Cartagena

 

It was wonderful sailing into Cartagena ( Carthago Nova or New Carthage) knowing we were seeing what ancient Carthaginians and Romans would have seen as they approached, even perhaps, the harbour, from a distance at least. Even the sleek yachts and sail boats, the technology essentially unchanged.

And as you walked the streets, you quickly sensed and saw the slow decomposition of past civilisations, one built upon the other. 

It was founded in 227BC by  Hasdrubal the Fair and named Qart Hadasht, Phoenician for New Town. Nothing good lasts for ever. Eighteen years later, in 209 BC it was attacked by the Roman general, Scipio Africanus. 

Even today, Scipio is recognised as a supreme strategist, one of the greatest in history and taught as such in military schools. He launched a determined coastal attack which despite their strong defences alarmed the Carthaginians—to the extent they withdrew their troops from their northern wall to withstand the attack. It was what Scipio was waiting for. Mago, the Carthaginian general, calculated, mistakenly, the northern wall was safe enough, protected as it was by a wide lagoon. Scipio, however, had learned that the lagoon was quite shallow and ebbed with the tide. (He conned his soldiers, Neptune had personally informed him of this in a dream.) With the fighting focused on the coastal wall, five hundred Romans waded through the lagoon, clambered the walls and opened the gates. 

Renamed Carthago Nova, Cartagena became one of the great cities of the Roman empire, much of its wealth derived from its silver mines. The dream ended in 425 AD when the city was sacked by the Vandals. Some years later the Byzantines took it over, and in 714 AD the city fell under Arab control. Cartagena remained Muslim until 1245 AD when Christian armies swept in and claimed it for Castile. 

After years of prosperity the city was in steep decline by the early C20th, still evident in some of the streets. It was the rediscovery of its past that has brought Cartagena renewed prosperity. ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ as they say.

The old city is very walkable, a short stroll from the harbour takes you to the gleaming marble paved Calle Mayor, its beautiful baroque buildings a powerful reminder of its golden age of prosperity, at least for the rich. 

The Gran Hotel

And who wouldn't like to stay in a hotel like this?

Traditionally the Cathedral of Viega Santa Maria was founded by the apostle St James, who landed here in 1st century AD spreading the word of Christ. When, in the C13th, Christian kings drove out the Moors, a new Cathedral was commissioned on the original site. During the Spanish Civil War 1936-39 the cathedral and surrounding buildings were largely destroyed by arial bombardment, and the future was reclaimed by the past. In clearing the devastation, they discovered the ruins of a vast Roman complex built upon by Vandals, Arabs and later, Christians. As you enter the rediscovered Roman theatre you walk through the bombed cathedral’s foundations.

The Rediscovered Roman Theatre

It was customary for the rich to sit near the front and the poor to enter and exit from the top and farther away. The two smallish holes at the top of these two photos above were called Vomitaria deriving from the latin Vomere -- 'to spew forth.'  A nice visual image. 

And as you look out from the theatre you realise how much of Rome lies beneath the modern city. 

An archaeologist was asked by a student where would she suggest investigating. Her answer was succinct. ‘Throw a stone and start digging.’ And this is a tribute to Cartagena, in marked contrast to Carthage (see previous post) Their past is everywhere, and everywhere treasured. You can visit recently excavated Roman baths, temple, street and houses and from there see the stuff just outside yet to be excavated. You can walk the streets and see Roman columns in an elegant sprawl. You can browse in a nondescript thrift store and glimpse the past beneath your feet. 

In this thrift store you can walk over glass panels showing its Roman substructure. Note my elegant trainers

Below the excavated baths, temple, buildings and street.

Part of a wall fresco

Below, the overspill.

And  broken columns lining the street.

And ending on a sweet note, we discovered a new way to serve coffee – but only for the non-diabetic and those with sweet teeth.  Read how to make it and weep, or alternatively try it.

 

                                                           All in all, one of our favourite cities

 

 

 

 

 

Carthage

But now nothing remains of the great city save a few cisterns and some shapeless masses of masonry; all that is valuable has been carried off either for the construction of the modern city Tunis or to enrich the public buildings and museums of Europe; and now, indeed, there can be no doubt that in very truth: ‘Deleta est Carthago.’ Carthage is destroyed.

Quote 1895 Murray’s Handbook for travellers in Algeria and Tunisa

And the sad thing is, so little has changed, and I'd been so looking forward to seeing something more. The years I'd spent teaching eleven year olds about the Punic Wars, Hannibal, the life and death struggle between Rome's military machine and Carthaginian sea power. 

We walked through its ruins in intense heat but were fortunate in having a laid back guide who didn’t walk too fast and was able to tell us what every obscure stone signified. Heat and imagination can have a hallucinatory effect and gradually the city took shape in my mind. 

First of all though, its history in a nutshell.

According to legend and Virgil, Carthage was founded in 814 BC by a Phoenician exile from Tyre. Queen Dido was escaping her tyrannical brother Pygmalion who may have been responsible for her husband’s death. Dido and her crew landed in Cyprus, where they seized eighty prostitutes as wives for their future colony. In North Africa, near modern Tunis, Dido tricked the resident ruler to grant them land. His initial response had been to grant them as much land as an ox hide could encompass. Dido cut the hide into ultra-thin strips, joined them into one very long strip, and wound it around one of the surrounding hills.  There they built their city which expanded over time. 

By the third century BC it had become the major maritime power in the Mediterranean with its colonies sprouting like mushrooms. The emerging Rome was not at all happy about this and after three fiercely fought wars, Carthage was destroyed in 146 BC.

Two illustrations of Carthage as it would have been. Note the hill housing the original settlement and the harbour below 

Carthage’s ancient harbour was known as ‘cothon,' a term now widely applied to similarly constructed harbours ie a man made basin connected to the sea by a channel. 

The cothon at Carthage had an outer rectangular merchant harbour, behind which lay an inner circular harbour reserved for military use. This harbour had an island in the middle which housed a tower from where the admiral could observe both the harbour and the sea beyond.

The inner harbour was surrounded by docking bays for ship maintenance. Above them were warehouses for oars, rigging, and essential ship supplies. 

At its peak, the harbour housed 220 ships, and the  narrow channel leading to it could be sealed by iron chains. 

This is all that remains. Imagination is called for. The maps above also help.

A hundred or so years later, Rome having appreciated the strategic value of the site, built Roman Carthage on the ruins of the original settlement. From there on it flourished as a major city in the Mediterranean—until its destruction by the Arabs in 698 AD. Its destruction was wilful and systematic. Columns from its churches and temples were used to build the Great Mosque of Tunis, and its remaining buildings quarried for stone to build luxury villas or apartment blocks. 

                                    This is what Dido would have seen from her original hill fort

The pictures below show what's left of where later Carthaginian elites lived—ie on and around the top of the hill. For all their wealth their water management was fairly basic, each house storing their own water, often on their roofs. 

The Tophet, ie burial grounds, and temple fragments.

The Tophet and Temple area are adjoined, and beneath each of these stelae are the burnt remains of a sacrifice. On many of the stelae are carvings of a crescent moon and a sun, often with a depiction of the Goddess Tanit, the moon Goddess, who partnered with the sky god Baal. If you look to the right of the photo immediately above, you will see the 'protective' half moon over the sun, below which is the goddess Tanit.

Children were sacrificed to Baal. These are their coffins.

The Roman aqueduct below

Everything changed when the Romans came. Rather like McDonald’s, Roman cities followed a pattern; aqueducts and fresh running water were one of life’s necessities, along with the baths. A single cistern carrying water from the aqueduct wouldn’t have worked. As seen in the picture below, a small fleet of cisterns, like pigs teats carried the water from the aqueduct to the thirsty city.

Following the steps of long dead Romans:  the road to the Antonine Baths and sea. 

                                    

The Antonine Baths were started by Hadrian and named after his successor Antonius Pius. They were the third largest baths in the entire Roman empire, something I wondered about as I wandered through them. They have two further distinctions. Because they were built upon clay, a feature of this coastline, the foundations were necessarily deep, which meant that there wasn't room for basements to house the hypocausts  As a result, they were built above ground, which meant the baths themselves were built above them, and so uniquely high.

The columns below serve a useful purpose. Everything below them were the hypocausts fed by broiling slaves for the heated water in the baths above

The cold, cold lager was very nice as we sailed from Tunis beneath a red sky