Tunisia · 814 BCE
Carthage
Qart-ḥadašt
The new city
Elissa of Tyre — Dido in the later telling — founded Qart-ḥadašt when the old island could no longer hold her. A circular harbor. A western capital.
Carthage after the burning
Antonine Baths · Roman rebuild on Qart-ḥadašt · Tunisia
Archaeological site of Carthage
Wikimedia Commons · Carthage, Antonine Baths
Gad Yaton: Rome burned the western capital. The road is still there. The name lived the salt.
The new city
Qart-ḥadašt: new city. Tyre’s daughter, not Tyre’s servant. A circular harbor. A council. A western capital that could look back at the mother coast and west to Gadir. Elissa of Tyre — the Romans made a romance of her and called her Dido. The founding is a Tyrian house moving house.
Hannibal, son of Hamilcar Barca, took the war into Italy: Trebia, Trasimene, Cannae. Rome barely survived him.
Rome’s verdict
In 146 they burned the city. Cato had already named the sentence. The photograph is the Antonine Baths — a Roman rebuild on Qart-ḥadašt. Honest: these vaults are later. The ground is not. Utica, older, watched. The letters did not burn.
They wrote Punic as the name of a war. The name lived the salt.
Gad Yaton: Rome burned the city and meant that nothing Phoenician would rise from that ground. They kept the alphabet. They wrote Punic as the name of a war. The name survived the salt.