Carthage and Tunis, the Old and New Gates of the Orient

^L ' V •.'• V/ m^s^ ^.oF-CA < Viiiiiiiii^Tv CElij-^ frt ^ Cci Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from < IVIicrosoft Corporation f.]IIBR, -^'.^ ;>J0^ r\f •lALIFOff^/, =3 %WJ. # >? slad. http://www.archive.org/details/carthagetunisold(Jl :hhv î. I)NIVER% ^ylOSMElfr^^ >^?S(f •Mmv^ '''/iawiNMW^ J ;; ;ijr{v'j,!j I irîiiu*- ÂUii ^^WEUNIVERS/, INJCV '"MIFO/?^ ^5WrUNIVER% CARTHAGE AND TUNIS VOL. 1 Carthaginian vase [Delattre). CARTHAGE AND TUNIS THE OLD AND NEfF GATES OF THE ORIENT By DOUGLAS SLADEN Author of "The Japs at Home," "Queer Things about Japan," *' In Sicily," etc., etc. ^ # ^ WITH 6 MAPS AND 68 ILLUSTRATIONS INCLUDING SIX COLOURED PLATES By BENTON FLETCHER Vol. I London UTCHINSON & CO. ternoster Row # 4» 1906 Carthaginian razors [Delatire). or V. J DeDicateO to J. I. S. WHITAKER, F.Z.S., M.B.O.U. OF MALFITANO, PALERMO AUTHOR OF " THE BIRDS OF TUNISIA " IN REMEMBRANCE OF REPEATED KINDNESSES EXTENDING OVER A PERIOD OF TEN YEARS 941029 (zr Carthaginian writing (Delattre). PREFACE CARTHAGE and Tunis are the Gates of the Orient, old and new. The rich wares of the East found their way into the Mediterranean in the galleys of Carthage, the Venice of antiquity ; and though her great seaport, the Lake of Tunis, is no longer seething with the commerce of the world, you have only to pass through Tunis's old sea-gate to find yourself surrounded by the people of the Bible, the Arabian Nights, and the Alhambra of the days of the Moors. Carthage was the gate of Eastern commerce, Tunis is the gate of Eastern life. Tunis is the most perfect Eastern city within easy reach of England. It is as Arab as Shanghai is Chinese. Both have a European city by the port, and both have a walled native city swarming with Orientals almost unconscious of the existence of Europe. Indeed, Tunis is the double-dyed Orient, for the Arab city is full of the architectural remains of ancient Carthage, viii preface which lay but ten miles away. And Tunis is as safe for person and property, as clean and healthy as if it were an Exhibition instead of a fortified Oriental city, and as if it were really awakened from a Rip van Winkle sleep of a thousand years. Most of the City of the Beys is under one roof —the far-famed Bazar of Tunis. No one sleeps in the Bazar. The rich Arabs, who are faithful to their national customs, live in the tall antique palaces of such streets as the Rue du Riche and the Rue des Andalous on its skirts ; the poor Arabs live in the rebats like those which stretch from the Bab-Souika and Bab-Menara. In the cool Bazar you spend the heat of the day, watching Oriental life. The Arab cares little to sell and there is little you care to buy. All the touting and bargaining is done by Jews. All the real bargains are outside the Bazar. The fantastic, romantic, delightful pottery of the Bab-Souika fills more than one page in this book ; the ancient brassware, as romantic, is sometimes sold for songs in the street-sales of the copper-workers' souk ; Bedouin jewellery and charms and saddle-bags you buy in the Bazar when you have the good luck to meet their itinerant vendors. Of all the Arab merchants in the Bazar, only the saddlers sell much to foreigners ; their leather- work is so elegant and barbaric in its designs, so glowing in its colours, so modest in its prices. But Ipretace ix there are streets leading up to the Bazar full of cheap and charming Oriental jewellery. Your day at Tunis may be summed up in a few words. You watch the Arab life, and when you are tired of it, go to a cafe, frequented by French society and enlivened by a good band. The restaurants, too, are cheap and excellent. There are many excursions to be made from Tunis. Kairouan, after Mecca, is the most sacred city of the Mahometan world. Dougga is a kind of Tunisian Pompeii. Gafsa is an oasis in the desert. But the nearest and most interesting excursion is to Carthage. From London it is easier to go to Carthage than it is to go to Pompeii. Only two days need be spent in train and boat on the journey to Tunis, and you can be among the ruins of Carthage within three-quarters of an hour from leaving your hotel- door at Tunis ; but it would be rash to expect to stand among the ruins of Pompeii in less than two hours after leaving your hotel at Naples. From the point of view of classical ruins Carthage is poor beside Pompeii, though it abounds in Roman buildings. But to these must be added the extensive early Christian ruins, which possess a unique interest because, in framing the rules of Christianity, Carthage played a part more important than Rome itself. The authorities on the subject, from Milman onwards, are unanimous in declaring that the forms of Latin X pretace Christianity were crystallised in the Church of North Africa. But it is not for monuments in marble that you go to the hill of Carthage. You feel, though you may not profess, that the Japanese are right in their belief, that every spirit which is born into the earth stays on the earth in its native land. You go to Carthage to greet the ghosts of Hannibal and his father Hamilcar, who would have given the empire of the world to their native city if she could have risen to the conception of receiving it. You go there for the supreme object-lesson of immortality. The Romans rooted out the ruins of their arch-rival so unsparingly that hardly one stone of the Punic city remains above the soil. Literally they obeyed Cato when he cried, " Delenda est Carthago." But Carthage is there in the air, the Carthage of Hamilcar—not the mere bones of the city, like Pompeii's rows of roofless walls, but the phantom of the city in her pride like the reconstruction by M. Aucler, which its brilliant author and its publisher, M. Ch. Delagrave, have permitted me to reproduce on the folding plate in this volume. This reconstruction is based on the studies of Abbe Delattre and the other great French scholars who have made the excavation of Carthage their hobby, and, as a piece of scholarship, is far superior to anything of the kind achieved by the Germans in attempting to reproduce ancient Rome and ancient Pompeii. preface xi And this is Carthage, whose name for two thousand years has thrilled all hearts like the sounding of a bugle. As the author of By the Waters of Carthage truly observed, what you build down outlasts what you build up by many centuries. All you have left of Punic Carthage are the harbours for war and commerce, which the Carthaginians excavated in the midst of their city, and the tombs, which have yielded a museum not inferior to the museums of ancient Rome. Those two linked harbours—the square for commerce in the day of battle, the round, with the island of the Admiral of Carthage, for her navy—as they glitter under the African sun, bring back ancient Carthage more forcibly than the descriptions of Appian, the historian of the final Punic war. For the empire of Carthage proceeded from those two docks cut off from the sea who shall say how many centuries ago .'' They were made when greatness was thrust upon those half-Jewish traders, when the change from emporium to empire forced them to fortify, with all the resources known to the ancients, their too accessible peninsula lying between the Mediterranean and the inexhaustible harbour provided for them by nature in the Lake of Tunis. It was the Lake of Tunis which made Carthage the emporium of the antique world ; and as you stand on the citadel, usurped to-day by the Cathedral of St. Louis and the monastery of the xii Ipreface White Fathers of the Desert, you turn your eyes first to the round pool and the square, and then to the broad lake, pink with multitudinous flamingoes, bounded by the twin peaks of Bou-Cornein, which is as beautiful as Vesuvius before it was deformed by the recent eruption. The view from Carthage excels the view from Naples. Its Bedouin inhabitants give it a glamour of the past which is stripped from Athens and Rome. Chapters I.-XII. of Vol. I. deal with the history and remains of historical Carthage in her days of empire. Chapter XVII. is devoted to the mythical Carthage of Dido. The rest of the first volume is given up to a Carthage curiously omitted by previous topographical writers—the Carthage of the Saints : martyrs like Perpetua and Cyprian, fathers of Christianity like Tertullian and Augustine, saints of sweet Uves like Monica and Fulgentius—and, in the day when Carthage took its farewell of history, Louis IX. of France, a saint if he had never been canonised. You feel as if you were walking in a seventeenth- century garden with borders of old-fashioned herba- ceous flowers as you read of these saints in the pages of Alban Butler—such purity, such fragrance is borne in upon your senses by his beautiful old English and glad and simple piety. And as you stand by the side of Carthage, whose prostrate form is covered with a rich robe of cornfields. Ipretace xiii whether in the dreamy haze of noon or the transparent sheen of sunset, you feel that you are in an enchanted land, where the phantoms of Dido and Hannibal, St.

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