The Carthaginian civilization or Punic civilization is an ancient civilization located in the Mediterranean basin and at the origin of one of the greatest commercial, cultural and military powers of this region in antiquity.
Founded by Phoenicians on the shores of present-day Tunisia and more precisely in the Gulf of Tunis in 814 BC. AD, according to the most commonly accepted tradition, Carthage gradually gained the upper hand over the Phoenician cities of the western Mediterranean, before spreading in turn and developing its own civilization. However, this is less known than that of ancient Rome, due to the destruction of the city by the Roman army at the end of the Third Punic War in 146 BC. J.-C., an end related by Greco-Roman sources which were widely and durably relayed in historiography. Although decried through the famous Punica fides, a prejudice stemming from a long tradition of mistrust towards the Phoenicians from Homer, this civilization nevertheless aroused more favorable opinions:
“By their power, they equaled the Greeks; by their wealth, the Persians. »
— Appian, Libya,
This civilization resulted from the mixture of the autochthonous culture, constituted by the Berbers in Africa, and the culture brought with them by the Phoenician colonists.
It is therefore not easy to distinguish what is Punic from what is Phoenician in the product of archaeological excavations, whose dynamism since the 1970s has opened up vast fields of study where the unity of this civilization appears. despite local peculiarities. Despite this progress, many unknowns about non-material civilization persist, linked to the nature of the sources: always secondary, through the loss of all the Punic literature, incomplete and often subjective.
