The city of Carthage, according to what is said to be the Carthagenians' own account, was founded in the year 814 BC. The settlement of the city, so the story goes, transpired as a result of events in Tyre, the chief city of Phoenicia. Elissa, the sister of King Pygmalion of Tyre, was married to her uncle, Acherbas, priest of of the god Melkart. The king, wanting to sieze her husband's fortune, had him killed. Elissa escaped, and made her way to the Phoenician settlements on Cyprus, where she joined forces with a priest of Astarte.
From Cyprus they sailed to the coast of North Africa along with a band of Tyrian and Phoenician Cypriot followers, including among them eighty temple prostitutes to provide for the future growth of the colony. Elissa and her followers settled very near the present-day city of Tunis, and there established the city of Carthage. Some time later, when a native chieftain tried to force Queen Elissa to marry him, she committed suicide by leaping into a fire.
To anyone at all acquainted with classical literature, this story is likely to have a curious pseudo-familiarity. In Virgil's Aenead, Carthage is also founded by a queen, who commits suicide by leaping into a fire after a marriage plan goes awry. In Virgil's version, however, the queen is named Dido, and she commits herself to the flames not to escape a marriage, but in despair after Aeneas deserts her, sailing from Carthage to Italy, where his descendents would eventually found Rome. The more familiar version of Carthage's foundation thus comes to us, in distorted form, from the very people who would eventually destroy Carthage itself.
These two versions of the Carthage foundation legend encapsulate, in miniature, the problem facing any account of Carthage's history from the Carthagenian point of view. The Carthagenians have no historical voice of their own to speak to us. Their story is told only by their enemies. Indeed, even the...