply is, who are they? Well, I'm not sure they've traditionally been a great mystery. I think most people have assumed that a people called the Phoenicians existed and that that's a fairly unproblematic conceptualization. However, recently, skepticism about the existence of a people called the Phoenicians has become kind of very academically fashionable. And so the debate is typified by two books that have come out within, what, the past six or seven years. So the first is a book

called In Search of the Phoenicians by a brilliant ancient historian called Josephine Quinn at Oxford. Yes, I know that book. And she goes in search of the Phoenicians and, spoiler alert, she doesn't find them. She basically says that it's completely wrong to think of there having been a people called the Phoenicians, that this is something that the Greeks have projected onto them, that the people of Tyre thought of themselves as Tyrians, that the people of Sidon thought of themselves as Sidonians. They did not have a collective identity. And essentially, the evidence that she adduces for that is that the great empires of the age in the Near East, they never treat what we might call Phoenicia as a single region,

as a single province. She says, we have no good evidence for the ancient people that we call Phoenicians identifying themselves as a single people or acting as a stable collective. And she argues, fascinatingly, that the identification of the Phoenicians as a single people reflected cultural assumptions of the 19th and 20th century, the way in which people in Europe were identifying themselves with their primordial ancestors, and that particularly Christians in Lebanon wanted to do the same because it would distinguish them from kind of Muslim Arab identity. Yeah. I mean, it's only the Greeks and the Romans who refer to them as Phoenicians. So the question then is, well, okay, the people of Tyre and Sidon didn't refer to themselves as Phoenicians,

but did they have a sense of themselves as belonging to a kind of collective in the way that the Athenians and Spartans, even as they were fighting with each other, would have recognized themselves as Greek? And there are absolutely academics who still stick up for that tradition. So an equally brilliant book by a scholar called Carolina Lopez-Riez, which came out in 2021, so only three years ago, Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean. I mean, she is clearly nailing her colors to the mast with that title. She absolutely does think that the Phoenicians existed. She says flat out, a Greek or Roman could recognize a Phoenician by specific traits. Okay. Such as? Well, so the gods, the rituals, the temples, the language, the clothes they wore. Roman comedians are always making fun of it. The kind of specializations, the maritime stuff, the trade,

all that kind of thing. And so she says the only real problem is that we do not know for sure how our subjects refer to their collective cities and networks, but this is not enough to deny a group identity. For what it's worth, I'm not in any way a specialist in this, but I would side with the idea that there was a kind of inchoate sense among the Tyrians and the Sidonians that they did have a kind of shared cultural identity. Right. But they wouldn't have called themselves the Phoenicians. No. So Carolina Lopez Rios argues that they did call themselves Canaanites, which has kind of been the traditional view. And this is how the biblical writers frame them. So they do frame the people of Tyre as worshippers of Canaanite gods. So in the first book of Chronicles,

a guy called Canaan is the father of Sidon. So Canaan gives his name to the land and he's the father of Sidon who then goes on to found the city. So I think that it's not just the Greeks who are seeing the people of Tyre and Sidon as distinctive. I think the Israelites are doing that as well because Sidon and Tyre are both seen as providing good things, cedar and craftsmen and things like that, and of dangerous things. So in one of the biblical accounts of the life of Jezebel, she's described as being a princess of Sidon, not of Tyre. So you have there a sense that she's interchangeable. It's like Wolverhampton and Birmingham, Tom.

Yes. People from outside, foolishly, can't tell the enormous difference between those two places. Actually, I think the obvious comparison is with the Greeks. There aren't actually that many passages where Greeks talk about there being a Hellenic culture. And we don't really have any, let's call it Phoenician literature. So even Josephine Quinn, although she denies the existence of Phoenicians, she's always using Phoenicians in inverted commas. So I think even that is betraying the fact that there is a kind of common culture there. So whether you want to call them Phoenicians or Phoenicians in inverted commas, I think there probably is. So I think that

the sense that you get in both the Bible and in Greek accounts, that the Phoenicians are formidable sailors and that they are spectacularly wealthy. I think that these probably would have been recognized by the Phoenicians themselves as giving them a kind of common identity. But it is sharpened in the Greek case because the Greeks, in a sense, they are direct rivals. What we were saying before the break, that the Greeks recognize themselves in the Phoenicians. And that's why the rivalry between them, I think, is so kind of intense, because the Greeks know that they are following in the Phoenician way. It's the Phoenicians who have given them the alphabet, which has enabled writing to flourish,

which in turn facilitates trade. But when the Greeks start spreading westwards to set up their own trade network, they find that the Phoenicians have got there before them, that the Phoenicians have occupied all the best spots. Because it's the Phoenicians who basically establish the Mediterranean as a kind of common sea that enable the silver and the iron ore of Spain and Italy to be brought to the Near East, and for Near Eastern fashions to be taken to Italy and to Sardinia and Spain. And when are we talking about here, Tom? I mean, 500 BC, further back, 1000 BC? Further back, say 900, 800, 700. Right. So well before the golden age of Greece. Yes, absolutely. And the Phoenicians have been able to do this because as they've been doing

since the third century millennium, they are at the cutting edge of maritime innovation. So they are building faster ships. They are coating the hulls with bitumen. So they're the first to do that to ensure that the water doesn't seep through. And their ships are so streamlined that basically they can travel up to 30 miles a day. That's incredibly quick. And also they can travel at night because they are the people who have developed the use of the pole star so they can use that and the greeks themselves call the pole star the phoenice so they are branding the pole star as phoenician yeah and it's this that has enabled the phoenicians to plant colonies right the way across Southern Africa, including Carthage, supposedly in 814 BC,

but going onwards, Sardinia, Sicily, Southern Spain, and out into the Atlantic. So we mentioned Gardez. And there are some stories, aren't there, Tom? There are sort of exaggerated myths and stuff that they went as far as Cornwall or indeed North America, which I imagine people think now is obviously total tosh. Right. Okay. So the Phoenicians are always looking for raw materials. They're looking for gold, for silver, for copper, for iron, and of course for tin. And to get this, they are going beyond the Pillars of Hercules. They are definitely planting colonies in Atlantic Iberia and Atlantic North Africa. So Portugal or what's now Morocco, basically.

Yeah. Whether they go as far as Cornwall, I mean, this is a tradition that's obviously very popular with the Cornish. There's no archaeological evidence for it. There's no explicit written evidence for it. But there is, I mean, this kind of classic ancient history, there is a poem that is written in late antiquity that is drawing on a fifth century poem. Well, a thousand years later. Yes. Okay. Well, sorry, Tom, I'd need a bit more than that.

I know you do. And this mentions a guy called Himilco who sails out into the Atlantic and he brings tin back from a place called the Cassiterides, which might be Cornwall, but equally, you know, it could be Northern Iberia or whatever. I mean, could be. But also we're told in this poem that Himilco had sailed out into the Atlantic ocean and had found there that the sea was covered with thick seaweed. And so it has been posited that perhaps this was the Sagaso Sea. Of course, people have wanted to believe that they might have sailed all the way to America. And there've been various faked lumps of stone with Phoenician

writing inscribed in it, but these are all fakes. There's no hard evidence at all. Tom, you've lost all our listeners in the Lebanese American community with this skepticism. Yeah, well, I'm sorry. But there is also evidence from a Greek text called the Periplus, so the sailing round, that a guy called Hanno might have sailed very, very far south down the coast of Africa, sourcing ivory, sourcing those apes perhaps that were referenced in the Bible. And we know that he sees creatures that almost certainly were chimpanzees. So there's definitely a sense, I think, that the Phoenicians are really, really formidable sailors. And Tom, let's get to Carthage. So they're going around establishing these colonies,

probably not in Cornwall, but at least on the shores of the Mediterranean. And obviously the most famous, the one that we began with, is the great city of Carthage. So the traditional date for that is 814 BC. Is that plausible? I think it's highly plausible. I mean, it's a lot more plausible than the date that Virgil gives it, which is of course around the time of the Trojan War. That is not when Carthage is founded, but yes, so probably mid to late 9th century BC, around when thethage is founded, but yes. So probably mid to late ninth century BC, around when the traditional date is. I mean, it seems entirely plausible. And it's one of a number of colonies that are being planted by the Tyrians at this time. So there's also Utica, which is where Cato the Younger in due course will commit suicide. But that was originally called the Old City and

Carthage is the New City. That's what it means. So, you know, you have a sense there that Carthage is perhaps not even the oldest colony being planted by the Tyrians. But as I say, by around 700 BC, you have Phoenician cities, Phoenician trading posts everywhere from the Atlantic to the Levant. And as I said, nothing like it has been seen in the Mediterranean before. So the Phoenicians or Phoenicians in inverted commas, I mean, these are really, really significant players in the development of trade and in the development of the Mediterranean,

the sense of the Mediterranean as a kind of single C. And evidence for the success of the Phoenicians in kind of cornering Mediterranean trade, I think is found in their very name. So this word phoenix, which the Greeks say comes from this Lebanese king called Phoenix, actually it means perhaps palm tree. So in the late fifth century, Carthage starts minting coins with a palm tree on it as a way of kind of advertising herself to the Greek world that she has a Phoenician identity. But it's likelier that it comes from the Greek word for reddish-purple.

The colour of purple, let's call it purple, comes from probably the most famous of all the Phoenician luxury products, which is a dye, which is made from mucus secreted by a distinctive predatory mollusk called the murex. And these mollusks are found in the Eastern Mediterranean. They're also found on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. And the mucus is secreted, I gather, specifically from the hypobranchial glands. And you can either do it by kind of tickling the mollusks and secreting the mucus that way, or you can just crush their skulls and pull by kind of tickling the mollusks and secreting the mucus that way, or you can just crush their skulls and pull the flesh out. And when you've pulled the flesh out,

you leave it to dry in the sun, and then you add salt water, depending on how rich you want the color of the dye to be. Of course, I mean, it absolutely stinks. So this is why the dye factories are always on the edge of towns. So in Sidon, they found one pile of shells that's over 130 meters high. So a lot of mollusks are being killed in the cause of making this dye. And it's a very specialized process. So even to this day, it's not really fully understood. And this is the origin of Tyrian purple, which is an expression we still use. Yes, it is. And the association of purple with spectacular wealth is evident in the fact that famously it becomes the color that is associated with Roman emperors. So you can see why naming

the Phoenicians after this luxury product, in a way, it's a kind of a grudging acknowledgement of just how completely they've cornered high-end trade. So that's one story that's told about the Phoenicians by the Greeks. The other is this legend about Cadmus introducing the alphabet to Greece, which you asked about. And the consensus of scholars is that Herodotus is right. Hooray. Ah, brilliant. Well done, Herodotus. Yet again, Herodotus gets it right. So the Phoenicians absolutely are the first to develop an alphabet in the sense of a kind of a standardized set of letters representing a range of sounds. And I'm absolutely not a linguist, and I know that linguists are famous for the tolerance

with which they listen to non-linguists describing different styles of writing and script. But basically, the reason why the Phoenician alphabet is so significant is that it's kind of in contrast to what had gone before, which is scripts that use symbols to represent either syllables or specific words. And obviously, it's much harder for that reason to learn. So the Phoenician alphabet has 22 letters. I mean, that is much easier to learn. And it's derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The prototype has been discovered, some inscriptions were found in the early 20th century in Sinai, but it's the Phoenician alphabet that is the first alphabet in the sense that we who use the Latin alphabet today would recognize

it. It's not hieroglyphs, so it's an alphabet rather than a hieroglyphic. Yeah, exactly. The symbols stand for letters rather than for things, as it were. Yes, exactly. And, you know, as Herodotus says, it kind of underpins the Greek alphabet. The Greek alphabet would be impossible without the Phoenician example. The Greek alphabet, in turn, influences the Latin alphabet that we use. Yes, of course. The Cyrillic, you know, all kinds of alphabets in the West, but it also influences alphabets in the East. So the Phoenician alphabet influences the Aramaic script, which is adopted by the Persians for their use. And in the

long run, it influences both Hebrew and Arabic. So the Phoenician script is unbelievably influential. And although initially it's used for trade, famously, it also comes to be used for literature. We don't have any Phoenician literature, but of course we do have the first great epics written in Greek, those of Homer, which would be unthinkable without the Phoenicians. So we have nothing, literally nothing written by the Phoenicians. Is that right? We have inscriptions. We have that kind of stuff. You love an inscription. I'm a little bit less tolerant of inscriptions than you are. Well, yeah. And as we said, the word byblos gives us the Greek word for book.

So we know that they had, I mean, papyruses or whatever. Yeah, they absolutely did. And it seems likely that it's via the Phoenicians that Near Eastern myth, so Gilgamesh and that kind of thing, enters Greece. Greek mythology clearly owes a lot to, say, Mesopotamian mythology. And it seems to be the Phoenicians with their writing that kind of serve as the vectors. Right. So that's one chalked up for the Phoenicians. Two, actually. We've got the die and we've got the alphabet.

Yeah, well done. But Dominic, what about the child sacrifice? So this is what we began with. I've been waiting on an episode for this, Tom. So what would be your sense? Well, I know nothing about this, but I would say I'd like to believe they did it. I think it makes a better episode if they did it. I think we want to end on a high on a note that people will remember. We don't want to just be debunkers all the time, Tom. Right. Well, you're going to be pleased because I would say that up until, say, the 90s, probably, the consensus among scholars was that

it was all Greco-Roman propaganda. The Greeks and the Romans were othering the Phoenicians. Of course. They were orientalizing them, Tom. Again, shocking scenes. But I think now the consensus would be that the Carthaginians did engage in child sacrifice. And the reason for that is that more and more sanctuaries have been found which seem to point to exactly that. So actually, these have been known about for about 100 years now. So these are open air enclosures marked out by stones, full of urns, some of which contain the burned remains of livestock, mostly sheep, but some of which contain the burned remains of small children. And so unsurprisingly, these have been named Tophets after the place in the Bible.

And the first one was found at a place called Mochia, which was an island off Sicily, very, very significant Phoenician city. And then in 1921, so this was two years after the one in Mochia, an enormous one was actually found in Carthage itself. So you see, not everything in Carthage was destroyed. I mean, it was huge. So it was about 30,000 square meters, about 20,000 funerary urns. You know, these were being put there over the course of many, many years. And if there seems to be a

kind of biblical link in Tophet, the use of Tophet, we don't know what the Carthaginians called it, but the Bible provides a convenient name. There are also lots of inscriptions in these Tophets explicitly stating that the children have been given as an offering and the Phoenician word for this offering is a molk. Oh, like Moloch. How exciting. Like Moloch. And so it's likely that Moloch was not a god at all, but a kind of sacrifice, an offering of a child. So that is something I think that Flaubert does get wrong, that the god that children are being offered to is not Moloch, but another god. And in Carthage, it's a god called Baal-Hamon and his queen called Tanit. And Baal means lord, and Hamon seems to come from the Venetian word hamam.

Sorry, Tom, what was that again? Hamam? Hamam? Hamam? Okay. No vowels. Right. Seems to come from the Venetian word hummum. Sorry, Tom, what was that again? Humm? Humm? Humm? Okay. No vowels. Right. And this means display my expertise in Venetian.

Yeah, go for it. I've been consulting the Bodleian. This means hot or a blaze, a fire. So he's good. Hot Baal, that's his name. Well, no, not Hot Baal. Lord of the Furnace. Oh, right.

I like Hot Baal better. I think you'll get more clicks with Hot Baal than calling yourself Lord of the Furnace. Lord of the Furnace. Oh, right. I like Hotbar better. I think you'll get more clicks with Hotbar than calling yourself Lord of the Furnace. Lord of the Furnace is pretty chilling. And Tanit. Tanit is in Salonbo. Yeah. Yeah, she is. Isn't she a priestess of Tanit?

The goddess of the moon? Something like that. Yes. Yeah. Tanit and Balhamon are equally the two great gods of Carthage. And Josephine Quinn, in her book, In Search of the Phoenicians, has a brilliantly fascinating chapter on the Tophets in which she points out that although there are lots of Phoenician settlements across the West that do practice this child sacrifice, there are also lots that don't. So it's not something that is a marker of inverted commas, as she would put it,

Phoenician identity. And it's definitely died out in phoenicia itself by at the latest the 7th century and so she argues the relative scarcity of this cult means that the users of the tophets must have formed a self-conscious group this was a rare and highly distinctive ritual choice and her thesis is that carthage was actually not an official colony of tyre but may have been founded by settlers who were fleeing mainstream disapproval of their enthusiasm for child sacrifice. Oh my God, Tom. So it really is the United States to Tyre's Great Britain. Right. So she makes this explicit. She says, like the exodus of the Puritans to the new world,

the formation of the circle of the Tophet could have been a reaction both to new opportunities in the West and new religious restrictions in the East. A sinister and freakish offshoot of the motherland. Wow. It's an amazing theory, isn't it? Yeah, I love it. It's kind of fascinating. And she points out also that the story of Dido, that it involves betrayal and deception and flight, that it's not a story of colonists being sent out with the blessing of the mother city. And that perhaps this is a distorted echo of the reality that it was kind of religious exiles. So Tom, actually we've come full circle in the episode because we started with that incredibly lurid and violent scene from Flaubert's book Salombo, which has

absolutely scandalized people in the 1860s, understandably. And actually, we've come back to the idea that for all the stuff about orientalizing and othering, quite possibly Carthage was set up by a kind of child sacrifice cult on the shores of the Mediterranean and, of course, would evolve into the great rival to Rome. Yeah. And that possibly it's not just the Greeks and the Romans who are looking at this with horror, that many of, inverted comma, Phoenicians would have done as well. Yeah. And that possibly it's not just the Greeks and the Romans who are looking at this with horror, that many of inverted comma Phoenicians would have done as well. Yeah. People from the old country. Crikey. But that just emphasizes the importance of trying to see the world not through Greek or Roman or non-child-sacrificing Phoenician eyes, but through

the eyes of the Carthaginians themselves. And maybe, could we do that next time? Can we get into the Carthaginian heads? That is the challenge we have set ourselves. So next time we'll come back and we will look at Carthage itself. What do we know about the origins of Carthage, the character of Carthage, the history of Carthage? Superb. All right.

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bombshell thank you very much tom that was fascinating and we'll see you all next time goodbye bye-bye i'm marina hyde and i'm richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club.

If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.