The Founding of Carthage

The Phoenicians sailed all around the Mediterranean Sea. And they started colonies—little settlements of Phoenician people—in many of the places where they landed. One of the most famous cities was Tyre, over in Canaan.

Carthage was first settled around 814 BC/BCE. At first, Carthage was just a tiny village. But soon it grew to be a huge, busy city where merchants from all different countries came to trade their goods.

We don’t know the names of the first Phoenicians who settled in Carthage. But later, a great writer named Virgil told this famous story about the beginnings of the city of Carthage:

ido was a Phoenician princess, the sister of the king of Tyre. She should have been happy. She was married to a very rich man, and she lived in a palace. But Dido’s brother, the king, was jealous of her and of her husband’s wealth. He wanted all that money for himself!

So the king had Dido’s husband arrested and put to death. Dido was terrified. Would she be next? She gathered together all of her friends and left Tyre in the middle of the night. They pushed away from the shore in a boat and sailed away, never to return.

Dido and her friends traveled and traveled. Finally, they spotted land. “Let’s go ashore here, and build a new city!” Dido urged her friends. They agreed, but when they reached the place where Dido wanted to settle, they found that the land was already settled.

“We should go somewhere else,” Dido’s friends said. But Dido was determined to build her new city on that very spot. She wanted to live close to the water, so that ships would visit her new city and trade with her. So she said to the owner of the land, “Will you sell me as much land as I can cover with the skin of a bull?”

“Of course!” the owner agreed. He thought that Dido would put her bull hide down over a little patch of ground, just large enough to stand on. But instead, Dido got out a very sharp knife and cut her bull hide into hundreds of long, thin strips. She laid the strips out, end to end, around a huge portion of land.

“There!” she said. “Now keep your promise and sell me this ground.”

The owner of the land was forced to agree. So Dido and her friends built a tower on the ground and named their tower “Bull’s Hide.” They settled around the tower and named their city Carthage. Soon, ships from all over the world came to Carthage to buy and sell their goods. The city bought with a bull’s skin became one of the most powerful in the world.

Note to Parent: The Phoenician civilization was at its height between 1200–700 BC/BCE.