Phoenicians made one of the most powerful maritime nations of the Mediterranean. No doubt, their most powerful colony was Carthage, in northern Africa, in today's Tunis, founded in 814 BC by Elissa, the sister of the king Pygmalion of Tyre, after her husband Acerbas was assassinated. Frightened for her life, Elissa and her suite fled and landed on the Cape Bon, a place on the North African shores, oriented towards Sicily, delimiting the two Mediterranean basins.
Deciding to stay there, Elissa had to buy a piece of land from the local Berbers, area that had to be no larger than an ox skin. The legend says she used a trick: she took the ox skin and cut
it into such thin fringes that she could surround with them a surface of four square kilometers. The Berbers called the new city "Qart hadasht" ("New city"), hence the later name Carthage. The hill that Carthage was founded on, dominating the Gulf of Tunis, is today called Byrsa, which means "ox skin".
Carthage reached its peak in 332 BC, when many Phoenicians, following the attacks of Alexander the Great, left their homeland, making Carthage their new capital. The city soon turned into a maritime power, making trade differently than Phoenicians. Ships carried soldiers, and the appealing territories were conquered by force or achieved willingly. The colony largely exceeded its metropolis.
Carthage funded many expeditions on the sea, and Punic ships (Pun was the other name of the city) reached the British islands in the V century BC. They described the Albion Island as being rich in tin and lead. The Carthaginians made trade from the British Islands and the African shores to Spain and Egypt; they dominated the seas, humiliating the maritime power of the emerging Rome.
The journey of Hanno the Navigator, around 425 BC, was better documented. His expedition was made of 60 ships and he navigated along the western coast of Africa until the Gulf of Guinea, describing hippopotamuses, crocodiles and gorillas, which they thought to be primitive people. They reached even the Azores Islands (Madeira and Canary were already known to the Phoenicians).
The humiliation of Rome reached its peak during the expedition of the Carthaginian general Hannibal (218-208 BC) into Italy, when Rome was nearly conquered. Carthage was a constant menace for the Roman power until its complete destruction, in 146 BC, by Scipio Aemilianus. The Romans wiped out the Phoenician Carthage and plowed the area.
On its place, they built a Roman Carthage, with palaces, theaters, amphitheaters, thermal baths (started by emperor Hadrianus in 118 AD and finished by emperor Antoninus Pius), temples, water reservoirs and aqueducts, of which some still stand. This city resisted for centuries, until the invasion of the Vandals (a Germanic tribe) in North Africa in 439 AD. Later, the place was occupied by Byzantines and Arabs. The Christian vestiges are the ones that resisted best: the church of Saint Cyprian, Damous Karita (a charity house) and the chapel of the thermal baths. The early Christian writers Tertullian and Saint Augustine were born in Carthage.
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