Merchant Enterprise; or, the History of Commerce

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: I.?CARTHAGE. JLL historians who have written concerning Carthage have regretted that her annals, as far as they have been penned, are the composition of hostile or indifferent foreigners. Whatever truth there may be in the legend that Dido, after the murder of her husband by her brother, King Pygmalion,...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: I.?CARTHAGE. JLL historians who have written concerning Carthage have regretted that her annals, as far as they have been penned, are the composition of hostile or indifferent foreigners. Whatever truth there may be in the legend that Dido, after the murder of her husband by her brother, King Pygmalion, fled from Tyre with all her treasure and a numerous body of friends and dependants and founded Carthage, there is no doubt that the colony was composed of Phoenicians, who had deserted their native land in consequence of domestic broils. Friendly relations subsisted between the parent and the offspring, although the latter was entirely independent; and each was at different times indebted to the other for assistance against an enemy. At the bottom of the large bay, now known as the Gulf of Tunis, is a peninsula which was formerly united to the mainland by an isthmus about three miles broad. Carthage stood on this peninsula, about 94 CARTHAGE. half way between Utica and Tunis, both of which were visible from its walls. A slender neck of land projecting westward into the Mediterranean formed a double harbour for the vessels of commerce and war. A single wall constituted the defence on the side of the sea; but on the isthmus, the citadel, Byrsa, cresting an eminence, and a three-fold wall, afforded protection against invaders. Behind stretched the city, a vast mass of tall houses of cubical shape, built of all sorts of materials, stone, planks, pebbles, reeds, shells, and mud, intersected by innumerable streets, with splendid temples rising here and there from the midst of groves of palms, citron, or cypress, and displaying their polished copper cupolas, glistening in the sun like red gold, their cones of white marble, their twisted columns and richly sculptured corni...