Background of the Carthaginians | World History | Khan Academy

Gustin's previous videos discuss how Rome became a republic in 509 BCE, but it's worth noting—and I've done this in other videos—that at that point, Rome was not this vast empire; it was really just in control of Rome itself. But over the next few hundred years, it starts to expand. Rome is a militaristic society. The Roman legions start to exert their influence over more and more of the surrounding people on the Italian peninsula.

We keep going several hundred years until we enter into the 3rd century BCE. This is a map of what the Mediterranean, at least, looks like roughly as we enter into that 3rd century BCE. You see, even though Rome has now exerted its power over most of the Italian peninsula right over here, it was not the dominant power in the Mediterranean. It was really the upstart, the new and growing Empire. There were other significant empires; you see here the remnants of Alexander the Great's Empire, his successors each now at their own significant Empire, and in particular, Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Persia, which had control over much of the Middle East.

The other empire that you see here in blue was the Carthaginian Empire. As we will see in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE, Rome and Carthage are going to come at loggerheads, and Rome eventually is going to overthrow Carthage as the dominant empire in the Mediterranean. But you can see in this map right as we're entering into the 3rd century BCE, Carthage, that you see in blue, was a significant empire.

So, the question is, who were these Carthaginians? The answer is that they were Phoenicians. Another answer is that even the Phoenicians did not call themselves Phoenicians. To understand where all of this came from, we have to go back 5,000 years ago—roughly five thousand years before now, around 3,000 BCE—where you have these city-states like Tyre and Sidon. I don't know if you can see those well; let me rewrite it: that is Tyre, this is Sidon.

Now this map is obviously a map of the 3rd century BCE, but if you go back to when these cities were founded—in fact, before they were laid before they were, I guess you could say, put under the influence of Nebuchadnezzar and then of a committed Persia—these were independent city-states. They are actually existing cities in modern-day Lebanon. In this region, then, the leading cities were Tyre and Sidon.

You had a group of people that would later be known as the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians were famous for many things; they were famous as traders, as really shipbuilders and traders. They colonized much of or large segments of the coastline of the Mediterranean, and this is going back thousands and thousands of years. Carthage was one of those colonies, established in the 9th century; this is what modern-day historians believe, sometime between 846 and 813 BCE.

It was a Phoenician colony set up as really a trading post for the Tyrians right over here. The reason why they are called Phoenicians—they didn't call themselves Phoenicians—these Phoenician people were called that by the Greeks and later the Romans because they were famous for trading their purple dye. They had their purple dye, which they got, which was derived from mollusks that they were able to get from the sea as Great Sea traders and shipbuilders.

So, they have this purple dye, and the term for this purple dye was related to the word "pannikin" or "Phoenicians," and I know I'm not pronouncing it well. So the Greeks and the Romans of the time called them the Phoenician people for their purple dye. Now, Carthage, as we will see in probably the next video, has a series of wars with Rome, which are called the Punic Wars.

I've always wondered, where does that term Punic come from? Why isn't it called the Carthaginian Wars or the Roman-Carthaginian Wars? That's because the Carthaginians referred to their origins as coming from Phoenicia, and the Latin term for that was "pona," once again related to the Greek word for that purple dye. So "pentakus" became "Punic."

The idea of Phoenician, phonation, Venetian—these are all related words to each other. So when we're talking about the Punic, we're talking about the Punic Wars. These are the Romans—or this is the modern-day English; the Romans would have said "Poe NICUs." These wars are referring to the wars with Carthage, who are descendants from the Phoenicians.

Now, just as a side note, another thing that you might be wondering about is, hey, this word Phoenician looks familiar; it looks like phonetic, like the phonetic alphabet. That was the other famous contribution of the Phoenicians, is that our alphabet—the idea of our alphabet—was derived from the phonetic alphabet of the Phoenicians.

So the Phoenicians did many, many things; they settled much. They were one of the real naval powers of the Mediterranean going back thousands and thousands of years. By the time we get to the middle of the Roman Republic, we're in the 3rd century BCE; we're in the 200s BCE. The ancient cities of Tyre and Sidon are not part of the Seleucid Empire. The Seleucid Empire was one of the successor empires of Alexander the Great, but their offspring, so to speak, Carthage, is now a dominant power in the Mediterranean.

With Rome starting to exert its might—although it has very powerful armies, it does not, at this point, have a very powerful navy. But as we will see, as we get to 264 BCE, these two great powers in the Mediterranean start to come into a little bit of conflict.