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Before undertaking anything, it was well to make 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 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 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 the 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 Salombo, 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 their French romantic periodicals. This is very different. This is set in Carthage. I remember reading this when I was in university and being stunned that it was so different from Madame Bovary, because what Salambo does is it plunges you into this incredibly violent, lourid, Orientalist fantasy of ancient Carthage, doesn't it?

It does. 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. The Carthaginians have been defeated, and they've had to pay reparations to the Romans. As a result, they can't pay their mercenaries, which they've been employing to conduct the war. The mercenaries have turned on Carthage and put it under siege, and it looks like the city may be about to be captured. The great Carthaginian general, the commander who had remained undefeated in the war against the Romans, Hamel Khabaka, has been summoned to join the rest of the Carthaginian elite to pay the ultimate sacrifice, which is to give their first born to the great God Moloch. It is the God Moloch whose hands have been moving up and down with the great golden chain.

It's very Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doum, isn't it? I mean, it's the sacrifice scene in the Temple of Doum.

Yes, it is. That, of course, I guess, would be playing on exactly this scene. Hamelkai does not want to sacrifice his son, called Hannibal. So he has got a slave boy instead and swap them. Of course, this means that Hamelkahr's son, Hannibal, survives. Yes. 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.

Tom, that war that you describe with the mercenaries, that's 238 BC. So we'll be getting 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. I guess the reputation 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 Carthageans 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. Yes. That That thing. The French were very keen to brand the British as Carthageanian, 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 formidable opponent that the Romans ever fought. That's a crucial part of why the memory of Carthage endures. 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 her civilization, did they really sacrifice their children, or is that just Roman propaganda? To try and bring back to life this extraordinary civilization, which has been, I think, blackened so repeatedly over the course of history.

Tom, just for people who don't know, Carthage is effectively on the site of present-day Tunis, the capital of Tunisia in North Africa. 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 This isn't the first episode that we've done on Carthage. 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 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 Tair. This woman is called Dido, but she's also known as Elissa. She has come from what is now Lebanon. In ancient times, it was called Canaan. She is a Tyrian princess. The story goes, and this is a story that doesn't feature in Virgil's account, but was repeatedly told by Greek and Roman historians, that she had been married to her uncle, a guy called Acerbas. And Dido's brother, a man called Pygmalian, was the king of Tire, was very, very jealous of Acerbas because Acerbas was so rich.

And so he has Acerbas murdered. And he then wants to seize Acerbas's wealth. But before he can do that, Dido makes an offering of it to the gods by putting it all, all the gold into sacs and throwing it into the sea. But in fact, Dominic, the sacs 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 Pygmalian, Pumayaton, Elissa, Dido, Elishat, and Akerbas, Zacabal. 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 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. Perhaps there's elements there. One thing that is absolutely certain is that Carthage really was founded by colonists from Taya. From Lebanon? Yes. The city in Lebanon. We know this from a very famous detail that is recorded by Herodotus. Taya ends up being conquered by the Persian Kings. The son of Cyrus the Great, the first and most formidable of all the Persian kings, a guy called Cambyses, he conquers Egypt, and then he wants to press on westwards and conquer Carthage.

To do that, he needs the assistance of a Tyrian fleet, because Tire is a great city of sailors. And the Tyreans refuse to participate on the basis that the Carthaginians are their children and that the Carthaginians still come to Tire to make offerings. And in fact, Dominic, you'll remember that Alexander the Great goes on to besiege Tire and to capture it. He does. And the story goes as when he captures Tire, there is a contingent of Carthaginian ambassadors there who've come to make offerings to Tire.

Nice. A special relationship, Tom, between Carthage and Tire.

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. On these inscriptions, you will read references to sons of Tye, to the Carthaginians as sons of Tye. 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.

I think that to know about Carthage, we first of all need to know about Tye. Sure. That is going to be the subject of today's episode. Taya is simultaneously, fabulously ancient and a parvenu. The earliest reference to it is the 19th century BC. That's almost 4,000 years ago. But relative to other cities on the Coast of what's now Lebanon, it's actually quite a parvenu. We have Biblos, which is the city that gives its name to the Greek word for book and ultimately to the Bible, and Siden, which is its near neighbor, arrival. These are much older than Tire. But Tire, 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. 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.

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 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 Babylon. The role that Tire and the other cities along Lebanon play is essentially that of sailors, people who go out and source raw material, which they then turn into high-end products, which they then sell on or pay as tribute to the Egyptians or to the Assyrians or whoever. To do this, they need to develop maritime skills. 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. Without that, they would be as denuted 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. As early as the third millennium, the people of Biblos are developing ships with curved hulls, whereas the Egyptians, for instance, had only had flat hulls.

Basically, never really mastered the art of venturing out into the Mediterranean. But the people of Lebanon are really doing this. 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 crossed the sea Egypt almost falls. All kinds of major powers do fall. One of them is a city called Ugarat, which is a neighbor of Tair. That gets destroyed. Tair survives. There's a breathing space then for the cities of Lebanon, particularly for Tair, because both Egypt and the Mesopotamian empires are pretty prostrate. And so the Tyreans can go out there. They have all this naval expertise, and they don't need to pay tribute. And so really, this is the golden age, really, of Tair. So they're going out, they're getting raw materials, they're coming back, they are taking 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? Yes. I guess your classic 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. Yeah, or Singapore. It's that thing, that role. I mean, that's very anachronistic, I guess, but it gives you some flavor. Now, you may be wondering how we know about this. Archeological evidence is very, very sparse because Tire 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, that's a thousand years on, so not entirely reliable. But we do have sources for the ancient history of Tire. That's exciting. And one of them is nothing less than the book we've already mentioned, which is the Bible.

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 Tire, a man called Hiram, plays a very key role. 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 Tire have. They 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. 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. Solomon sells Hiram some cities that has excellent agriculture, so both of them benefit. The Bible goes into some detail about what this means in practical terms.

Solomon builds a red sea fleet, and I'll quote from the Book of Kings, 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. Of course, Ryder Hagerd situates it in Africa. We know that it's a real place because a fragment of pottery was found in eighth century BC, sometime like that, which makes a reference to it. 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 gives a sense of The excitement of it, the sense that there are new worlds of possibility and wealth out there, and that the Tyreans want a bit of it. I mean, more than a bit of it, they want a lot of it. Of course, Tire has direct access to the Mediterranean, and the Bible tells us that Solomon and Hiram are also sending fleets across the Mediterranean.

They travel to a mysterious place called Tarsish, a great fleet. 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 Tarsish 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 Thierryns called Gardes, which will go on to become the Spanish city of Cadiz. But more likely, it's a place called Tarsish, which approximates to Andalusia today, so Southern Spain. Okay.

Tom, if the Tyreans are having all this contact with the people of the Bible, are there religious contacts and things, cultural contacts, and things like that as well, like gods and rituals and all of that stuff that feeds into what becomes Judaism?

Yes, there are congruities because the Israelis and the people of Canaan, as the people of Tire would have probably described themselves. They're very close. 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 Tyrean. There's definitely admiration for Tire. It's not just in the Book of Kings, but Isaiah and Ezequiel, they are stupified by the wealth of Tire, the sense that essentially treasure itself is in some way, Tyrean. So, Furgus 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 that's massive witness to just how significant Tire is as a model of trade and wealth. But you're right that there are also huge causes for anxiety. The name Moloch, which Flaubert draws on for his novel, this comes the Bible. We're told in the Bible that Solomon builds a temple to Moloch who is described as the detestable God. 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 Tofet.

And this Tofet is described as a place where men sacrifice, and I will quote the Bible, their sons and daughters to the fire of Moloch.

God, he like in Flaher's book, Salambo, like the Carthaginians.

Exactly like in Flaher'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 echo of the scene in Salambo. And although this isn't explicitly associated with Tire, there is also a sense after the glory days of Hiram and Solomon building the temple together, that Tair's reputation is darkening. And this darkening of the reputation is focused on a particular woman who is the daughter of a king of Tire in the ninth century called Ithabal. And this woman is Jezebel.

I wondered if we get to Jezebel. Now, she's a great character, Tom. She is. 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 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 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 Israeli prophets, Elijah and Elisha. Of course, biblical writers hate this. They hate the idea that an Israeli king might have been seduced by the worship of Baal. So after Ahab's death, Elisha comes to an Israeli 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 condems 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. They do throw her down. 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. 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. 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 mist 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 Tire and hostility to her. You also get the same in the writings of the other ancient people who bear witness to the glory of Tair, which is the Greeks. It's a bit like with Persha. Basically, the narratives we get about Persha come from the Greeks and biblical accounts. It's the same with the people of Tair. Tair plays a very important role in Greek mythology because the princess Europa, who gives her name to the continent of Europe, comes from Taya. She's a beautiful princess. She has a father, usually called Agunor, but in some accounts, called Phoenix. 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 Zews. But Agunor, 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 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 famous Greek city, namely Thebes. The acropolis of Thebes is called the Cadmeya. At the end of his life, Cadmus and his queen are turned into serpents.

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 This 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. He says that actually it wasn't Ziusu had abducted Europa. It was Greek merchants, and they were doing it because Thierry and merchants had abducted a Greek princess. There's this reciprocal princess rustling going on. This culminates in the sack of Troy and then in due course with the Persian invasion of Greece. So That's bad, Thierry 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. This is the invention of writing. 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 Thierre, 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. Herodotus also gives us quite a lot of other information about Tye. 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. This is a bit like the Egyptians, the Tyrians and The Tyreans 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. Herodotus also confirms that Carthage was founded by Tye. It's from Herodotus that we get this story that the people of Tire wouldn't sail against Carthage, even when commanded, too, by the Persian king. And there's a sense in which, although the Tyreans are 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 Tyreans who provide a key naval contingent, because they are still master mariners.

So there's a sense there, again, of a rivalry between the Greeks and the people of Tire and the other people. Because I should add at this point that Tire is not the only city to be providing a squadron to the Persian king and fighting at the battles of Artemisian and Salamis. Herodotus also names the kings of two other city states. One of them is Cydon, which we've already mentioned, the great port north of Tire. Another is a port called Arados. These are all different cities, but according to Herodotus, they are a single people. Rather like, say, Athens and Sparta and Thebes are all Greeks. Herodotus assumes that Tire and Cydon and Bibelos, that they are all a single people, and he names this people as Phenitians.

I wondered if we get to the Phenitians. They're named after Phoenix, who is the brother of Cadmus. Have I got that right?

Or it might be the other way round. I mean, there are 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've forgotten that he didn't exist.

The likelihood is that he's invented to explain who the Phenitians are. Herodotus is not the first Greek author to mention the existence of Phenitians, so Homer does. In the Iliad, the funeral games that are held for Patroclus, the beloved of Achilles in the Iliad, the first prize in the footrace is a beautiful silver mixing bowl that has been made in Siden and brought by Phenitian merchants. In the Odyssey, when Adysius has returned to Ithaca and he's met by Athena, and he lies to Athena just because that's what Adysius does. He always lies, even to Athena. He claims that he's a fugitive from Crete and that he's paid passage to Phenitians who have brought him to Ithaca. And Athena laughs because she knows that Adysius is always lying and she loves it. So the Phenitians are... They're 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 phero had employed Phenitians 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 Phenitians had gone beyond the line of the equator, it's clear that actually this story is true. Herodotus acknowledges that it's the Phenitians who are the best sailors in Xerxes' fleet. Now, Greek attitudes to the Phenitians harden in the wake of the Persian Wars, because obviously, the Phenitians 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. And so Thucidides, the great historian of the Pelopindian War, he describes the Phoenicians as barbarians. He says, actually, it was the Phenitians who'd originally settled Sicily, but then they'd been forced out by Greek colonizers, and he thinks that this is absolutely tremendous. I think there's a sense there that the Phenitians are, unlike the Persians, are sinister doppelgangers of the Greeks, that they're simultaneously alien and similar, and that's what makes them unsett. I think you get the same thing actually in the Bible, that the biblical writers are alarmed by, let's call them the Phenitians, because they are so recognizable, they are so similar. 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. There's no question that the Phanesians are the rivals of the Greeks in this early period, going from home up to, I suppose, the time of the Persian Wars. Then Carthage inherits that mantle, and Carthage fights against the Greeks in Sicily, and then, of course, against Rome. The Roman The Romans inherit the suspicion of the Phenitians, and particularly the Carthaginians. They have this phrase, punica feides, punic faith. Punic derives from the Latin word for Phenitian. It's the Greeks and the Romans who major in this story about child sacrifice. There are over 30 Greek and Roman writers who refer to it. Thirty? Yeah. So Flobeg, 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. I think we should take a break at this point. 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. In the second half, why don't we try to pull it all together and say, who were the Phanesians 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. Welcome back to the Rest is History. We are talking about Carthage, the great rival of ancient Rome. We started with Gustave Flaubert, We're talking about child sacrifice and the lourded blood-soaked reputation of Carthage. And Tom, in the first half, you traced Carthage's origins back to Lebanon, to the city of Tair, and to these people called the Phenitians. Now, the Phenitians 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 Phenitians existed, and that's a fairly unproblematic conceptualization. However, recently, skepticism about the existence of a people called the Phenitians has become very academically fashionable. So the debate is typified by two books that have come out within, what, the past six or seven years. The first is a book called In Search of the Phenitians by a brilliant ancient historian called Josephine Quinn at Oxford. Yes, I know that book. She goes in Search of the Phenitians, and spoiler alert, she doesn't find it. She basically says that it's completely wrong to think of there having been a people called the Finitions, that this is something that the Greeks have projected onto them, that the people of Taya thought of themselves as Tyreans, that the people of Sidon thought of themselves as Sedonians. They did not have a collective identity. Essentially, the evidence that she induces for that is that the great empires of the age in the near east, they never treat what we might call Phenitia as a single region, as a single province. She says, We have no good evidence for the ancient people that we call Fénitians identifying themselves as a single people or acting as a stable collective.

She argues, fascinatingly, that the identification of the finitions 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 Muslim Arab identities community. Yeah. I mean, it's only the Greeks and the Romans who refer to them as finitions. So the question then is, well, okay, the people of Taur and Sidon didn't refer to themselves as Phenitians, but did they have a sense of themselves as belonging to a collective in the way that the Athenians and Spartans, even as they were fighting with each other would have recognized themselves as Greek. There are absolutely academics who still stick up for that tradition. An equally brilliant book by a scholar called Carolina Lopes-Riez, which came out in 2021, so only three years ago, Phenetians and the making of the Mediterranean. She is clearly nailing her colors to the mast with that title. She absolutely does think that the Phenetians existed. She says flat out, a Greek or Roman could recognize a Phenitian 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 specializations, the maritime stuff, the trade, all that thing. 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 inchoate sense among the Tyreans and the Sedonians, that they did have a shared cultural identity.

But they wouldn't have called themselves the Phanesians.

No. Carolina Lopes-Rías argues that they did call themselves Canaanites, which has been the traditional view. This is how the biblical writers frame them. They do frame the people of Tye as worshippers of Canaanite gods. In the first Book of Chronicles, a guy called Canaan is the father of Siden. Canaan gives his name to the land, and he's the father of Siden, who then goes on to found the city. I think that it's not just the Greeks who are seeing the people of Tair and Sidon as distinctive. I think the Israelis are doing that as Jezebel. Because Sidon and Tair are both seen as providing good things, cedar and craftsmen and things like that, and of dangerous things. In one of the biblical accounts of the life of Jezebel, she's described as being a princess of Sidon, not of Tire. 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, Phenitian literature. Even Josephine Quinn, although she denies the existence of Phenitians, she's always using Phenitians in inverted commas. Right. I think even that is betraying the fact that there is a common culture there. Whether you want to call them Phenitians or Phenitians in inverted commas, I think there probably is. I think that the sense that you get in both the Bible and in Greek accounts, that the finitions are formidable sailors and that they are spectacularly wealthy. I think that these probably would have been recognized by the finitions themselves as giving them a common identity. But it is sharpened in the Greek case because the Greeks, in a sense, they are direct rivals. It's what we were saying before the break, that the Greeks recognize themselves in the Phenitians. And that's why the rivalry between them, I think, is so intense, because the Greeks know that they are following in the Phoenician way. It's the Phenitians 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 Phenitians have got there before them, that the Phenitians have occupied all the best spots, because it's the Phenitians who basically establish the Mediterranean as a 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.

When are we talking about here, Tom? I mean, 500 BC, further back, a thousand BC?

Further back. Say, 900, 800, 700. Okay.

Well before the golden age of Greece.

Yes, absolutely. The finitions 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. They are building faster ships. They are coating the huls with bitumen. They're the first to do that to ensure that the water doesn't seep through. Their ships are so streamlined that basically they can travel up to 30 miles a day. That's incredibly quick. Also, they can travel at night, Because they are the people who have developed the use of the Polestar. So they can use that. And the Greeks themselves call the Polestar the Thuinike. So they are branding the Pole Star as Phenitian. And it's this that has enabled the Phenitians 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 Gardes.

And there are some stories, aren't there, Tom? There are exaggerated myths and stuff that they went as far as Cornwall or indeed, North America, which I imagine people think now is obviously total tosch.

Right. Okay. So the Phenicians are always looking for raw materials. They're looking for gold, for silver, for copper, for iron, and of course, for tin. To get this, they are going beyond the Pillars of Hercules. They are definitely planting colonies in the Atlantic, Iberia, and Atlantic, North Africa.

What's that, 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 archeological evidence for it. There's no explicit written evidence for it. But there is, I mean, this classic ancient history, there is a poem that is written in late antiquity that is drawing on a fifth century poem.

What, a thousand years later? Yes. Okay, well, sorry, Tom, I need a bit more 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 Casseterides, which might be Cornwall, but equally, it could be Northern Iberia or whatever. It could be.

It could be Porto.

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 Sagasso Sea.

Yeah.

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 finition 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, 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. We know that he sees creatures that almost certainly were chimpanzees. So there's definitely a sense, I think, that the Phenitians are really, really formidable sailors.

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 ninth century BC, around when the traditional date is. I mean, it seems entirely plausible. It's one of a number of colonies that are being planted by the Tyreans at this time. 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. You have a sense there that Carthage is perhaps not even the oldest colony being planted by the Tyreans. But as I say, by around 700 BC, you have Phenitian cities, Fénitian trading posts everywhere, from the Atlantic to the Levant. As I said, nothing like it has been seen in the Mediterranean before. The Phenitians, or Phenitians in inverted commas, 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 single sea. Evidence for the success of the Phenicians in cornering Mediterranean trade, I think, is found in their very name.

This word Phoenix, which the Greeks say comes from this Lebanese king called Phoenix. Actually, it It means perhaps palm tree. In the late fifth century, Carthage starts minting coins with a palm tree on it as a way of advertising herself to the Greek world that she has a Phoenician identity. But it's a likelihood that it comes from the Greek word for ready purple. The color of purple, let's call it purple, comes from probably the most famous of all the Phenitian luxury products, which is a dye, which is made from mucus secreted by a distinctive predatory mollusc called the murex. These mollusks are found in the Eastern Mediterranean, and they're also found on the Atlantic Coast of Morocco. The mucus is secreted, I gather, specifically from the hypobranchial glands. You can either do it by tickling the mollusks and secreting the mucus that way, or you can just crush their skulls and pull the the flesh out. When you've pulled the flesh out, you leave it to dry in the sun, and then you add saltwater, depending on how rich you want the color of the dye to be. Of course, it absolutely stinks. So this is why the dye factories are always on the edge of towns.

So inside them, they found one pile of shells. It's over 130 meters high. So a lot of mollusks are being killed in the course 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 it's 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 Phenitians after this luxury product, in a way, it's a grudging acknowledgement of just how completely they've cornered high-end trade. That's one story that's told about the finitions by the Greeks. The other is this legend about Cadmus introducing the alphabet to Greece, which you asked about. The consensus of scholars is that Herodotus is right.

Hooray. Brilliant. Well done, Herodotus.

Yet again, Herodotus gets it right. The Phoenicians absolutely are the first to develop an alphabet in the sense of a standardized set of letters representing a range of sounds. 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 Fnitian alphabet is so significant is that it's in contrast to what had gone before, which is scripts that use symbols to represent either syllabus or specific words. Obviously, it's much harder for that reason to learn. The Fnitian alphabet has 22 letters. I mean, that is much easier to learn. It's derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The prototype has been discovered. Some inscriptions were found in the early 20th century in Sinei. But it's the Fnitian 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.

So the symbols stand for letters rather than for things as it were.

Yes, exactly. And as Herodotus says, it underpins the Greek alphabet. The Greek alphabet would be an impossible without the Phenitian example. The Greek alphabet in turn influences the Latin alphabet that we use. Yes, of course. Cyrillic, all kinds of alphabets in the West. But it also influences alphabets in the East. The Phenitian 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. The Fnitian script is unbelievably influential. Although initially it's used for trade, famously, it also comes to be used for literature. We don't have any Fnitian literature, but of course, we do have the first great epics written in Greek, those of Homer, which would be unthinkable without the Fénitians.

We have nothing, literally nothing, written by the Phenitians.

Is that right? We have inscriptions. We have that stuff.

Tom, you love an inscription. I'm a little bit less tolerant of inscriptions than you are.

Well, yeah. And as we said, the word Biblos gives us the Greek word for book.

So we know that they had papyruses or whatever.

Yeah, they absolutely did. And it seems likely that it's via the Phenitians that near Eastern myth, so Gilgamesh and that thing enters Greece. Greek mythology clearly owes a lot to, say, Mesopotamian mythology, and it seems to be the Phenitians with their writing that serve as the vectors. So that's one chalked up for the Phenicians. Two, actually, we've got the die and we've got the alphabet. 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 like a 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. The reason for that is that more and more sanctuaries have been found which seem to point to exactly that. Actually, these have been known about for about 100 years now. 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 Tofets after the place in the Bible. And the first one was found at a place called Motchia, which was an island of Sicily, very, very significant Fénitian city. And then in 1921, so this was two years after the one of Motchia, an enormous one was actually found in Carthage itself. So you see, not everything in Carthage was destroyed. It was huge. It was about 30,000 square meters, about 20,000 funerary urns. These were being put there over the course of many, many years. If there seems to be a biblical link in tophet, the use of tophet, we don't know what the Carthageanians 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 finitian word for this offering is a molk.

Oh, like Moloch. How exciting.

Like Moloch. It's likely that Moloch was not a God at all, but a sacrifice, an offering of a child. That is something I think that Flowbed does get wrong, that the God that children are being offered to is not Moloch, but another God. In Carthage, it's a God called Baal Hamon and his It's this queen called Tanit. Baal means Lord, and Hamon seems to come from the Venetian word hummum.

Sorry, Tom, what was that again?

Hum? Hum? Hum? Okay. No vowels. This means, display my expertise in Venetian. Yeah, go for it. I've been consulting the Bodhian. This means hot or a blaze, a fire.

So he's called Hot Bal. That's his name.

Well, no, not Hot Bal. Lord of the Furnace.

Oh, right. I like Hot Bal better. I I think you'll get more clicks with the Hot Bal. Then you call yourself Lord of the Furnace.

Lord of the Furnace is pretty chilling.

And Tanit. Tanit is in Salonbo. Yeah. Yes, she is. Isn't she a priestess of Tanit? The Goddess of the Moon, something like that.

Yes. Tanit and Balhaman are equally the two great gods of Carthage. And Josephine Quinn, in her book, In Search of the Fnitians, has a brilliantly fascinating chapter on the Tofets, in which she points out that although there are lots of Fénitian settlements across the West that do practice this child sacrifice, there are also lots that don't. It's not something that is a marker of, inverted commas, as she would put it, Fénitian identity. It's definitely died out in finetia itself at the latest of the seventh century. She argues, The relative scarcity of this cult means that the users of the Tofets must have formed a self-conscious group. This was a rare and highly distinctive ritual choice. Her thesis is that Carthage was actually not an official colony of Taya, But may have been founded by settlers who were fleeing mainstream disapproval of their enthusiasm for child sacrifice. Oh, my God, Tom.

It really is the United States to Tire's Great Britain.

Right. She makes this explicit. She says, Like the exodus of the Puritans to the new world, the formation of the circle of the Tofet 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. Yeah.

Wow. It's amazing It's a theory, isn't it? Yeah, I love it. It's 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 religious exiles.

So Tom, actually, we've come full circle in the episode because we started with that incredibly lourded and violent scene from Flowbeys Book, Salombo, which has absolutely scandalized people in the 1860s, understanding incredibly. 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 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, in inverted comma, Phenitians 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 Phenitian eyes, but through the eyes of the Carthaginians themselves.

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. So next time we'll be talking about Carthage. Now, if you'd like to be part of our own Sinister cult. Death cult. It's the Rest is History Club. You know the drill by now. Therestishistory. Com to sign up. And you will get the next episode about Carthage and the Carthage Union mindset. And then you will get the next episode about the outbreak of Carthage's great superpower rivalry with Rome. We'll get them straight away and a host of other benefits. If, of course, you're already a member of our Sinister Death cult, well, you'll probably have enjoyed hearing the advert anyway. So on that bombshell. Thank you very much, Tom. That was fascinating. And we'll see you all next time. Goodbye.

Bye-bye.