The Carthaginian site was deliberately uninhabited for the century after its destruction in 146 BC. The subsequent twenty-one centuries of the site — Roman provincial capital, early Christian city, Vandal royal capital, Byzantine provincial seat, Arab small town, modern Tunisian suburb of Tunis — constitute the afterlife of the Punic colony.
Africa Proconsularis
The Roman province of Africa, established in 146 BC, comprised the territorial core of the former Carthaginian state. The provincial capital was Utica — the pro-Roman Phoenician city north of the destroyed Carthage — and the provincial administration was conducted from there for the subsequent century. The site of Carthage itself remained formally accursed and uninhabited.
The agricultural economy of the province flourished under Roman administration. The Carthaginian agricultural techniques — preserved in the twenty-eight-volume agricultural treatise of Mago of Carthage, which had been deliberately translated into Latin by Roman senatorial decree at the conclusion of the war — provided the principal textbook of Roman agricultural practice. The province became, within a century of the conquest, one of the principal sources of the grain supply of the city of Rome itself.
The Caesarian and Augustan refoundation
The formal refoundation of Carthage as a Roman colony was conducted in two stages. Gaius Julius Caesar planned the refoundation in 46–44 BC as part of his broader programme of colonisation of the provinces with Roman veterans and proletarian Roman colonists; the actual refoundation was conducted by Augustus in 29 BC as Colonia Iulia Concordia Carthago. The new city was laid out on a standard Roman grid plan, overlying the Punic remains, with the principal civic buildings (forum, capitolium, basilicas, amphitheatre, baths, theatre) constructed across the subsequent century.
By the second century AD Roman Carthage had become the second city of the western Roman Empire (after Rome itself), with a population of approximately 300,000 to 500,000 and a role as the principal provincial capital of Roman Africa. The physical remains of the Antonine Baths — built under Antoninus Pius in the 140s AD, the second-largest baths in the Roman world — constitute the principal surviving Roman monument at the site.
Augustine's Carthage
The Christian city of Carthage from the second to the fifth centuries AD was the principal centre of Latin Christian intellectual culture. The principal figures associated with the city include Tertullian (c. 155 – c. 240, the first Latin Christian theologian); Cyprian (c. 200 – 258, the bishop and martyr); Perpetua and Felicity (the martyrs of 203, whose Passion is one of the earliest surviving Christian martyrologies); and Augustine of Hippo (354–430), who was educated at Carthage in the 370s, returned as a teacher in the 380s, and conducted periodic visits to the city throughout the period of his bishopric at Hippo (in the neighbouring province) from 395 to 430. Augustine's Confessions — composed in the late 390s — preserves the principal Western literary description of Roman-Christian Carthage in the fourth century.
The Vandal kingdom
The Vandal kingdom of Carthage, established by Geiseric in 439 after a migration from Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar, ruled Carthage and the principal Carthaginian-province territories for ninety-five years. The Vandal kingdom was a Germanic-Arian Christian state with a Latin-Roman-Catholic majority population, governed through a relatively-light Vandal aristocratic overlay on the existing Roman administrative institutions. The principal historical event of the Vandal kingdom was Geiseric's sack of Rome in 455 — a fourteen-day systematic looting of the city of Rome that produced the English adjective "vandalism".
The Vandal kingdom was destroyed by the Byzantine reconquest of Africa under Belisarius in 533–34, which restored Carthage to Roman (Byzantine) administration as the seat of the Exarchate of Carthage. The Byzantine Carthage endured for a century and a half until the Arab conquest of 697–698, in which the Arab forces under Hassan ibn al-Nu'man captured and systematically destroyed the Byzantine city. The subsequent Arab capital of Africa was established at the new city of Tunis on the inland lake immediately west of the Carthaginian peninsula; Carthage itself was abandoned as a major urban settlement.
The modern site
The modern village of Carthage, on the site of the Punic and Roman city, is a residential suburb of Tunis, approximately 10 miles north-east of the Tunisian capital. The archaeological site — designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979 — comprises the principal surviving monuments of the Roman city (the Antonine Baths, the amphitheatre, the theatre, the Byrsa hill), the Tophet (with thousands of Punic urn-burials preserved in situ), fragments of the Punic harbour works, and the National Museum of Carthage at the Byrsa summit, which houses the principal archaeological finds. The archaeological excavations conducted from the 1920s under French direction, expanded from the 1970s under a UNESCO-coordinated international campaign, and continuing under Tunisian institutional direction, constitute the principal documentary source for the Punic and Roman history of the site.
The Punic afterlife
The Punic linguistic-cultural inheritance endured for centuries after the 146 BC destruction. Punic continued as a spoken language in the agricultural hinterland of Carthage and the broader North African coast through the Roman period; Augustine reports that in his time (the late fourth century AD) the Punic language was still spoken in the rural Numidian territories. The Berber linguistic inheritance, which overlay the Punic substratum, preserves limited evidence of the Punic substratum but is the linguistic survival of the population the Punic colonists mixed with.
The Carthaginian commercial and administrative achievements shaped the subsequent Mediterranean institutional history. The alphabetic writing system that the Phoenicians and Carthaginians used became, through the Greek and Roman intermediation, the principal writing system of all subsequent Western civilisation. The commercial-mercantile institutional tradition that the Phoenician cities and their Carthaginian descendants developed — maritime trade through chartered merchant houses, colonial trading posts, commercial law and commercial credit — was absorbed into the Hellenistic-Roman mercantile system and transmitted onward into the medieval Italian commercial revival and the early modern European commercial expansion. The Carthaginian agricultural manual of Mago provided the principal textbook of Roman agricultural practice for five centuries.
The Punic-Phoenician inheritance is, in the modern Mediterranean, diffuse rather than institutionally identifiable: the alphabet that this paragraph is written in; the commercial-merchant tradition that the Mediterranean has maintained; the agricultural practice that the North African and Mediterranean cultivators have preserved; the physical archaeology of the Punic sites at Carthage itself, at Motya, at Tharros, at Gadir, at Lixus. The city itself endures, at the site of the original 814 BC settlement, as a residential suburb of the Tunisian capital. The visitor who walks on the Byrsa hill walks on the physical site of the Carthaginian state that this volume has described.
End of Chapter X