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Richard Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization Penguin, 2012
Richard Miles is a professor of history at the University of Sydney and a Fellow Commoner of Trinity Hall, at the University of Cambridge. He has extensive knowledge of the ancient world. He wrote about the Punic wars, the Romans, the Vandals of North Africa and hosted on BBC a television series - Ancient Worlds. He also directed archeological excavations in Carthage and Rome.
The title was inspired by the famous statement of the Roman senator, Cato the Elder, "Delenda est Carthago" - "Carthage must be destroyed" - which sealed the fate of that Mediterranean city. The book provides a sweeping yet vivid narrative of about ten centuries of developments that led to the destruction of Carthage, after three Punic Wars. The book is a comprehensive history of Carthage, from its origins to its demise. The purpose of the book is to recreate the lost world of the great North African metropolis and to "reassess some of the comfortable historical certainties that underpin many of the modern West's assumptions about its own cultural and intellectual heritage."(22). Miles wants to prove that Western civilization is not founded exclusively on Roman and Greek cultures but is indebted to other cultures and people as well. The author uses primary sources, secondary sources and the latest archeological discoveries. However, he points out that the Greek and Roman sources are negative and clichéd. They promote the image of cruel, unmerciful people, untrustworthy, cheaters who practiced child sacrifice to appease their gods. It was this version of the history of Carthage that was adopted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Western Europe.
Miles commences his story with the roots of the Carthaginians in Phoenicia - the land of the color purple. The Phoenicians' prosperity was the result of their outstanding mastery of the sea. They created a network for trade with merchants stationed in foreign ports as royal agents who...