1100 BCE–146 BCE

Phoenician and Carthaginian

The Phoenicians of Tyre sailed to the far end of the Mediterranean and founded Gadir. Livy and Velleius Paterculus reckoned that foundation at about 1100 BCE, eighty years after the Trojan War, but no excavation bears it out: what has been dug so far begins in the 8th century BCE, which is also when Sexi and Abdera and the other colonies of the southern coast take hold.

Carthage was founded by Phoenician emigrants from Tyre late in the 9th century BCE. When Tyre fell to the Chaldeans, the city broke free and took charge of the colonies of the west. After the battle of Alalia, about 537 BCE, it was already the dominant power of the western Mediterranean, master of its routes and of the Pityusae, where the Phoenicians had founded a colony on Ibiza in 653 BCE.

Having lost the First Punic War, Carthage looked in the peninsula for what Sicily had cost it. Hamilcar Barca carried the conquest there and held it for eight years, until he died in battle in 228 BCE; his son-in-law Hasdrubal founded Qart Hadasht over the town of Mastia in 227 and signed the treaty with Rome that set the Ebro as the limit between the two powers. Carthaginian rule never passed the southern half of the peninsula. The siege of Saguntum opened the Second Punic War, Gadir surrendered in 206, and Scipio Aemilianus destroyed Carthage in 146.

Of those eight centuries little still stands: walls and houses under today's towns, cemeteries on the hillsides, workshops beside the beaches and museum cases. The exception is on Cape Bon, at Kerkouane, razed during the First Punic War and never rebuilt: the one Punic town whose houses have no other on top of them.

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by Phantazein

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