Punic Culture

[Gazius]

Any good overivew books on it? In the carthage section, there's Motya, Unearthing a Lost Civilization, how is that? It sounds like it may reference to what I'm looking for, but also contains a lot of other stuff. Are the Phoenicians the Punics? Or is Punic a melting pot of various cultures with a base in Phoenicia? What happened in Canaan, and carthage after they became a roman province? Does the culture still exist today? It mentions on wiki that they're a semetic langauge base, does that mean only the language has continued on in history, or has any part of the culture as well?

Wiki also has some information on what happened, but it seems a bit to... simple?

[Watchman]

Phoenician => Poeni => Punic, I know that much. I've seen it mentioned in passing parts of the old Carthaginian culture may have survived in the Maghreb for a long time among the common folk, and that the Muslim conquerors quite by accident established a degree of rapport with the relics.

[oudysseos]

The Motya book is actually quite specific to the tiny island of Motya, just off the coast of Sicily and directly across from Carthage. Motya was destroyed by the Greeks in the 4th century BCE so it's a little before the EB timeframe, but the book does contain a fair amount of info about the extent of Punic culture in the western med. The bbok by Serge Lancel that you find in the bibliography thread is an excellent review of the information that we possess about Carthage, but as a great deal of that info is archeological, much of Lancel's book deals more with aspects of material culture than written history and/or punic literary culture. I have not read the Goldsworthy book as I am waiting to find a second hand copy.

Aside from that, Augustine reports that some kind of Punic language was spoken even into his time, and I tend to presume that the survival of a language and the survival of culture are linked.

Certainly the extent and duration of Carthaginian/Punic hegemony is a story that has largely gone untold. Greco-roman propoganda? Or did the Punics just not care very much about their own history?

It is very frustrating. Many general overview histories ignore the massive Punic culture or mention it only in relation to Roman history- for example Freeman's Egypt, Greece and Rome, an otherwise excellent book, makes little mention of the advanced Punic civilization that largely predated the achievements of the Greeks. There is one source that I can offer you untried- S. Moscati, The World of the Phoenicians. Haven't read it, don't know if it answers any of your questions.

[Gazius]

There is one source that I can offer you untried- S. Moscati, The World of the Phoenicians. Haven't read it, don't know if it answers any of your questions.

I'll look into it, I'm a little lacking on reading material at the moment anyhow.

Concerning The Fall of Carthage, all I can find is buying an online version, or a trade paperback coming out later this year. Did a hardback already come out and now is nowhere to be found, or are people reading the online version?