The Iron Age Revival of the State, XXV, With Bonus Gathering the Bones Content: Shining New City on a Hill

 

Queen Dido of Carthage has come up in this blog in two very different contexts. First, "an urn said to contain the ashes of Dido" appears in the main room of Temple Hall in the hamlet of Templeton on the shores of Glimmerglass, in James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers: Or, the Source of the Susquehanna. It is part of a set of enigmatic images in a place where we would expect to see ancestral portraits, and is such a ludicrously obvious CLUE that we really ought to be taking it as a hint that this is a puzzle we're being invited to unravel. In this case, not to drag it out at any length, Dido committed suicide on her own funeral pyre in the Temple of Venus at the summit of the Byrsa citadel of Carthage. This is more than enough references to "Temples" (there are more!) to read the clue as saying that one of the author's grandfathers is not who the genealogists say he was (Richard Fenimore), but rather Benjamin Franklin's illegitimate son, William Temple Franklin. Whether this is true is another matter. 

Dido (click this link for the ear worm song) has also come up in her own right as the mythical Queen of Tyre who fled the oppression of her brother, Pygmalion, and founded the city of Carthage on the Tunisian shore of North Africa in either shortly after the fall of Troy, or, more plausibly, 814BC. This discussion is going to develop the claim that she staged her voyage of colonisation from Cyprus, from which her alternative name, "Elissa" is derived from the name of the Great Goddess of Cyprus, per Marie-Pierre Noel's theory, giving me an excuse to embed a performance that isn't "White Flag" or Purcell's "Dido's Lament:"

This post is brought to you, indirectly, by the Academia.edu algorithm's helpful habit of recommending that I read articles that I'm obviously interested in because I have already read them. There are not, as it happens, any useful articles on the founding of Carthage at the site, as near as I can tell, but a search turned up the fact that  when I tried to find some I found instead that Saro Wallace published a new monograph in 2029, Travelling Through Time: Imagining Movement in the Ancient Aegean World (Amazon link).

This is absolutely my jam. I'm not going to precisely review it  here because anything I say would just shed an uncomfortable light on my totally-not-creepy Saro Wallace bedroom shrine. What I am going to do is work a discussion of it into the Academia algorithm-inspired brief survey of recent work on the foundation of Carthage, with maybe some brief asides about Fenimore Cooper's explanation of the foundation of America as a creole aristocracy that forgot itself.

Wallace's point is that the current vogue of talking about "Mediterranean-ness" and "connectivity" hasn't quite achieved a full post-colonial moment. The colonial moment sees populations moving to new, colonised places, and replicating themselves socially and culturally without local intermediation due to their innate superiority. (Sometimes the superiority lies in the vigour of their barbarism, but superiority nonetheless.) It is, in itself a myth of the Eighteenth and especially Nineteenth Centuries, but gets projected back to the Greek colonisation period of Archaic and Early Classical Antiquity. Modern approaches to Mediterranean history are supposed to get past that and incorporate post-modern approaches to the creation of self and ecological approaches to the insertion of "packages" into "niches." (The plantation of the Mediterranean!) A common Mediterranean identity threatens to short-circuit the discussion of identity; connectivity deproblematises "insertion." 

Wallace then moves on to discuss seemingly every prehistoric and barely-historical account of group movements in the ancient Mediterranean in chronological order, which means that I spent the whole day yesterday reading to get to Carthage, about which she said relatively little, which, fair enough, it says "Aegean" right there in the title. 

The traditional problem of the foundation of Carthage is one of explaining how Tyre came to be planting organised colonies far away in the central Mediterranean in 814, if that is the date we settle on, and not a later one, and why, in particular, there. Colonialist narratives make the problem of why it became a "Punic" town is invisible, since eastern Mediterranean city-state dwellers are intrinsically superior to Berber locals, who, per Wikipedia, had already missed out on the entire Bronze Age, which even Atlantic Europe managed to figure out. Wallace points out the extent to which Antique language choice was politically mediated; on the other hand, in the very brief library shelf search I undertook in preparation for this post I found a special issue of Karthago entirely devoted to the Greek dialect of Cyrene, which concludes that in spite of ample Berber borrowings, it is entirely reasonable to see it as originating in the specific dialect of the legendary metropole of Thera, even though we don't know anything about the dialect of Thera. I'm sure that I am being entirely unfair to Catherine Dobias-Lalou, but it seems like a wishy-washy place to end the discussion. 

On the other hand, I also learned that there is a scholarly community around Karthago which is trying to make the "Detroit Circle" a thing. That is, if you were wondering,  a coherent geographical region centred on the Strait of Gibraltar, and not a street address in the city of Detroit. In conclusion, dear very sincere Francophone scholars with a serious research project: Please stop before someone goes all "fetch" on you. To be fair, the whole "quest for metals" thing has had scholars scratching their head over Carthage from the first, since it seems as though "Phoenician" traders reached the Rio Tinto long before the establishment of Carthage. Carthage is clearly linked to Spain, but also to Numidia, so the "Detroit Cercle" sounds like the paradigm we should be going with. It's just too bad that the name is dumb, is what I'm saying. 

The not-so traditional problem of Carthage is that we've reached the point where only archaeology is going to take us any further, and it is pretty hard to do archaeology at Carthage. Some early graves have been dug up recently, say, in the last forty years, and John Boardman thinks that they're definitive evidence that Euboeans participated with Phoenicians in establishing the first settlement there. On the other hand, Boardman sees Euboeans and Carthaginians K-I-S-S-I-N-G pretty much everywhere, and I'm not sure that we are going to follow him from Lefkandi to Al Mina to now Carthage.  You don't have to be a brilliant young archaeologist to appreciate that it is long past time to disentangle the Phoenicians from the northern Aegean and, indeed, the Phoenicians from "the Phoenicians," never mind build on an old picture of Phoenician colonists coming to Old Eretria and recruiting Greek helpmeets for further Mediterranean adventures. 

So, fine, the Byrsa at Carthage is an interesting an enigmatic place. We would have known that from the tophet (spicy!), but that pertains more to the period around 600 when, we may acknowledge, so many of the new cities of the Central and Western Mediterranean made choices about who they would be, and the Romans chose to be Latins, the Syracusans, Greeks' and the Carthaginians, "Phoenicians." What I want to know more about is the initiation of the trajectory to statehood, which might give us more insight onto the particular ethnogenesis chosen at Carthage, even if the answer is as simple as, "all the incomers spoke Punic." 

If you can't dig at Carthage, you can dig around Carthage, where changing land use patterns might have left something more authentically Early Iron Age in the ground. My (again, very brief) shelf search turned up an extensive campaign at the abandoned city site of Leptiminus, headed by D. L. Stone, D. J. Mattingly, and N. Ben Lazreg, and a more idiosyncratic investigation of the site of Utica, by Jean-Yves Monchambert. Leptiminus was a Roman-era industrial city on the Sahel coast south of Carthage/Tunis, abandoned in historic times because of a shallow and dangerous harbour; Utica, is traditionally, the first Punic city in North Africa, later eclipsed by Carthage and, supposedly, left high and dry inland by progressive silting that filled its old rivermouth harbour. The silting story turns out to be wrong, which means that Utica was sited on a seaside eminence overlooking a large but shallow bay, several kilometers from the river mouth which has been associated with it. It is a very un-Phoenician location, in particular in that has not been an island since the Middle Bronze Age, and the port is still not identified. A heterodox location for an early North African city is nothing new, given Cyrene,but, apart from the early temple, Monchambert is puzzled about what Utica was for, and is certainly not convinced of its role as a "bridgehead" in the "drive for metals." 

Leptiminus is what it says on the tin, except that a neat origin story as a marine murex plantation settlement is undermined by a  lack of murex shells; there are also suspiciously few signs of olive oil exports given that jarring olive oil for export was supposed to be the complementary industrial activity to its well-known ceramics production. While these facts pertain to the Roman-era city, they at least suggest that we don't know as much as we think we do about this particular site. 

Wallace, within her Aegean remit, is more interested in historically Greek-associated sites on the Italian side of the sea, and spends some time on the landscape around Metaponto and Pithecusae. Both sites have been extensively excavated, so they are important to consider, whatever hobby horse one is riding, in whatever direction.

The October Horse, again

Metaponto has been the subject of an extensive field survey campaign with the aim of elucidating the archaic Achaean colony's chora. She is more interested in some nucleated sites turned up by the survey than anything which can be clearly linked to the city itself. One is assigned as a rural cult location on the strength of extensive Aegean-style pottery, the other is clearly a small city state which  never identified as Greek, and whose identity is therefore lost in the obscurity of the Italian Late Iron Age. Each site in its own way complicates the identification of Metaponto as straightforwardly an early Greek colony. It is a pity that she doesn't address the evidence of land use in the chora, since as I recall the reports on the survey which admittedly I read a long time ago), the point that stuck out for me was evidence of an extensive stud lasting until Imperial times, when the Romans gained access to trans-Alpine horses. Apulia is not a good place to raise horses, but it beats the rest of Italy!

Pithecusae has been identified as an emporium and conceptualised as a conceptual precursor to colonisation proper, inhabited mainly by Greek men come seeking their fortune, who intermarried with local women. Again, I have some familiarity with the archaeological reports and was struck by the evidence for extensive metalworking at the site, and specifically early ironworking. Wallace blindsided me by focusing on the gendered history of the site, problematising ideas of hybridisation and assimilation via intermarriage by observing that sexual relations aren't always like that. I was particularly struck by the observation that it isn't always easy for an outside male to join an existing community by intermarriage when citizenship is bound up with one's share of the communal land. No room for him to farm, no room for him to marry in! This seems unarguable, but opens up a huge exception for the "Sacred Spring," when iron tools and the rise of the new forest industries created just exactly the "land without people for people without land" to which Wallace objects in other stories of Mediterranean movement. If Pithecusae is, indeed, the island staging area for the later settlement of Cumae, the residents of the "emporium" had a future as some of the richest landowners in Italy. Historians and archaeologists not having bothered to contextualise this, I turn to the geologists, who tell me that the "Campanian plain" is actually the alluvial plain of the Volturno River, and is characterised by "both natural and human-induced subsidence." 

In other words, it was probably a coastal swamp in need of reclamation before it could be farmed; although as always the lacustrine resources would have supported an indigenous population even in the absence of dykes and ditches. This may have direct relevance to the Tunisian Sahel, which might have needed reclamation before it could be farmed intensively as well. Intensive farming is not, however, a big concern for our sources as far as the early period is concerned. The Carthaginian Empire is understood as commercial rather than agrarian, and to the extent that it turned towards agricultural wealth later, its rural hinterland is found to the north of the city rather than along the coast to the south.  The one thing that the Carthaginian hinterland historically produces that  is in demand in the Middle East is cavalry troopers, so I am going to end this post with the suggestion that it is going to turn out to be all about horses, horse training, and Numidian "bold dragoons."

(Anyone who knows the American Revolution well enough to guess who the cavalryman might be that Cooper insists on making a mystery when the Christmas revellers reach said the Bold Dragoon tavern, please let me know!)