Roman Era Carthage and Lepcis Magna a Comparative Study of the Romanization and The
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Roman era Carthage and Lepcis Magna a comparative study of the Romanization and the Libyphoenician survival of the two leading cities of Africa Proconsularis Andreas Lagaard, Historisk Institutt, UiO, HIS4090 Vår 2008 1 Preface: This thesis started off as an interest in the Phoenicians sparked off by Maria Eugenia Aubet's The Phoenicians and the West and especially her mention of the lost literary heritage from these peoples which intrigued me to no end. So when I had to choose a subject fro my work I was really interested in doing a piece on them and their lost history. However there were no thesis councilors available for that time period and I had to move my chosen period into the realm of Antiquity when the Phoenician homelands were reaching their historical dusk so to speak. I vacillated in the beginning between doing a study on the Alexandrian siege of Tyre with possible comparative avenues of research pertaining to the previous sieges/attacks on the island city state and a study on the Western Phoenicians and their zone of influence. As Jon Iddeng, my future thesis councilor to be, was an expert in Latin Literature and the Romans in general I chose to follow a path of study detailing their archenemies the Punic peoples. At first I in my naivety thought that the whole Punic realm of the Western Mediterranean would be a fitting subject for study. I quickly realized the vast magnitude of such an undertaking and scaled down my subject to first just the Punic peoples in Africa and then later to just the populations of Punic Africa's heartlands in Tunisia and Libya. As for the time period I chose to limit myself to the period after the Roman invasion and occupation as the prior period had received thorough examination from illustrious scholars such as Serge Lancel, G.C. and Colette Picard and B.H. Warmington among others. I wanted to tackle the question of Punic survival in the face of Roman incursion as the subject of cultures being subjugated by others always has been an almost morbid interest of mine. Furthermore the area seemed to my inexpert knowledge to be much more of a virgin territory where I could however insignificantly break new ground. After a while as I perused the sources available on the subject I quickly realized that even limiting myself to the Punic heartlands in Africa would be a monumental undertaking especially for one of my meagre philological and archaeological skills. I had to limit myself further and since Lepcis Magna and Carthage were the two sites most readily available in English language sources and in the sources in general due to their historical importance in the Roman period I landed on them as my choice for subject matter. My intention was and is to do a comparative study as to how Romanization affected them and as to how Punic they remained after the Roman takeover. The two sites were ideally suited to this as they presented stereotypes for two very different urban constellations in Punic Africa. Carthage was the foremost Roman colony of the region re-founded by Julius Caesar and Augustus and Lepcis was the Punic stronghold which suffered little Roman immigration rendering it as pure a Punic site as possible given the circumstances. With this in mind I strode to work and the present thesis is the end result. 2 I would like to thank my thesis councilor Jon Iddeng for pointing me in the right direction for valuable sources, helping me out with understanding the Latin inscriptions and giving invaluable comments upon my work in progress. Furthermore I want to thank Professor David Mattingly for supplying me with tips for source materials and Professor Karel Jongeling and his Ph.D student Robert M. Kerr for letting me read some of their unpublished work and helping me understand a bit more about the complexities of the Late Punic language and its epigraphic corpus. Andreas Lagaard 29.04.08 3 Abbreviations: AE: L'Année épigraphique CIL: Corpus Inscriptionum Latinorum CIS: Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum IPT: Iscrizioni Puniche Della Tripolitania IRT: Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania Tables: Table 1 p 32 Libyphoenician and Roman/Hellenistic deities in Carthage's Latin inscriptions Table 2 p 33 Libyphoenician and Roman/Hellenistic deities in Carthage's Latin inscriptions alongside the Christian and Jewish inscriptions Table 3 p 35 Inscriptions with and without Libyphoenician elements from Lepcis Table 4 p 49 Carthage and Lepcis' Neo-Punic and Latin inscriptions Table 5 p 54 Lepcis' Neo-Punic multilingual corpus Table 6 p 56 Lepcis' public and possibly private Neo-Punic corpus Table 7 p 63 Carthage and Lepcis' Latin corpus with Libyphoenician elements Table 8 p 67 Lepcis' dated inscriptions, a development 4 Table of contents: Introduction Chapter p 8 1.Historical background for the Canaanites p 8 2. Historical background for the Tyrians and the Phoenicians in general p 9 3. The colonies in the Western Mediterranean basin p 10 4. The confrontations with Rome p 11 5. Aftermath p 12 6. Classical Historiography p 13 7. Modern Historiography p 13 Theory & Method Chapter p 15 1.The problem of Romanization p 15 2.David Cherry's requirements for acculturation models and critique of other models p 17 3. David Cherry's model p 19 4. My approach p 20 5.Important definitions p 21 6. Availability of sources and problem statements p 23 7. Selected intellectual cultural values p 24 Religion Chapter p 26 1. Problematic sources p 26 2. Carthage before the fall p 26 3. Roman era Carthage p 28 4. Lepcis Magna p 33 5. Comparison p 36 6. The Libyphoenician cults and Christianity p 39 7. Running it through the Cherry requirements p 41 8. Conclusion p 42 5 Language Chapter p 44 1.Historical context and background p 44 2.Framework for analysis p 46 3. Neo-Punic p 46 4.Latino-Punic p 59 5.Greco-Punic p 61 6.Other major Libyphoenician sites in Tunisia and Libya p 61 7.The Latin inscriptions p 62 8. Running it through the Cherry requirements p 64 9.Conclusion p 65 Institution chapter p 69 1.Historical background p 69 2.General political history and regional administrative framework in the Roman period p 71 3.Framework for analysis p 76 4.Lepcis Magna p 77 5. Carthage's Libyphoenician institutions p 80 6. Running it through the Cherry requirements p 83 7. Conclusion p 84 Conclusion Chapter p 87 1.Reservations on the available evidence/Cherry's model revisited p 87 2.Summary of the argument so far p 88 3.Final comparison p 90 4.Final argument p 92 5.Avenues for further research p 96 Source Chapter p 98 1.Reservations regarding the selection of sources p 98 2. Classical sources p100 3. Contemporary sources p103 4. Literature list p112 6 7 Introduction Chapter As the theme of this thesis I´ve chosen the Punic culture and civilization in the Western Mediterranean in the period after 146 B.C.E when Carthage the leading Punic city was destroyed by the Romans. 1.Historical background for the Canaanites The origins of the Carthaginian and the other Punic citystates can be found in the area roughly comprising modern Lebanon. ( Aubet, 2001, p 13 ) The people the Greeks called the Phoinikes and we today commonly call the Phoenicians did not themselves employ this term. Instead they called themselves Can´ani or what we would call Canaanites today. ( Aubet, 2001, p 6-13 ) Up until approximately 1200 B.C.E and the end of the Bronze Age the Canaanite territory encompassed the coastal areas from the estuary of the river Orontes in modern day Syria to the Egyptian border in the south. As far back as the Early Bronze Age 3100-2300 B.C.E this territory was centred around great cities like Byblos, Tyre and Megiddo. Due to their geographical position these cities had strong political and commercial ties with Egypt, Mesopotamia and the strong Syrian states. In texts found in the ruins of the ancient city Ebla in contemporary Syria and dating back prior to 2500 B.C.E this territory is called Ga-na-ne (Canaan) or La-ba-na-an (Lebanon). Byblos was the leading city of this early period and the whole area became the most vital commercial link between Egypt and the Syrian states in the centuries from 2500 to 2300 B.C.E. In reality both Byblos and the other Canaanite cities were under strong Egyptian influence and could be said to have been nothing more than vassal states for the Old Kingdom of Egypt. But at the end of the Early Bronze Age the most important Canaanite cities were plundered and burnt by nomadic tribes of Semitic origin and the period from 2300 to 1900 B.C.E marks a stop in the sea trade with Egypt. After 1900 and up to approximately 1550 B.C.E Egypt regained its control over the important cities of Byblos, Ugarit and Megiddo although Tyre is now mentioned as an independent kingdom. In the following period from 1550 to 1200 B.C.E or what is called the Late Bronze Age the Canaanite cities formed a vital part of the great trade network in the Eastern Mediterranean which also included Egypt, Mycenea and Mesopotamia. But at the transition into the Iron Age the cities fall on bad times together with the rest of this trade network. Egypt´s power fades, Mycenea collapses and Ugarit, one of the region's greatest cities is destroyed and abandoned.