Show notes
Buried beneath the city streets of the Tunisian capital of Tunis, an ancient city lies forgotten.In this episode, we look at one of the most dramatic stories to come down to us from the ancient world: the rise and fall of the empire of Carthage. Find out how this city rose out of the Phoenician states of the Eastern Mediterranean, and set out on voyages of discovery and settlement that put them at the centre of the ancient world.
Highlighted moments
It could take more than 50 kilograms of these snails to make a single gram of dye, and so these fabrics were extremely expensive.
“These ships were a kind of ancient flat-pack furniture.”
“All the sacred places, the temples and every other unoccupied space were turned into workshops, where men and women worked together day and night without pause, taking their food by turns on a fixed schedule. Each day they made a hundred shields, three hundred swords, a thousand missiles for catapults, five hundred darts and javelins, and as many catapults as they could. For strings to bend them, the women cut off their hair for want of other fibers.”
“Some of the libraries and archives of Carthage survived the burning of the city. In these were kept the books of Carthaginian history, perhaps poetry and mythology, science and medicine, documents of the Phoenician voyages of discovery to the edges of the world. But all of these were taken by the Romans. Some were simply burned, while others were distributed among the Romans-African allies. As a result, not a single one of these works has survived.”
Transcript
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