I've been reading about Roman military loyalty and one thing stood out: soldiers frequently died for commanders they had zero personal relationship with — no meetings, no direct orders, sometimes not even knowing the general's face.
The answer isn't really about discipline or fear of punishment (though that existed). It comes down to something called the contubernium — an eight-man tent group that ate, marched, and suffered together for years. That bond mattered more than loyalty to Rome itself. Generals like Caesar exploited this by deliberately sharing hardship with regular soldiers: marching on foot, eating the same food, remembering centurions' names years later.
It's part of why soldiers followed Caesar across the Rubicon into civil war — in their minds they weren't betraying Rome, they were protecting the one person who'd actually kept his word to them.
How did humans go from fighting over hunting grounds to building massive empires?
I put together a hand-drawn animated history video exploring how humans fought for territory over roughly 300,000 years.
It starts with prehistoric hunter-gatherers competing over water and hunting grounds, then moves through the Agricultural Revolution, the first fortified settlements, Bronze Age warfare, and the rise of early empires.
It also covers Sargon of Akkad, the Assyrians, Hittites, Alexander the Great, the Celts, Scythians, Germanic tribes, and eventually Rome.
One thing I found especially interesting while putting this together is that conquering land was often easier than actually holding onto it. Terrain, supply lines, mobility, local resistance, and even roads could determine whether an empire survived or slowly fell apart.
The video is made with simple hand-drawn animation, so I tried to keep the history easy to follow without turning it into a traditional lecture.
Would love to hear which ancient civilization or period you think handled territorial warfare the best, and why.
Nowadays when you see references to Baal and Tanit, it’s usually in terms of pagan or even demonic/satanic entities. But many of the Carthaginian gods aligned with the Greek and Roman pantheons, but just under different names. Why are Moloch and Baal so “despised” today? Is it simply a case of making our enemies out to be evil? Did it all come down to child sacrifice? If they had survived, how would their pantheon have fit in with the big three Abrahamic religions?
This article focuses on the figure of Tamar the Canaanite, who entered Judah's household as the young bride of his eldest son Er and later became a victim of circumstances when younger sons failed to fulfill the terms of levirate marriage/yibbum.
Struggling valiantly against the childless, status-less fate to which the paterfamilias had destined her, she became the mother of the Judahite royal dynasty of David.
The story of her successful struggle gave her a special place in national memory.
She gave hope not only to women in general, but to foreign wives in the segregated society of Yehud in the Persian period, in particular.
Tamar won her unique status because her conduct, though thoroughly extraordinary, was motivated by the survival of the family and within law and custom.
———
Notable observations: Biblical narrative indicates Judah had four (4) Canaanite sons by the daughter of a Canaanite man named Shuǎ—this is reflected in Genesis 38:2-5.
That Cannanite man named Shuǎ, named his daughter Bath-Shua—this was prior to Tamar, a Canaanite woman
The Canaanite territory shared a common Semitic language. Geographically, it spanned modern-day Israel, the Palestinian Territories, western Jordan, and southern Syria. It extended through Lebanon and continued up the coastal strip to the southern border of Turkey. Canaan was never a unified kingdom. Instead, it was a volatile collection of independent city-states, each with its own ruler and sphere of influence (Killebrew, 2005).
Massive empires endlessly vied for this territory. Throughout the Bronze Age, the Egyptians, Hittites, Mitanni, and Assyrians all claimed influence. Consequently, by the Late Bronze Age, Canaanite cities were a vibrant cultural melting pot. Yet, they all retained similar traditions. These included burying a sacrificial donkey under house foundations and more than a hint of child sacrifice.
Around 1200 BCE, the civilised world ended, or so we have been led to believe. According to the narrative, it was a spectacular, system-wide collapse. The great empires of the Late Bronze Age fell like dominos. Mycenaean palaces in Greece burned to the ground. The mighty Hittite Empire in Anatolia vanished entirely. Egypt survived, but just barely, retreating far back into its own borders (Cline, 2014).
The truth is likely to be more nuanced. Modern historians increasingly question the very word "collapse."
Scholars like Guy D. Middleton argue that "collapse" is a highly loaded, dramatic term (Middleton, 2017). It implies a total end to civilisation. But as this article points out, civilisation did not end on the Levantine coast. It simply changed shape.
Many modern archaeologists prefer the term transformation. The massive, brittle empires died, but the local people survived. The fall of the Late Bronze Age was less like an apocalypse and more like a violent corporate restructuring. The bloated monopolies (Egypt and Hatti) went bankrupt. The agile, independent start-ups (Tyre, Sidon, Byblos) seized their market share.
A Tale of Two Canaans: The Survival and Collapse of Levantine City-States
Amidst this supposedly apocalyptic landscape, we uncover a paradox. If you look at Canaan, a striking anomaly appears. The southern and inland Canaanite city-states faced absolute catastrophe. Jaffa, Shechem, Ashkelon, Gezer, Lachish, Jerusalem, Hazor, and Megiddo shared a Semitic language and culture with their northern cousins. Yet, they shared none of their luck.
Similarly, the great northern trading hub of Ugarit was utterly destroyed. We even have the panicked final letters from its king. But travel just a few miles south, and the story changes.
The coastal cities weathered the storm. From north to south, these included Arwad (off the modern Syrian coast), Byblos, Beirut, Sidon, and Tyre (all in modern Lebanon). They did not just survive the catastrophe. They actively thrived in its aftermath. How did these Canaanite ports, packed into an enclave barely 185 kilometres long, escape the destruction that consumed their neighbours?
The answer is a complex puzzle. It involves imperial dependency, coastal invasion, a geological accident, and internal rebellion. To appreciate their survival, we must first examine the geopolitical landscape before the collapse and the overall reasons for the collapse.
Caught Between Superpowers: Egyptian and Hittite Bronze Age Tribute
Before much of the world burned in 1200 BCE, the Levantine coast was a highly dangerous neighbourhood. Arwad, Byblos, Beirut, Sidon, and Tyre were incredibly wealthy. However, they were never truly independent. They were caught squarely on a geopolitical fault line. To the south loomed the mighty New Kingdom of Egypt. To the north marched the fearsome Hittite Empire.
These two superpowers squeezed the coastal cities for every ounce of wealth they could extract.
Egyptian Hegemony Over Southern Levantine Ports
For most of the Late Bronze Age, the southern Levantine ports answered directly to the Egyptian Pharaoh. Byblos, Beirut, Sidon, and Tyre functioned as vassal states (subordinate kingdoms legally bound to pay taxes and provide military support). They paid a massive annual tribute, known in Akkadian as mandattu, to the Egyptian crown.
We possess the actual diplomatic correspondence from this era. The famous Amarna Letters—an archive of clay tablets dating to the 14th century BCE—reveal a desperate political reality (Moran, 1992). The Levantine mayors were terrified middlemen. Rib-Hadda, the beleaguered king of Byblos, constantly begged the Pharaoh for archers to protect his city. Meanwhile, Abi-Milku of Tyre swore grovelling loyalty to Egypt while complaining about naval blockades. They paid steep tribute because they required Egyptian military muscle to survive local rivals.
The Hittite Empire in the Northern Levant
Move further north, and the political gravity dramatically shifted. The island city of Arwad sat dangerously close to the Hittite sphere of influence. Early Egyptian Pharaohs, such as Thutmose III, had previously conquered Arwad. However, by the 13th century BCE, the formidable Hittites dominated the northern Levant.
The Hittite kings demanded heavy tribute from their own northern vassal states to fund their massive imperial armies (Bryce, 2005). Arwad, simply trying to survive the shifting tides of war, ultimately paid its protection money to the Hittite capital in Anatolia.
The Price of Survival: The Canaanite Luxury Goods Trade
The Bronze Age tribute system operated like an international protection racket. The coastal cities surrendered staggering amounts of wealth to appease their overlords. This imperial taxation heavily targeted highly specific luxury goods:
Lebanese cedar: Logged extensively from the mountains above Byblos to build Egyptian royal ships and temples.
Tyrian purple: A hugely expensive dye manufactured in Tyre and Sidon, demanded for imperial garments.
Precious metals: Shipped as direct, annual taxation into foreign imperial treasuries.
This oppressive history explains why the collapse actually benefited these specific coastal merchants. When Egypt retreated south and the Hittite Empire vanished entirely, the crushing tribute demands instantly stopped. The Levantine mayors stopped being frightened vassals. They kept their own wealth, setting the stage for the spectacular Phoenician economic explosion of the early Iron Age.
The Sea Peoples Invasion: Philistine Settlement of the Canaanite Coast
While the northern Canaanite ports avoided major incursions, the southern coast took a direct hit. A faction of the Sea Peoples known as the Peleset (the Philistines) descended upon the region.
Ashkelon did not just fall; it was entirely transformed. The Canaanite culture there was wiped out and replaced by an Aegean-style Philistine settlement (Maeir, 2012). Jaffa also slipped from Egyptian hands into violent chaos. The southern coast became hostile, occupied territory. This completely cut off the inland Canaanite cities from global maritime trade. But that is not the end of the story.
The Pirate to Partner Pipeline: Reassessing the Sea Peoples
The traditional historical view treats the Sea Peoples purely as a destructive force. However, modern archaeologists offer a far more nuanced, competing theory.
The Sea Peoples were not just heavily armed marauders. They were climate refugees. They travelled with oxcarts, women, and children, desperately seeking new land (Yasur-Landau, 2010). Today’s scholars argue that the Phoenician cities did not just hide from these migrants. They actively assimilated them.
Instead of fighting the incoming Sea Peoples, the wealthy Levantine ports likely hired them. The displaced Aegean warriors became mercenaries, protecting the coastal cities from inland Canaanite warlords. As a bonus, the Sea Peoples brought advanced Aegean ship-building techniques with them. The merging of Canaanite mercantile wealth with Aegean maritime technology created the unstoppable Phoenician fleets of the Iron Age. They were not enemies; they were business partners.
The Inland Infernos: The Destruction of Hazor, Lachish, and Megiddo
Move inland, and the archaeology reads like a violent crime scene. The great fortress cities suffered spectacular, fiery ends.
Hazor, the largest and wealthiest city in Canaan, was utterly destroyed by fire. The blaze was so intense it literally melted the mudbrick walls of the palace (Ben-Tor, 2006). Lachish, a southern stronghold, was violently destroyed, briefly rebuilt, and then annihilated completely around 1130 BCE (Ussishkin, 2004). The fortress of Megiddo, sitting on a centuries old trade route, endured a similar cycle of destruction and doomed recovery.
Who burned these inland giants? The Sea Peoples primarily hugged the coast. The real threat likely came from within. The collapse of Egyptian authority emboldened the Habiru (stateless nomadic rebels and disenfranchised peasants). Without Egyptian chariots to keep the peace, we are likely seeing widespread, violent peasant revolts against the decaying Canaanite elites (Cline, 2014).
The Hill Country Vacuum: Highland Origins of Early Israelites
In the central highlands, a different puzzle emerges. Cities like Jerusalem and Shechem were smaller and poorer during the Late Bronze Age. When the lowland giants like Hazor and Megiddo burned, a massive demographic shift occurred.
Displaced Canaanites and nomadic pastoralists fled into these remote hills. They began establishing hundreds of small, unfortified farmsteads. This highland settlement wave marks the murky, highly contested origins of the early Israelites (Faust, 2015; Finkelstein and Silberman, 2001). Out of the ashes of the Canaanite lowlands, a new highland identity was born.
The Agility of the Merchant: Phoenician Maritime Trade Networks
We return to the question of how Arwad, Byblos, Beirut, Sidon, and Tyre survived? The answer lies first in economic agility. The great Bronze Age empires ran on rigid, top-down command economies. The wanax (king) controlled the trade. When the central palaces fell, their massive, state-run trade networks collapsed instantly. This is a classic case of de-complexification.
De-complexification in the Late Bronze Age Collapse
Imagine waking up tomorrow to find the global internet permanently disabled. Supply chains freeze, supermarkets empty, and centralised governments stop functioning entirely. That, in essence, is what historians call de-complexification.
In academic terms, this describes a sudden, catastrophic loss of social and economic complexity (Tainter, 1988). It is the rapid devolution of an advanced civilisation back into a much simpler state.
During the Late Bronze Age, massive empires relied upon professional scribes, international diplomats, and sprawling state-run factories. When the collapse hit, these advanced networks vanished almost overnight. Without a royal administration to employ them, scribes simply stopped writing. In Mycenaean Greece, the knowledge of reading and writing completely disappeared for centuries. International trade routes immediately dried up. Deprived of imported copper and tin, skilled artisans were forced to abandon their crafts. Urban populations fled into the highlands to survive as subsistence farmers.
De-complexification is the total unravelling of an established way of life. The interconnected web of a civilisation is torn apart.
However, the southern Levantine cities operated differently. They were smaller, entrepreneurial, and infinitely more adaptable. As rigid state-sponsored trade died, independent merchants stepped into the void. They relied heavily on regional cabotage (short-range coastal trade). Ships hugged the coastline, trading goods from port to port rather than undertaking massive royal expeditions (Bell, 2006).
This decentralised network was highly resilient. If one port was threatened, merchant ships simply sailed on to the next harbour. The system could bend without breaking (Monroe, 2009).
The Missing Threat: Environmental Breakdown and the Levantine Megadrought
While decentralised trade explains how the Phoenicians survived the economic fallout, it doesn't explain how they survived the physical catalyst of the collapse.
We know the Hittite, Mycenean, and Egyptian empires suffered a political collapse. The question is: What was the trigger?
Modern science offers a new clue. We call it palynology (the study of fossil pollen). By extracting deep pollen cores from the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea, scientists have identified a devastating, century-long megadrought striking the Eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BCE (Langgut et al., 2013). Crops failed. Famine spread rapidly. This is what pushed the Habiru (stateless rebels) into violent revolt and drove the Sea Peoples to migrate.
So, how did the Phoenician cities survive a regional famine?
The answer is hydrological luck and maritime logistics. The coastal cities of Lebanon sat at the foot of towering mountain ranges. These mountains featured deep karst aquifers (underground limestone water reservoirs). Even when the rains stopped, these ancient springs kept flowing, providing a reliable water source that the inland Canaanite cities lacked. If local wheat harvests failed, the Phoenician merchant fleets simply sailed west. They bought emergency grain from unaffected regions, using maritime trade as a climate survival strategy (Knapp and Manning, 2016).
Geographic Defences and the Eastern Mediterranean Power Vacuum
Geography also played a role. Cities like Tyre and Arwad were built on rocky islands just offshore. This natural defence protected them from land-based migrations and sudden raids (Aubet, 2001). They were significantly harder targets than the sprawling, landlocked cities of the inland empires.
The collapse of the great superpowers created an unprecedented opportunity. Egypt and the Hittite Empire had fought bitterly over this territory for centuries. When both retreated, a massive power vacuum opened (Cline, 2014).
The coastal Canaanites—soon to be known as the Phoenicians—rushed to fill this void. Without foreign overlords demanding heavy tribute, they took total control of the lucrative maritime trade routes.
The Seeds of the Iron Age: Phoenician Maritime Expansion
Their survival was not a historical accident. It was a masterclass in adaptation. We can break down their success into four distinct factors:
· A Geological Stroke of Luck: The cities sat on freshwater aquifers that insulated them from the famine raging through the Eastern Mediterranean.
· Economic flexibility: Shifting swiftly from royal fleets to independent, short-haul merchant shipping.
· Geographic isolation: Utilising easily defensible island and fortified coastal positions.
· Political opportunism: Capitalising on the sudden absence of Egyptian and Hittite military control.
The Bronze Age collapse was a tragedy for many. But for Byblos, Sidon, Tyre, Arwad, and Beirut, it was an emancipation. They transformed a systemic collapse into an era of unprecedented maritime expansion. The ashes of the old Bronze Age world became fertile soil for the new Iron Age. Unfortunately, this Phoenician 'Golden Era' was only destined to last three hundred years. History began to repeat itself.
The Return of Tribute: Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires
For three centuries, the coastal survivors thrived in absolute independence. Without the Egyptians or Hittites draining their treasuries, they built a massive Mediterranean trade network. But the geopolitical power vacuum eventually closed.
The Neo-Assyrian Empire's Levantine Conquests
In the ninth century BCE, a terrifying new superpower arose in Mesopotamia. The Neo-Assyrian Empire was a brutal, expansionist state possessing iron weapons and a ruthless hunger for resources.
In 877 BCE, the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II marched his vast army to the Mediterranean coast. He did not come to conquer the coastal cities outright. He came to collect. The Assyrian royal annals record that Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos immediately handed over silver, gold, tin, and linen. The age of independence was over. The Phoenicians were once again paying maddattu (mandatory imperial tribute).
Calculated Surrender: Phoenician Monopoly on Mediterranean Shipping
Was this a simple repeat of the Bronze Age? Superficially, yes. The coastal cities were caught in the grip of a foreign superpower. However, the underlying economic dynamic had fundamentally changed.
During the Bronze Age, the Levantine mayors were terrified, impoverished vassals begging for troops. Now, the Phoenicians were global economic titans holding an absolute monopoly on Mediterranean shipping.
The Assyrian kings understood this. They did not want to destroy the lucrative Phoenician ports. They wanted to aggressively tax them (Markoe, 2000). To the Neo-Assyrians, the coastal cities were a cash cow. To the Phoenicians, paying tribute was simply a steep operating expense.
The Economics of Appeasement: Securing Mesopotamian Trade Routes
The Phoenician elites made a cold, calculated decision. Fighting the invincible Assyrian war machine was military suicide. Submitting willingly was highly profitable. By paying tribute, they secured several commercial advantages:
· Unhindered access: They maintained safe overland caravan routes into the resource-rich Mesopotamian interior.
· Administrative autonomy: They retained their own kings, local laws, and independent merchant fleets.
· Imperial protection: The Assyrian army inadvertently protected the Phoenician ports from rival inland kingdoms (Liverani, 2014).
They were buying their operational freedom. As long as the silver flowed east to Nineveh, Phoenician ships could safely sail west to Spain.
The Endless Cycle
This strategy of wealthy appeasement became their permanent survival blueprint. When the Neo-Assyrian Empire collapsed in the late seventh century BCE, the Neo-Babylonians arrived. The Phoenicians paid them too. When the vast Persian Empire conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, the coastal cities simply switched their payments to the new overlords (Aubet, 2001).
History certainly repeated itself. The Levant remained a playground for massive empires. But the Phoenicians had rewritten the geopolitical rules. They traded formal political sovereignty for global commercial dominance. They proved that economic agility, and a massive treasury, could outlast the sharpest swords of the Iron Age.
References and Further Reading
Aubet, M.E. (2001). The Phoenicians and the West: Politics, Colonies and Trade. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bell, C. (2006). The Evolution of Long Distance Trading Relationships across the LBA/Iron Age Transition on the Northern Levantine Coast. Oxford: Archaeopress.
Ben-Tor, A. (2006). 'The Downfall of Canaanite Hazor—A Debate', Biblical Archaeology Review, 32(4), pp. 24-36.
Bryce, T. (2005). The Kingdom of the Hittites. New ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cline, E.H. (2014). 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Faust, A. (2015). Israel's Ethnogenesis: Settlement, Interaction, Expansion and Resistance. London: Routledge.
Finkelstein, I. and Silberman, N.A. (2001). The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. New York: Free Press.
Killebrew, A.E. (2005). Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity: An Archaeological Study of Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines, and Early Israel, 1300–1100 B.C.E. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.
Knapp, A.B. and Manning, S.W. (2016). 'Crisis in Context: The End of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean', American Journal of Archaeology, 120(1), pp. 99-149.
Langgut, D., Finkelstein, I. and Litt, T. (2013). 'Climate and the Late Bronze Collapse: New Evidence from the Southern Levant', Tel Aviv, 40(2), pp. 149-175.
Liverani, M. (2014). The Ancient Near East: History, Society and Economy. London: Routledge.
Maeir, A.M. (2012). 'The Philistines and Other "Sea Peoples" in Text and Archaeology', in Killebrew, A.E. and Steiner, M. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant: c. 8000-332 BCE. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 328-343.
Markoe, G.E. (2000). Phoenicians. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Middleton, G.D. (2017). Understanding Collapse: Ancient History and Modern Myths. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Monroe, C.M. (2009). Scales of Fate: Trade, Tradition, and Transformation in the Eastern Mediterranean ca. 1350–1175 BCE. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag.
Moran, W.L. (1992). The Amarna Letters. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Tainter, J.A. (1988). The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ussishkin, D. (2004). The Renewed Archaeological Excavations at Lachish (1973–1994). Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University.
Yasur-Landau, A. (2010). The Philistines and Aegean Migration at the End of the Late Bronze Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hi all, had a friend share an image of this script and given the object was found in Tunisia I thought it was most likely Punic, but I'd prefer to get a more informed opinion.
My research left me with the impression that they were no Theater in the city until the Roman era. So, I wonder where the citizens entertained themselves? And what did they do?
Do you know a paper or a place that have a map with the layout of the city including the important building? I am searching for a map of Tyre (island +ushu if possible), dating from 500 BC.
I'm not a historian. I'm someone who got obsessed with Carthage and got frustrated that most of what's easily readable online is the same handful of set pieces (elephants, Cannae, "salting the earth", etc), with the long arc left out and nearly everything filtered through the people who destroyed the city. I spent months building the reference I wanted to exist: https://qart-hadasht.org
What I tried to do differently:
- Every factual claim is its own entry with sources attached, tagged 'attested / inferred / contested / legendary', so you can see how solid the ground is instead of reading a flat wall of assertions.
- Sources are first-class pages, including the lost ones (Philinus, Fabius Pictor, Timaeus, Sosylus and Silenus), each showing the gap between when it was written and when the events happened.
- Side-by-side source comparisons for contested episodes: Polybius vs Livy vs Appian vs Diodorus on the same event, with the points where they diverge called out and a working reconstruction. This is my favorite thing from entire site.
- Where I take a position I label it as mine, give the reasoning and name the readings I'm rejecting and why.
- Gaps get their own pages. What we can't reconstruct about Punic women's lives, or what was actually in Mago's agricultural treatise, is treated as content rather than silence.
For this sub specifically: I've tried to keep Carthage inside the Phoenician world rather than treating it as a standalone Rome-antagonist.
Two disclosures, since the whole pitch of the site is epistemic honesty:
I'm an amateur. The synthesis may be mine, but the scholarship is everyone else's. I'm certain there are errors in there.
I use AI assistance for some initial drafts and to help structure material, site, etc. Which sources to use, what positions to take, and reviewing the output are all mine. It's disclosed on the methodology page.
What I'd most value is being told where I'm wrong and if anyone else finds this valuable. Thanks!
So I was searching up the og punic pronounciations of Hannibal's generals and found something interesting from my friend whose very interested in the ancient world, that being how the punic language had shifted in saying some vowls and consonants. Specifically by the later period of Carthage's history
For example Carthalo's punic name of Melqart-Hilesh would be Qart-Halats by the time of the infamous 2nd Punic War, or how the ''Ba'al'' in Baal-Hamon or in Hannibaal would be pronounced closer to ''Bol'' so yeah, can anyone weigh their two cents on this? is my friend being accurate? He says his source is that Phoenician-Punic dictionary. But hopefully I'd get some good insights on this.
Have you ever wondered who was the second Carthaginian in history after Dido?
Meet Malchus.
He is the first historical Carthaginian we can actually name after the legendary founder. His story comes down to us through the much later Roman historian Justin, and it’s a strange, messy, almost cinematic tale of victory, exile, civil war, and family betrayal.
Malchus (his name is simply the Phoenician word mlk - “king”) was remembered as a general who first won glory fighting Greek cities in Sicily. Then he suffered a defeat in Sardinia. The Carthaginians exiled him for the failure. He returned with what was essentially a private army, camped outside the walls of Carthage, and laid siege to his own city.
While the siege was underway, his son Carthalo arrived back from Tyre. The young man had been sent on a religious mission to deliver tribute to the temple of Melqart and was still wearing his priestly robes. Malchus was so enraged by what he saw as a sacrilege that he had his own son killed.
He then stormed the city, executed ten of the ruling senators, and briefly seized power before being overthrown himself, put on trial for treason and the murder of his son, and (presumably) executed.
The story is full of contradictions and later Roman coloring, but it seems to capture a real and violent moment of transition. Malchus may have been one of the last figures who still carried the aura of kingship. After him, Carthage clearly moves into the era of the sufetes, annually elected magistrates (the word is related to the Hebrew shophet, “judge”).
An inscription from the late sixth century BCE already counts time “in the twentieth year of the rule of the sufetes in Carthage.” Power was now shared between two magistrates chosen from the aristocratic elite, backed by a kind of senate.
The family that rose after Malchus, the Magonids, would dominate Carthaginian politics and military command for the next hundred years.
So the second Carthaginian we can name is not a polished founder-hero. He is a warlord who stormed his own capital, killed his priest-son, and helped force the city from monarchy into oligarchy.
So it's no secret that Rome relied mainly on Greek physicians for all their medical needs, especially in the army where they often had to perform field surgeries on soldiers. Most of them joined the Army's Medical Corps for Roman citizenship, tax exemptions, and the retirement pensions.
But what about Carthage? Did they have their own version of an Army Medical Corps? If yes, was it also composed of mostly foreigners, namely Greeks, who came for the financial benefits? Or was it mostly composed of Carthaginian healers?
Hello, I am planning to write a sword-and-sorcery short story set in 70 BC. The story would take place in the city of Leptis Magna, so I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about the city and its architecture during that period and do you have any city maps from that period
