Following the siege of Carthage in 146 BC, Rome razed the city, killed tens of thousands, sold 50,000 survivors into slavery, and destroyed its libraries — resulting in the near-total loss of Carthaginian literature, history, and written culture. ✦ AI generated
Paul Cooper · Fall of Civilizations · 2023-06-18 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 305:09
Some of the libraries and archives of Carthage survived the burning of the city. In these were kept the books of Carthaginian history, perhaps poetry and mythology, science and medicine, documents of the Phoenician voyages of discovery to the edges of the world, but all of these were taken by the Romans. Some were simply burned, while others were distributed among the Roman's African allies. As a result, not a single one of these works has survived. Today, scarcely a few documents written by a Carthaginian can be read, and no works of literature or history have come down to us.
verbatim transcript · starts at 305:09
(03:30:10) of an age that had passed into nothing. After the carnage of the siege, the blackened ruins of the city were emptied of all life. But for the Romans, this still wasn't enough. In the years that followed, they sent further delegations to the city to systematically take it apart piece by piece to ensure that no population crept back to repopulate its ruins, that never again would their great rival resurface
(03:30:50) in North Africa. Some of the libraries and archives of Carthage survived the burning of the city. In these were kept the books of Carthaginian history, perhaps poetry and mythology, science and medicine, documents of the Phoenician voyages of discovery to the edges of the world, but all of these were taken by the Romans. Some were simply burned, while others were distributed among the Romanís African allies. As a result, not a single one of these
(03:31:26) works has survived. Today, scarcely a few documents written by a Carthaginian can be read, and no works of literature or history have come down to us. So, for the next two thousand years, their story would be told by others. Their voices and their memory, just like their city, were completely erased. The territory of Carthage was absorbed into the new Roman province of Africa, and for the next hundred years, what
(03:32:05) remained of the ruins of Carthage were left to crumble into the sands, home to wild dogs, overgrown with scrub and weeds and marram grass, washed with salt from the sea air, the roost of gulls and crows. More than a century later, Rome would send a party of 3,000 colonists to the ruins of the shattered city, and they founded a Roman colony on the rubble. As they settled the area, the ruins of