About 325 ft. from the railway station of La Malga are the still imposing ruins of the amphitheatre. Near by, at the spot called Bir el Jebana, Père Delattre has discovered four cemeteries, one of which contains the tombs of state officials or servants of the imperial government. Rather more than half a mile north-west of Byrsa are the huge cisterns of La Malga, which, at the time of the Arab geographer, Idrīsī, still comprised twenty-four parallel covered reservoirs, 325 ft. by 71½ ft.; of these fourteen only remain.
On the hill of the Petit Séminaire, which is separated from Byrsa by a valley, Père Delattre has discovered a Christian basilica, the baths of Gargilius, large graves with several levels of tombs, and much débris of sculpture, which, however, is insufficient to enable us to say that this is the site of the temple of Tanit or Juno Caelestis. The quarter of Dermèche, near the sea, whose name recalls the Latin Thermis or Thermas, is remarkable for the imposing remains of the baths (thermae) of Antoninus. In one place called Douimés was the Ceramicus where excavation has discovered a graceful basilica, proto-Punic tombs, potters’ ovens with numerous terra-cotta moulds which were abandoned after the siege in 146 b.c., and finally a Roman palace with superb marble statues. Farther on are huge reservoirs of Borj-Jedid which are sufficiently well-preserved to be used again.
Behind the small fort of Borj-Jedid is the plateau of the Odeum where the theatre and fine marble statues of the Roman period have been laid bare; beyond is the great Christian basilica of Damus-el-Karita (perhaps a corruption of Domus Caritatis); in the direction of Sidi-bu-Saïd is the platea nova, the huge stairway of which, like so many other Carthaginian buildings, has of late years been destroyed by the Arabs for use as building material; on the coast near St Monica is the necropolis of Rabs where Delattre dug up fine anthropoid sarcophagi of the Punic period.
In the quarter of Megara (Magaria, mod. La Marsa) it would seem that there never were more than isolated buildings, villas in the midst of gardens. At Jebel Khaui (Cape Kamart) there is a great necropolis, the sepulchral chambers of which were long ago rifled by Arabs and Vandals. This cemetery had a Jewish quarter.
We must mention finally the gigantic remains in the western plain of the Roman aqueduct which carried water from Jebel Zaghwan (Mons Zeugitanus) and Juggar (Zucchara) to the cisterns of La Malga. From the nymphaeum of Zaghwan to Carthage this aqueduct is 61 Roman miles (about 56 English miles) long; in the plain of Manuba its arches are nearly 49 ft. high.
Though several famous travellers visited and described the ruins of Carthage during the first thirty years of the 19th century, such as Major Humbert, Chateaubriand, Estrup, no scientific investigations took place till 1833. In that year Captain Falbe, Danish consul at Tunis, made a plan of the ruins so far as they were visible. In 1837 there was formed in Paris, on the initiative of Dureau de la Malle, a Société pour les fouilles de Carthage; under the auspices of this body Falbe and Sir Grenville Temple undertook researches, and a little later Sir Thomas Read, English consul, following the example of the Genoese and the Pisans, carried away to England the mosaics, columns and statues of the baths of Antoninus. The Abbé Bourgade, chaplain of the church of St Louis erected in 1841, collected together Punic stelae and other antiquities from the surrounding plain; these formed the nucleus of the magnificent museum subsequently formed by Père Delattre at the instigation of Cardinal Lavigerie. Between 1856 and 1858 Nathan Davis made excavations on the supposed site of the Odeum, and in 1859 Beulé undertook his celebrated investigations on Byrsa. Among other explorers were A. Daux in 1866; von Maltzan in 1870; E. de Sainte-Marie in 1874; Ch. d’Hérisson in 1883; E. Babelon and S. Reinach in 1884; Vernaz in 1885; Gauckler in 1903. Of these the majority were sent officially by the French government. But their attempts were partial, disjointed and without any systematic plan; they were entirely superseded by the brilliant and persevering work of R.P. Delattre. The Musée Lavigerie, the result of his labours, contains a vast archaeological treasure, the interest of which is doubled by the fact that it stands in the very midst of the ancient site. Unfortunately Delattre’s work suffered too often from the absence of a cordial understanding with the directors of the antiquities department, La Blanchère and P. Gauckler, who, having themselves undertaken excavations, transported their finds to the Bardo museum, by the help of the public funds at their disposal.
The main authority for the topography and the history of the excavations is Aug. Audollent’s Carthage romaine (Paris, 1901). A topographical and archaeological map of the site was published under the direction of Colonel Dolot and with the assistance of Delattre and Gauckler by the Ministère de l’Instruction Publique in 1907.
History.—The history of Carthage falls into four periods: (1) from the foundation to the beginning of the wars with the Sicilian Greeks in 550 b.c.; (2) from 550 to 265, the first year of the Punic Wars; (3) the Punic Wars to the fall of Carthage in 146 b.c.; (4) the periods of Roman and Byzantine rule down to the destruction of the city by the Arabs in a.d. 698.
(1) Foundation to 550 b.c.—From an extremely remote period Phoenician sailors had visited the African coast and had had commercial relations with the Libyan tribes who inhabited the district which forms the modern Tunis. In the 16th century b.c. the Sidonians already had trading stations on the coast; with the object of competing with the Tyrian colony at Utica they established a trading station called Cambē or Caccabē on the very site afterwards occupied by Carthage. Near Borj-Jedid unmistakable traces of this early settlement have been found, though nothing is known of its history. According to the classical tradition Carthage was founded about 850 b.c. by Tyrian emigrants led by Elissa or Elissar, the daughter of the Tyrian king Mutton I., fleeing from the tyranny of her brother Pygmalion. According to the story, Elissa subsequently received the name of Dido, i.e. “the fugitive.” Cambē welcomed the new arrivals, who bought from the mixed Libyo-Phoenician peoples of the neighbourhood, tributaries of the Libyan king Japon, a piece of land on which to build a “new city,” Kart-hadshat, the Greek and Roman forms of the name. The story goes that Dido, having obtained “as much land as could be contained by the skin of an ox,” proceeded to cut the skin of a slain ox into strips narrow enough to extend round the whole of the hill, which afterwards from this episode gained the name of Byrsa. This last detail obviously arose from a mere play on words by which Βύρσα “hide,” “skin,” is confused with the Phoenician bosra, borsa, “citadel,” “fortress.” In memory of its Tyrian origin, Carthage paid an annual tribute to the temple of Melkarth at Tyr, and under the Roman empire coins were struck showing Dido fleeing in a galley, or presiding over the building of Byrsa. On the Vatican Virgil there is a representation in miniature of workmen shaping marble blocks and columns for Dido’s palace.
The early history of Carthage is very obscure. It is only in the 6th century that real history begins. By this time the city is unquestionably a considerable capital with a domain divided into the three districts of Zeugitana (the environs of Carthage and the peninsula of C. Bon), Byzacium (the shore of the Syrtes), and the third comprising the emporia which stretch in the form of a crescent to the centre of the Great Syrtis as far as Cyrenaica. The first contest against the Greeks arose from a boundary question between the settlements of Carthage and those of the Greeks of Cyrene. The limits were eventually fixed and marked by a monument known as the “Altar of Philenae.” The destruction of Tyre by Nebuchadrezzar (q.v.), in the first half of the 6th century, enabled Carthage to take its place as mistress of the Mediterranean. The Phoenician colonies founded by Tyre and Sidon in Sicily and Spain, threatened by the Greeks, sought help from Carthage, and from this period dates the Punic[2] supremacy in the western Mediterranean. The Greek colonization of Sicily was checked, while Carthage established herself on all the Sicilian coast and the neighbouring islands as far as the Balearic Islands and the coast of Spain. The inevitable conflict between Greece and Carthage broke out about 550.