ABSTRACT
Almost nothing is known of the early development of Carthage, except what can be deduced from the archaeological evidence. Though her inhabitants’ ancestors in Phoenicia invented the alphabet, by an irony of fate only the most fragmentary written records of the Carthaginians of any period have survived. When Carthage was destroyed, her libraries were given to the kingdoms of Numidia; their contents vanished as the Punic language gradually fell into disuse by the literate, Latin-speaking upper classes in the later centuries of Roman rule and the scrolls could no longer be understood. Even for the centuries when her power and prosperity were greatest, therefore, the history of Carthage that has come down to us was written by her Greek or Roman enemies. Any historian of the ancient world is working with painfully incomplete information, with fragmentary data that have escaped destruction more or less by accident; some names, some incidents, and those not always the most important, are far better documented than others. In the case of Carthage, the accidents of time have been compounded with bias.
