Studies in North Africa

Preface to First Edition

" A land of sand and ruin and gold.” Thus Swinburne describes North Africa.

Sand indeed there is — sand that seems to stretch out into infinity ; ruins, too, the ruins of three great civilisations which have passed away ; gold also — though of no material wealth ; rather it is the glory of the golden haze over the desert, and the yellow sand gleaming in the sunshine.

The writer has described no place which he did not visit during a protracted sojourn in North Africa.

For the facts which lie outside the range of such first-hand evidence he has consulted, so far as possible, the original authorities. In cases where the opinion of a single author has been relied upon, on any special point, a reference has been given in the text.

In addition to the standard books of reference, he has consulted, especially, the following works, and desires to express his indebtedness to them : —

The Religion of the Semites, Robertson Smith, Chap, i.-ii.

The Religion of Ancient Egypt, Wiedemann, Chap. ii.

Les Civilisations de V A frique du Nord, Victor Piquet, Chap, xiv.— xvi.

L’Afrique Romaine, Gaston Boissier, Chap, vi., vii., viii.

L' Alger ie, Maurice Wahl, Chap, xiv., xvi.

Les Ruines de Carthage , le R. P. Delattre, Chap. xi.

Thugga, Dr. Carton, Chap. ix.

Carthage Chretienne, Abel Alcais, Chap. x.

The Scourge of Christendom, Sir Lambert Playfair, Chap. xvi.

The Barbary Corsairs, S. Lane-Poole, Chap. xvi.

Alger au XVIII. Sidcle, Venture de Paradis, Chap, xvi.-xvii.

Sketches of Algiers, W. Shaler, Chap. xvii.

Preface to Second Edition

This book formed a first and distinct part of a twopart volume published just before the war and entitled " ’Twixt Sand and Sea.” It was both large and expensive. In accordance with frequent suggestions the two parts are now separated. The first part slightly abridged, by one of the collaborators, is now brought out in a small and cheaper edition, in the belief that it will supply a want, and also come within the scope of a larger public. It is hoped to bring out the second part in the same form at a later date.

August , 1921.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. The City of Elissar, 850-264 b.c. . 13

II. The Sword and the Trident, 264-201 b.c. 26

Chapter I The City Of Elissar, 850-264 B.c

It was about* the year 850 B.c. that Elissar, Princess of Sidon, fled from her native country, after the murder of her husband Sychoeus by her brother Pygmalion. Descended from Ethbaal or Ithbaal, King of Sidon, she was the niece of Jezebel and the cousin of Athaliah. Thus, a Wake or Dido, she landed on the shores of the Gulf of Tunis, not far from the little Sidonian port of Combe. Hospitably received by the natives and their King, Iarbas, Son of Hammon, who subsequently became a suitor for her hand, she repaid their kindness by tricking them out of a site for a city on the little hill of Byrsa. There and thus Carthage was founded. At the foot of the hill she dug a Cothon or harbour, to which she welcomed the battered galleys of iEneas, like herself a wanderer from the flames of Troy-town.

* Rollin is more precise. He makes Elissar the granddaughter of Ethbaal, and places the foundation of Carthage in the reign of Joash, King of Judah, ninety-eight years before Rome was founded, 846 B.C.

In the end, capta ac deserta, betrayed and forsaken by her faithless guest, she built a great pyre outside her palace, and cast herself despairingly upon it : so she perished, either to bring upon the traitor the doom he so richly deserved, or to escape the importunities of her unwelcome suitor, Iarbas, or to rejoin in death her murdered husband.

In the light of other kindred myths of the Semites, a very profound and interesting interpretation may be given to the story. We are taught to see in the Queen, the Dido who accompanies the Pilgrim Fathers on their way, and helps them to build their new city, no mere woman, however exalted, but a divine being ; and in her willing death the noble self-sacrifice of a goddess, who leaps into the flames and dies to consecrate and win a blessing for the city she has founded. Thenceforth she became the Tychl, or Luck, the patron saint of the place for which she had died ; and, in the yearly offering of a maiden at her shrine, her death was commemorated and mystically renewed. What awful act of sacrifice or self-sacrifice may lie behind the myth we cannot tell ; similar rites were practised at Tarsus ; and, in the stories of Hercules Melcarth and Sardanapalus, traces of a kindred legend may be found.

Who, then, was Elissar ? The answer, up to a certain point, is tolerably plain. Both Elissar and Pygmalion were apparently titles of Ashtart, the biblical Ashtoreth,* goddess of the Sidonians. To identify her with Tanith, the supreme divinity of Carthage, attractive as it would be, is difficult ; for, as will be shown later on, Tanith was, in all probability, a Libyan, not a Phoenician, goddess; but various hints, such as that of Justin, that her pyre was built “ at the end of the town ” — that is, of Byrsa, the city of Elissar — would suit an identification of

* That is, Ashtart, with the vowels of Bosheth, " Abomination ”

the Temple of Dido, and the scene of her death, with the Sanctuary of Tanith, which stood somewhere between Byrsa and the sea. Here it was that, in later days, the human sacrifices of the Carthaginians were offered to the goddess ; and even so late as the fourth century of our era, the spot, enclosed in a thicket of thorns, and inhabited, so it was said, by asps and dragons, was surrounded with superstitious terrors.* It was even found necessary to destroy a Christian church erected on the spot, or into which the temple itself had possibly been transformed, in order to put an end to the polluted rites of which it had been so long the abode. Perhaps it would be safer to say that, as the Phoenician settlers, and their worship, became Libyanised, the worship of Elissar Ashtart paled before, and at last was supplanted by, that of the Libyan goddess.

Such, at any rate, is the legend in its best-known form, and the best interpretation which can, at present, be placed upon it. The story of the bull's hide which Elissar cut into strips to measure her grant of land with, may be at once put aside. It arose merely from an accidental similarity of sound between the Greek word for an ox-hide and the Phoenician word for a fortress, Byrsa, or Birtha, the biblical Bozrah. Apart from its decorative details, the fable is valuable merely as a testimony to Phoenician trade methods and the inventive faculty of the Greeks ; while, in order to bring Elissar and .Eneas together, Vergil was compelled to do that which, we are told, lies beyond the power of the very gods themselves, and

“ annihilate both time and space To make two lovers ”

unhappy.

That Carthage was Phoenician in origin, its name *Sil. Ital., 1. 81.

Karthhadach,*, the New City, or Naples — the Greek Karchedon and the Latin Karthago — tells us plainly enough. It shows also that it was not the first of these settlements ; it was new in comparison with Utica, Outich, the Old City, which lay to the north-west across the marshy plain and Sebka, which were then the Gulf of Utica ; new in comparison with Tunis (Tunes) at the head of its lake, or with Comb£, which stood near, if not on the very site where Carthage was built. The precise relation of the New to the Old City is doubtful ; on the whole, it seems probable that Carthage was not an offshoot or dependency of the Tyrian Utica, but rather a Sidonian city founded in rivalry with it. At any rate it was content, until 450 b.c., to pay a rent for the ground on which it stood to the Berber tribe of the Maxyes.

We are so accustomed to speak of the inhabitants as Carthaginians or Phoenicians or Poeni, that it is difficult to realise that the name by which they called themselves was none of these, but “ Canaanite,” a man of the plains, a Lowlander. The Greeks gave the country from which they came the name of Phoenike, the Land of Purple, or of the Red Men ; the Romans corrupted the name into Poeni or Punians ; but even so late as in Christian times an African farmer" would call himself a Canaanite.

The site of the new city was well chosen, f

Low down on the Gulf of Tunis, sheltered from every wind that blows except the north-east, from which a little bay and a great breakwater protected the entrance to the harbours, an isthmus, ending in a triangular or fan- shaped peninsula, juts out some

* Karth, akin to the biblical kirjath.

f With his characteristic love of legend, or, as we should call it, folk-lore, Vergil tells us ( Aen . i. 444), that Juno, or Ashtart, or Tanith, commanded Elissar to build on the spot where she should find a horse's head. The place was marked by a sacred grove.

ten miles into the sea. On the south it is washed by the shallow waters of the Lake of Tunis ; on the north by what is now the Salt Lake or Lagoon, called the Sebka er Riana, but which was then the open Gulf of Utica, where the great river Medjerda, or Bagradas, emptied its sullen waters into the sea. The river has now changed its course, and vast banks of sand have collected, changing the gulf into a lake.

From the head of the Lake of Tunis to the Gulf of Utica runs the protecting mountain range of the Djebel Ahmor, a formidable barrier between the isthmus and the mainland ; somewhere in these mountains lay the cave into which, on the fatal hunting day, Juno Pronuba led Elissar and the Dux Trojanus to shelter from the storm, while the nymphs shrieked upon the hill- tops. It was the day which began the long enmity between Carthage and Rome, which was to end only when Scipio wiped the great city of Elissar off the face of the earth.

At its mountain base the isthmus has a width of nearly ten miles, but it soon shrinks to little more than two ; then it spreads out again in long even curves into the fan-shaped peninsula already spoken of, where it has a breadth of six miles. The northern point of the open fan is occupied by the hills of Kamart ; the southern by the narrow neck of land called the Ligula or Toenia,* which, like Chesil Beach or the Palisades of Kingston Harbour, shuts in, save for a narrow break in the middle, the Lake of Tunis. From the Ligula the shore line runs due north-east for a distance of about four miles, where it ends in Cape Carthage, the central point of the fan. For the first two and a half miles the shore is flat, then it rises rapidly into the hill now crowned with the New Fort, Bordj-el-Djedid, and then, higher still, into the

* Now called La Goulette.

B rocky headland of the cape where stood the old Pharos, and now stands the lighthouse.

The trend of the northern shore is very similar, only, of course, in opposite directions. A long curve to the north-east ends in the heights of the Djebel Khaoui or Kamart, corresponding to the Ligula to the south. Then, turning to the south-east, the coast runs to Cape Carthage. This section of the coast is mountainous, save for a single dip at La Marsa close under the cape.* On this great triangle of land stood Carthage.

The beginnings of the city were, however, much more modest. We can trace them, with some degree of accuracy, by the position of the cemeteries, of which the sides of the hills are full ; for by the Semites, as by the Romans, the dead were considered unclean, and could not be buried within the walls of the city.

In this way we learn that the earliest settlement was not on Byrsa at all, but on the seashore just outside the Ligula, where, afterwards, the great harbours were excavated. Here the coast, turning abruptly to the east, forms a little sheltered bay, well fitted to be the harbour of the first inhabitants, as it was to be the entrance to the harbours in later days. About a mile due north of this bay, nearly the same distance from Bordj-el-Djedid, and about half a mile from the sea, stands the hill of Byrsa ; on the land side it rises up, by a steep ascent, to a height of about two hundred feet ; on the other it drops precipitously towards the sea. With the exception of the Acropolis of Athens and the Capitol of Rome, it is perhaps the most famous hill on the face of the earth. When

* The distances are, approximately, as follows : —

Cape Carthage to Kamart 4 miles

Cape Carthage to the Ligula 4 miles

Across the isthmus from Kamart to the Ligula 6 miles Cape Carthage to a point on the centre of this

line across the isthmus i mile l8 first included within the bounds of the city, it was, as its name implies, a fortress or kasbah ; in course of time, when tyranny at home was more feared than attack from abroad, it was consecrated to religious uses, and became, like the other two, the central shrine of the national worship.

Two lines drawn from Byrsa — the one south, to the Ligula, the other east, to the seashore, south of Bordj-el-Djedid — would enclose the site of the city proper, which was to greater Carthage what the City is to greater London. Within its walls were contained the great Temple of Eschmoun, the cathedral of Carthage, which stood on the hill of Byrsa itself ; the less officially important, but more popular, Temples of Hammon and Tanith ; the naval harbour or Cothon, opening into the commercial harbour, and, through it, reaching the sea ; the long line of quays which reached from the Ligula to Bordj-el-Djedid, and the Forum, which was at once the market, the Royal Exchange, the Law Courts and the Guild Hall of the city.

Punic in origin, Carthage remained, so far as the government was concerned, Punic to the end. Its constitution was a narrow and rigid oligarchy, from which all but the old Punic families were jealously excluded. There was no extension of the franchise or citizenship, such as, from time to time, replenished the ranks of the Republic of Rome, offered a reward to capacity and service, and repaid or secured the fidelity of the cities of the Empire.

The bulwark of this oligarchy was the council of one hundred, actually one hundred and four, of which the magistrates or “ Suffetes ” * were little more than the officials. As these offices were for sale, it became practically a government of capitalists, in which the great families, Magon, Giscon, or Barcas, could obtain from time to time a predominant influence. Decayed

* Shafetes, or Shophetim, the judges.

*9 grandees were enabled to retrieve their fortunes from the spoils of lucrative offices, such as those of taxcollectors.

Thus the oligarchy degenerated into a plutocracy, vulgar, ostentatious, self-indulgent, and heartless. The story of the contemptuous amusement with which the Carthaginians received the report of their ambassadors, that the whole Senate of Rome possessed only one service of silver plate, which reappeared at every dinner-party they were invited to, sufficiently describes them.

As with the equally vulgar nobles of the Roman Empire, it was the fashion to collect works of art, and, as it was easy to employ Greek artists, or to steal original statues, &c., ready made, from Greece or Sicily, the Carthaginian millionaires filled their palaces with works of Greek art ; thus setting an example which, in due time, the Romans followed, when, in their turn, they looted Carthage. Of their Architecture it is difficult to judge, save from the tombs ; these are for the most part strongly influenced by Greece and Egypt.

On the other hand, they possessed and developed in a high degree the Semitic aptitude for banking and business generally, which has made the Jews the financiers of the world. It is said that they used paper money, of no intrinsic value, in the same way that bank notes and cheques are used now.

They have left no traces of any natural science, or art, or literature, save on the one subject of agriculture. They possessed no growing or spreading aptitude for political life, and they showed no desire for free forms of government.

The Carthaginians had no lust for empire, save that of the sea, and of the ports and markets which were necessary to secure and develop their trade. They never fought if they could help it. Though 20 capable of spasmodic outbursts of desperate valour, they allowed themselves to be supplanted in Egypt, Greece, Italy, and East Sicily almost without a struggle ; in the great trade war with Greece it was their allies, the Etruscans, who did most of the lighting at Cumae (280 b.c.) and Alatia (217 b.c.). They lived in Africa “ after the manner of the Zidonians ” in their old land, “ quiet and secure " in “a place where there is no want of anything that is on the earth.” *

As the city grew in power, wealth, and population, the necessity for some territory was increasingly felt, and they pressed forward gradually, submerging the various cities which came in their way, destroying their walls (except in the case of Utica), and imposing on them a tribute of money or of men. Thus Leptis Parva,f south of Sousse, was assessed at 365 talents (£90,000) a year.

By degrees they advanced in this tentative way, until they occupied, more or less completely, a territory corresponding fairly with modem Tunisia and the department of Constantine. The Libyan fortress of Tebessa was not captured until the time of the First Punic War 4 Even within these limits it was frequently a matter of alliance rather than of conquest. The famous inscription from the mausoleum at Dougga§ to Ataban, son of Ifmatel, son of Falao, is in Libyan as well as Phoenician, and records an intermarriage between the two peoples ; and the other similar monuments at Kasserine, and Kroubs (near Cirta), and elsewhere, show that it was by alliance with the native princes, rather than by war, that they preferred to spread their sphere of influence, and obtained permission to establish settlements and markets. It was in this way that they were able to recruit their armies

* Judges xviii. io.

t Now Lamta. J Polyb. i. 73. § Now in the British Museum.

from among a warlike but, on the whole, friendly population. Such privileges as these were all that the Poeni required, and for these they were ready, if need were, to pay tribute.

This principle of alliance, rather than conquest, was carried so far that when, at the time of the wars with Rome, Cirta was taken from its rightful King, Masinissa, it was not seized by Carthage, but left in the hands of Syphax, King of Massesylia,* whose alliance was purchased with the hand of Sophonisba. The territory actually belonging to Carthage, or Africa, consisted of little more than the corner of land between Thabraka (Tabarca) to the west and Taparura (Sfax) to the south ; and this was all that the Romans annexed, under the name of “ Provincia Africa/’ The land thus occupied was, for the most part, divided into vast estates and worked by slaves, a single owner possessing sometimes as many as twenty thousand ; the native farmers and peasantry, when not altogether dispossessed, were reduced to the position of serfs or felahin, and paid a rent of one quarter of the produce of the land. Under these conditions, agriculture became exceedingly scientific, and the treatise on the subject by the Carthaginian Magon remained long a text-book among the Romans.

Of this city of Elissar, the Romans did not leave one stone upon another ; two little ponds mark the site of the harbours, the immense systems of cisterns at La Malga, near Bordj-el-Djedid and elsewhere, though remodelled by the Romans, were probably Punic in origin; a fragment or two of wall in Byrsa possibly belong to the Punic fortifications ; a number of votive tablets witness to the faith of the people ; beyond this there is nothing save a grim layer of ashes mixedf with bones of men, women, and children, and the graves of the dead.

* His capital was at Siga, west of Oran, f This layer is about five feet thick.

As it is from these cemeteries that we can trace the position of the earliest settlement and the gradual growth of the city, so it is from their contents and from the manner in which the dead were laid in them that we learn what little is known of the life of the inhabitants of the city.

The sides of all the hills are full of tombs, some reaching back to the seventh century before Christ, while others date from the times of the Punic Wars.

In the earliest of the cemeteries, which lie nearest the sea, the dead were laid in the ground without coffin or covering of any kind ; but later on a different and very elaborate system of burial was adopted. A vertical shaft was sunk into the ground or rock to a depth of about thirty feet, large enough to allow of the body being lowered on a litter or bier. At the bottom, lateral chambers were excavated ; the walls were covered with stucco, so fine and white as to glisten like snow in the lamplight, and so close in texture as to ring like metal when struck. Above the stucco ran a cornice of cedar supporting a ceiling of the same wood. The whole was roofed in with great slabs of stone, the weight of the earth above being borne by other stones inclined one against the other, and forming the curious triangles which are so distinctive of these sepulchres. The entrance was blocked with a great stone, and finally the shaft was filled up with earth. In these chambers the dead, decked out sumptuously, were laid on beds, facing the entrance ; they were surrounded, not by any dismal funeral trappings, but by lamps, vases of perfumes, and other familiar household furniture, so that, when they awoke from their sleep,* they might

* Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, in accordance with Egyptian beliefs, “ when the spirit revisited the body.” Pap. iii. 36, in the Louvre, shows the winged soul descending just such a shaft to reach the mummy.

find themselves at home with all the gear and housing of their earthly lives around them.

Later still a fresh modification was adopted ; the body was laid in a stone sarcophagus and sealed up with resin. On the lid was carved a recumbent image of the dead, sometimes of great dignity and beauty. Of these effigies the most noticeable is that of Tanith, or the “ priestess/' hereafter to be described. Another represents a Rab, or priest. In this the features are grandly calm and dignified, the hair abundant and curly, the beard and moustaches full. A long robe descends to the sandalled feet ; over this a short cloak falls from the left shoulder to the hip. The right hand is uplifted in prayer ; the left, bent at the elbow, holds a vase of offerings.

A third is of a woman. The hair stands high over the forehead and is brought down on each side of the face in two long plaits or curls. The whole body is clothed in a soft robe, gathered in loosely at the waist and falling in graceful folds to the sandalled feet. Over the head is drawn a long veil ; it is held by the right hand, which is thrown boldly forward, while the left hand draws it easily across the body. The figure is very Greek in conception ; except for the position of the right hand, it follows closely the lines of the Greek funeral monuments, a very lovely example of which is in the Vatican Museum, under the name of " Pudicitia."

Besides these carvings, there have been found in these tombs a series of terra-cotta masks, so skilfully modelled and so characteristic as to require a word of notice. Some of them are mere grotesques, admirably conceived and executed ; these were placed near the dead to frighten away evil spirits by their grimaces. Others, equally .skilful, are more interesting in that they seem to be likenesses of real men and women. These are distinguished by wearing a metal ring, the biblical “ Nezem,” piercing through the central cartilage of the nose.

The first is a man. The face is a long oval, the forehead high, and the hair, short and curly, grows low upon it ; the ears, large and projecting, are pierced for earrings. The upper lip and chin are clean-shaven, but the cheeks are covered with bushy whiskers, descending to the jaw. The cheek-bones are high, the nose long, straight and pointed. The eyes and mouth are drawn up at the corners, giving a shrewd, humorous expression to the countenance. Altogether the whole face is pleasant and life-like.

The only other mask I need speak of is that of a woman. It is curiously different from the first. A snood, like an Egyptian Klaft, covers all the hair except a little fringe of curls over the forehead, and is drawn down behind the ears over the breast. The ears are large and pierced for five rings, two in the lobe and three in the upper fold. The nose is very heavy and bulbous, the eyes large and drawn upwards as in the other case ; the chin small and receding, the mouth small and drawn up in a smile. The whole expression is so kindly that the ugliness of the nose and ears is forgotten.

Such, then, were the great lords, the Hasdrubals and Hamilcars of Carthage ; such her mariners who wandered over the seas as far as Britain ; and such the home-staying folk, the mothers and wives who welcomed the sailors when the voyage was over.

Chapter II The Sword And The Trident, 264-2oi B.c

When, in the year 264 b.c., Carthage first came into armed collision with Rome, she had been for nearly two hundred years the Queen of the Mediterranean, dominant in the East, so supreme in the West that her ambassadors told the Romans that they might not even wash their hands in the sea without leave from Carthage. A naval power only, she had never sought for other empire than that of the sea, but that had been hers so completely and so long, that she had learnt to consider it hers almost by a law of nature. Just as now, wherever the traveller round the world finds a piece of land worth having, he finds the English flag waving over it, so was it then in the Mediterranean, the central sea of the ancient world. The south of Spain owed allegiance to Carthage ; North Africa was fringed with her factories or emporia ; the west of Sicily, Sardinia, Malta, the Balearic Islands, accepted her rule. With Greece she had settled her accounts, with Rome she had a treaty. And so, sitting like a queen, like Tyrus before her, in the midst of the seas, with the wealth of the world pouring into her lap, it is little wonder that ‘‘ her heart was lifted up because of her beauty, and she set her heart as the heart of God/'

But, for all this fair show, the foundations of her supremacy were rotten, for it rested upon her sea power only. When she needed troops, Carthage had to trust to the chance friendship of the warlike and barbarous tribes which surrounded her, and to the very uncertain loyalty of a mercenary army. When Hamilcar Barcas landed in Spain at the beginning of the Second Punic War, it is said that, with the exception of a General Staff of officers, he had not a single Carthaginian soldier in the ranks. It was by his disgraceful betrayal of his Libyan troops, in 358 B.c., that Himilco gave occasion for the phrase " Punica Fides,” which clung to Carthage for ever after ; while on their return from the First Punic War, the army of Hamilcar mutinied and, for three years, engaged Carthage in the Mercenary War of which Flaubert has given so lurid an account in Salambo.

Meanwhile, across the narrow seas which divide Africa from Europe, a hardy and strenuous race was being built up into a nation, welded together by blood and iron. Every man was by instinct and necessity a soldier, and inspired by a spirit of patriotism which made him cheerfully recognise and accept universal service as a national duty. Conquered Etruria had done much to civilise her rough conquerors : she had given them laws, religion, architecture — everything, indeed, but language. The rich plains of Cisalpine Gaul (Lombardy) had been occupied, and South Italy annexed. And now Rome, looking across the narrow strait from Scylla to Charybdis, claimed Sicily as a natural and necessary portion of her inheritance.

So long as Carthage confined herself to the extreme west of the island, to Drepanum (Trapani) and Panormos (Palermo),* and Greece was content with her foothold at Syracuse, there was no occasion for any actual collision ; but there was not room in the little island for the intrusion of a third power. In 265 b.c. Rome made her first advance by receiving all Sicilian Italians into the Italian Confederacy. In the following year