Carthage

Phoenician city founded by colonists from Tyre ~814 BC in North Africa. Mediterranean thalassocratic empire. Astarte transformed there into Tanit. Destroyed by Rome in 146 BC. Rebuilt as Roman capital, today a suburb of Tunis.

Location and name

Carthage (Phoenician 𐤒𐤓𐤕𐤇𐤃𐤔𐤕, Qart-ḥadašt, “new city”; Latin Carthāgō; Greek Karkhēdṓn) was a Phoenician city-state and later a Roman colony in North Africa. The ancient site corresponds today to a coastal suburb of Tunis, capital of Tunisia.

The name “new city” contrasts with the originating Phoenician metropolis, Tyre, in the Levant — Carthage was the new Tyre of the western Mediterranean.

Period

Phoenician/Punic phase (~814–146 BC)

Founding (~814 BC, traditionally) — Phoenician colonists from Tyre under the leadership of Queen Elissa/Dido (semi-mythical figure, immortalized in Virgil’s Aeneid as Aeneas’s lover).
Expansion — Carthage becomes a thalassocratic power dominating the western Mediterranean, with colonies in Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Hispania, and the Balearic Islands.
Punic Wars against Rome (264–146 BC) — three wars that decided control of the Mediterranean:
- First (264–241 BC) — Rome takes Sicily.
- Second (218–201 BC) — Hannibal crosses the Alps; celebrated victories at Trasimene and Cannae; lost at the Battle of Zama.
- Third (149–146 BC) — Rome destroys Carthage, salts the soil (according to tradition) and kills or enslaves its inhabitants. End of the Punic state.

Roman phase (~46 BC onward)

Recolonization by Julius Caesar and Augustus — Carthage is reborn as capital of the Roman province of Africa Proconsularis.
Apex in the 2nd–3rd centuries AD — one of the Empire’s greatest cities. Antonine Baths, amphitheatre, theatre, circus, basilicas.
Seat of important Christian centers — Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine studied there.
Conquered by the Vandals in 439 AD, the Byzantines in 533, the Arabs in 698. Definitive decline.

Tanit absorbs Astarte

The religious peculiarity of Carthage is the emergence of Tanit (Phoenician Tnt) as the principal goddess — a figure that absorbs and surpasses Astarte, inherited from the Tyrian metropolis.

When the Phoenicians founded Carthage, they brought Astarte with them. But there she merged with/was replaced by Tanit, a local North African deity (probably of partially assimilated Berber origin). Tanit absorbed Astarte’s functions and became the principal goddess of Carthage, with the epithet “Tanit Pene Baal” (Tanit, face of Baal).

The central Carthaginian cultic pair is Tanit + Baal Hammon. Carthage’s Tophet — a sacred precinct with thousands of votive stelae and urns — bears witness to this cult. The interpretation of tophets as sites of child sacrifice is a controversial topic in current archaeology: some interpret them as such (following Greco-Roman sources, hostile to Carthage); others as common infant necropolises. The truth probably lies between the two.

Game perspective

In Mensageiros do Vento, Carthage is, through the lens of the game, the first great complete name-mutation within the chain.

Pafos showed Astarte becoming Aphrodite without changing the temple or the place. Eryx showed syncretic layers stacked upon one another. Carthage is different: here the goddess changes her name to something new (Tanit) and acquires her own personality that exceeds the Phoenician heritage. The Astarte-Tanit continuity exists — the theological material is the same — but the local face is so strong that she becomes better known as a North African goddess than as a Phoenician derivation.

This pattern (ancient goddess who becomes a new goddess with a local name) is, under the game’s reading, one of the forms that Sophia takes when she escapes a demiurgic form and has not yet been captured by the next. Tanit is Sophia between Tyrian theology and Roman theology, in a Carthaginian interlude of approximately six centuries.

The destruction of Carthage by Rome in 146 BC is, under this reading, a major demiurgic event: Rome eliminates not only a rival political power, but a cultic form that escaped imperial control. The salting of the soil (mythical but semiotically potent) is a gesture of ritual erasure.

That Carthage is reborn as a Roman city some decades later is typical of the demiurgic method: destroy the previous form and reoccupy the place with its own form. Under this new guise, Roman Carthage becomes one of the centers of early Christianity — another theology, another guise, but the same geographical place.

The mensageiros who access the akashic Carthage encounter three painfully superimposed layers: the goddess Tanit still alive beneath the salted soil; the triumphant Rome of the bath ruins; the proto-orthodox Christianity of the Latin fathers. A dense place.