General works
The whole sweep
- Miles, Richard. Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization. London: Allen Lane, 2010. The best single-volume modern history, and the obvious starting point.
- Hoyos, Dexter. The Carthaginians. London: Routledge, 2010.
- Hoyos, Dexter, ed. A Companion to the Punic Wars. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Thirty specialist chapters; the standard reference for the wars.
- Lancel, Serge. Carthage: A History. Trans. Antonia Nevill. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. By the excavator of Byrsa; strongest on the archaeology of the city itself.
- Warmington, B. H. Carthage. Rev. ed. London: Robert Hale, 1969.
- Quinn, Josephine Crawley. In Search of the Phoenicians. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Argues that the Phoenicians never thought of themselves as a people at all. Contentious and excellent.
Chapters I–III
Foundation, the Phoenician west, the empire
- Aubet, María Eugenia. The Phoenicians and the West. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. The standard account of the western expansion.
- Markoe, Glenn. Phoenicians. London: British Museum Press, 2000.
- Docter, Roald, and Hans Georg Niemeyer, eds. Carthage Studies. Ghent: Ghent University, 2007–.
- Krings, Véronique, ed. La civilisation phénicienne et punique: Manuel de recherche. Leiden: Brill, 1995. In French; still the fullest single reference work on the field.
- Fantar, M'hamed Hassine. Kerkouane: cité punique du Cap Bon. 3 vols. Tunis: INAA, 1984–1986. The excavation report for the one Punic town that survives as Punic.
Chapters IV–VII
The wars with Rome
- Goldsworthy, Adrian. The Fall of Carthage: The Punic Wars 265–146 BC. London: Cassell, 2000. The clearest military narrative of all three wars.
- Lazenby, J. F. Hannibal's War. Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1978.
- Lazenby, J. F. The First Punic War. London: UCL Press, 1996.
- Hoyos, Dexter. Hannibal's Dynasty: Power and Politics in the Western Mediterranean, 247–183 BC. London: Routledge, 2003.
- Daly, Gregory. Cannae: The Experience of Battle in the Second Punic War. London: Routledge, 2002. On what the day was actually like at the level of the individual soldier.
- Fronda, Michael P. Between Rome and Carthage: Southern Italy during the Second Punic War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. On why the Italian allies mostly did not defect, which is the war's real hinge.
- Le Bohec, Yann. Histoire militaire des guerres puniques. Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1996.
Chapters VIII–X
Destruction, religion and the afterlife
- Ridley, R. T. “To Be Taken with a Pinch of Salt: The Destruction of Carthage.” Classical Philology 81, no. 2 (1986): 140–46. The paper that traced the salt story to the nineteenth century.
- Purcell, Nicholas. “On the Sacking of Carthage and Corinth.” In Ethics and Rhetoric, ed. Doreen Innes et al. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
- Xella, Paolo, et al. “Phoenician Bones of Contention.” Antiquity 87, no. 338 (2013): 1199–1207. One side of the tophet argument; see Schwartz below for the other.
- Schwartz, Jeffrey H., et al. “Skeletal Remains from Punic Carthage Do Not Support Systematic Sacrifice of Infants.” PLoS ONE 5, no. 2 (2010).
- Stager, Lawrence E., and Samuel R. Wolff. “Child Sacrifice at Carthage: Religion or Population Control?” Biblical Archaeology Review 10, no. 1 (1984).
- Rives, J. B. Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
Ancient sources
The enemy's account, which is all there is
- Polybius. The Histories. Trans. Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. The essential source. Polybius knew Scipio Aemilianus and was probably at the destruction.
- Livy. The War with Hannibal (Books XXI–XXX). Trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. Later, more literary and less reliable than Polybius, but the fullest narrative of the second war.
- Appian. The Punic Wars, in Roman History. Trans. Horace White. Loeb Classical Library, 1912. The only continuous account of the third war and the siege.
- Diodorus Siculus. Library of History, Books XIII–XX. Loeb Classical Library. The Sicilian wars, and the sacrifice passages.
- Cornelius Nepos. Hannibal, in Lives of Eminent Commanders.
- Hanno. The Periplus of Hanno. Trans. Wilfred H. Schoff. Philadelphia, 1913. A Carthaginian text, surviving only in Greek translation: the voyage down the Atlantic coast of Africa.