4 ms·

Not much of anything the Carthaginians recorded survived. Their civilisation was destroyed as thoroughly as possible, and the only proper accounts of it are Rom

Not much of anything the Carthaginians recorded survived. Their civilisation was destroyed as thoroughly as possible, and the only proper accounts of it are Roman and Greek. So nearly everything about Carthaginian history is naturally controversial for that reason.

George83728 3y ago
> Their civilisation was destroyed as thoroughly as possible Ehh, we still remember they exist. How many other civilizations have been so thoroughly eradicated that we don't even remember them at all?
- mistrial9 3y ago
  many! mostly nature-friendly ones lacking concrete perhaps?
ffgjgf1 3y ago
> was destroyed as thoroughly as possible, and the only proper accounts of it are Roman and Greek. Physical destruction/genocide wasn’t really necessarily for that. Texts written on papyrus just don’t last very long. Nothing survives from the Etruscans either and the Roman never actively suppressed their culture as far as we know. People just stopped speaking the language and texts were no longer copied. We know so much about many middle eastern civilizations exclusively because they were using clay tablets and liked making inscriptions on rocks. Had they used more perishable materials we’d know significantly less about them than the Carthaginians.
- AmericanChopper 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure that the total destruction of their cities, and all institutions of their society is one of the main reasons nobody was around to preserve their language or history. There are almost no primary sources of Carthaginian history, the only real close-to-contemporary sources are an incomplete account from Polybius (a Greek, who lived as a Roman slave), and Livy (a Roman aristocrat born 100 years after the destruction of Carthage). If you want to make statements about what Carthage and it's people were like, your options for source material are a mostly destroyed archeological record, or second hand accounts from outsiders mostly comprised of Carthage's enemies.
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    Yes, but that more or less applies to every civilization besides Greeks and Romans regardless of what happened to them (and even the amount of Greek/Romans text that have survived is tiny). Maybe Egypt is an exception. For instance most of what we know about ancient Persia comes from Greek sources. As far as we know more the Greek/Romans had preserved much more information about Achaemenids than their Sassanian successors. Even if Carthage was somehow semi peacefully annexed into the Roman empire and and their upper classes were assimilated into the Roman society over time more or less the same thing would have happen (just that we’d have had a longer window during which Punic texts could’ve been translated to Greek/Roman). This happened all the time after all.

George83728 3y ago

> Their civilisation was destroyed as thoroughly as possible Ehh, we still remember they exist. How many other civilizations have been so thoroughly eradicated that we don't even remember them at all?

mistrial9 3y ago
many! mostly nature-friendly ones lacking concrete perhaps?

ffgjgf1 3y ago

> was destroyed as thoroughly as possible, and the only proper accounts of it are Roman and Greek. Physical destruction/genocide wasn’t really necessarily for that. Texts written on papyrus just don’t last very long. Nothing survives from the Etruscans either and the Roman never actively suppressed their culture as far as we know. People just stopped speaking the language and texts were no longer copied. We know so much about many middle eastern civilizations exclusively because they were using clay tablets and liked making inscriptions on rocks. Had they used more perishable materials we’d know significantly less about them than the Carthaginians.

AmericanChopper 3y ago
I'm pretty sure that the total destruction of their cities, and all institutions of their society is one of the main reasons nobody was around to preserve their language or history. There are almost no primary sources of Carthaginian history, the only real close-to-contemporary sources are an incomplete account from Polybius (a Greek, who lived as a Roman slave), and Livy (a Roman aristocrat born 100 years after the destruction of Carthage). If you want to make statements about what Carthage and it's people were like, your options for source material are a mostly destroyed archeological record, or second hand accounts from outsiders mostly comprised of Carthage's enemies.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  Yes, but that more or less applies to every civilization besides Greeks and Romans regardless of what happened to them (and even the amount of Greek/Romans text that have survived is tiny). Maybe Egypt is an exception. For instance most of what we know about ancient Persia comes from Greek sources. As far as we know more the Greek/Romans had preserved much more information about Achaemenids than their Sassanian successors. Even if Carthage was somehow semi peacefully annexed into the Roman empire and and their upper classes were assimilated into the Roman society over time more or less the same thing would have happen (just that we’d have had a longer window during which Punic texts could’ve been translated to Greek/Roman). This happened all the time after all.