The Phoenicians were not colonisers in the customary sense of the word: they were merchants backed by the greatest seagoing tradition in the ancient world. Carthage, at any rate to begin with, was no different from most of their other trading posts. They had already established these in Sicily and Sardinia, along the North African coast, and as far westward as Gades (Cadiz) where the Atlantic beats against Spain. Following the pattern of their great city of Tyre and other later foundations, they had chosen a place easily defendable against attacks from the hinterland, and one which provided a suitable anchorage for their trading vessels in the summer months, as well as a separate harbour for the lean war-galleys that protected their shipping. The Phoenicians were sailors, not soldiers. But instead of remaining no more than a trading post, Carthage rapidly developed into the greatest mercantile city in the Mediterranean. This in itself lends support to the story that it was founded by the exiled Queen Elissa and a group of nobles; for no ordinary Phoenicians would have been interested in expanding in such a manner—or have had the resources to do so.

The small bay, El Kram, protected by its headland, was almost certainly the site of the original trading post, and the long sand beaches in the area were ideal for drawing up their ships so that they would be safe from strong winds from the north. A little inland from the bay the colonists proceeded to construct an artificial harbour (Cothon) for their warships, where they could be safely moored all year round. This was circular, about a thousand feet in diameter, with an island in the middle for the naval headquarters. A similar but square-shaped merchant harbour lay to seaward of this, connected to the warship harbour, although the latter preserved its secrecy by being surrounded by a double wall. No one, not even from the mercantile harbour, could see what new construction or repair work was being carried out there. These two harbours, with their surrounding outbuildings, sheds and quays, were the heart of the city—its very raison d’être. Nearby was the sacred enclosure of Tanit, the Canaanite goddess of fertility, who had assumed a greater significance in Carthage than in her native Levant. Perhaps this was because she had absorbed a local nature goddess, perhaps also because the land by which Carthage itself was surrounded was so exuberantly fertile that even the Phoenicians, whose main concern had always been trade and manufacture, and the necessary dominance of the ‘fish-infested’ sea, now looked inland towards the rich earth of what is today called Tunisia. Eastwards the extent of their dominion ran along the coastal areas of Libya and Tripolitania. To the west, again extending along the limit of cultivatable earth, they gradually embraced Algeria and Morocco—lands which, like all the others, they farmed not themselves but with the enforced labour of the native population.

Out of this richness, coupled with their command of the western sea-routes, their artisans’ skill, and their inherited ability as the greatest entrepreneurs of the ancient world, the Carthaginians had gradually dissociated themselves from their ancestry. They had become a people in their own right and turned their port and trading depot into the greatest city of the day. Carthage ran back from the small headland and the artificial harbours towards the hill of Byrsa which formed the inner citadel. It was here that the temples of the other gods were sited, palaces of the nobles, and the tall many-storeyed buildings housing merchants and workmen and the skilled craftsmen of a nation which relied for its raw materials and sources of riches largely upon the mines and the materials of the lands that lay far away to the west. Principal among these was Spain—the peninsula which, as they had steadily retreated over many centuries before the advance of the Greeks, the Carthaginians had carefully preserved as their own and secret treasure-trove.

Carthage was cooled often in summer by the north wind, but it was also harassed by the easterly Levanter, and sometimes it sweltered under the simoon off that great desert to the south. The town itself, on its peninsula and its hill, was almost an island. In this respect it resembled in microcosm nearly all the North African coastal belt, where a combination of sea on the one hand and mountains and desert on the other produces a curious feeling of remoteness from the giant continent of Africa.

This was the home that Hannibal knew as a boy. It would have been impossible for him, even during that great war against Rome which was being waged across the sea to the north, to have been unaware that Carthage was a spider’s web of trade and communications that spread eastward to Egypt and the Levant, and westward as far as scarcely imaginable places beyond Spain. Where the Mediterranean issued between the giant Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar and Ceuta) into the misty Ocean that lapped the whole world round, the Carthaginians had planted trading posts. Their interests extended as far north as Britain and the Baltic, as well as to the Canary Islands, the Cameroons, and possibly even the Azores. In the Mediterranean, apart from western Sicily, the Maltese islands and the Lipari islands were Carthaginian ports of call, and Sardinia, Corsica and the Balearics were in their sphere of influence. The boy would have been early familiar with the multitudinous things that filled the warehouses of Carthage—gold from Africa, silver and tin from Spain, the skins of deer, lions and leopards, elephant tusks and hides, Greek pottery, faience from Egypt, perfumes from the East, Ionic columns for temples or the homes of the rich, marble from the Aegean islands, and dressed stone from the quarries of the Sacred Mountain (Cape Bon). Carthage was the great mart of the ancient world and the words of Ezekiel, in his prophetic lament for the fall of Tyre some centuries earlier, were even more apt for the colonial city that had far eclipsed its founder:

 

Thy borders are in the midst of the seas, thy builders have perfected thy beauty…. Fine linen with broidered work from Egypt was that which thou spreadest forth to be thy sail; blue and purple from the isles of Elisha was that which covered thee. The inhabitants of Zidon and Arvad were thy mariners: thy wise men, O Tyrus, that were in thee, were thy pilots. The ancients of Gebal and the wise men thereof were in thee thy calkers: all the ships of the sea with their mariners were in thee to occupy thy merchandise….