The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean

by Carolina Lopez-Ruiz

  The Latin term suffete, for example, is recognizable as the equivalent of the Punic shofet. The Carthaginian constitution had two of these annually elected magistrates at its head, and this has led to disagreement between scholars as to the agency through which this particular institution was introduced to other communities within North Africa. The map established by Souraya Belkahia and Ginette di Vita-Evrard shows that the majority of attestations of suffetes are located in the ancient hinterland of Carthage, although attestations appear as far west as Cirta and Volubilis, and as far south as Capsa and Lepcis Magna (Belkahia and di Vita-Evrard 1995: 271).

  Although the majority of the inscriptions are Latin and date to the period of the High Empire, the spread of the institution has often been interpreted as the general legacy of Phoenicio-Punic influence, thought only to become visible later with the development of the epigraphic habit. Some have thought that the institution was the legacy of a broad but loosely hierarchical network of more or less autonomous Phoenicio-Punic cities (Gsell 1928, 2:290–92; Nicolet 1978: 596–99); others that it was the direct and top-down agency of Carthaginian imperialism and colonization (Pilkington 2013); yet others have suggested the willing adoption and propagation of such a constitution by Numidian and Mauretanian élites (Mommsen 1886: 329–30).

  There is probably no single model that can explain the genesis of these municipal offices in every context, or the precise way in which they functioned. It is important to remember that by the Roman period many of these communities were subordinated into broader municipal hierarchies, such as that of the Cirtan federation or the pertica of Carthage, which covered large areas of territory. Some groups, such as the seven free peoples mentioned in the Lex agraria, may well have simply retained an institutional framework that was already in place before the Roman conquest. For the inland communities, Stéphane Gsell wondered whether or not the attestations of suffetes, the majority of which date to the second century ce, really indicated a continuity with the Carthaginian practice, or a more recent borrowing relating to the context of Roman imperialism in Africa (Gsell 1928: 2:302). This idea has been championed most recently by Josephine Quinn and Matthew McCarty (Quinn and McCarty 2015: 181–90). One most commonly finds two suffetes or magistri at the head of each local assembly, which mirrored the Roman practice of having two chief municipal magistrates in the form of duoviri. Quinn and McCarty suggest, therefore, that some of these communities, especially those in Numidia such as Cirta and Thugga, may have chosen to adopt the institution of suffetes as a way of communicating with both the Roman administration and the settlements of Italian colonists, through a municipal structure that was familiar to them (Quinn and McCarty 2015: 181–90). Two cities, Althiburos and Mactar, and possibly a third, Thubursicu Bure, possessed a college of three suffetes. One thus appears to be seeing a uniformity of terminology, which may be concealing a degree of variety in local practice.

  The Punic Language

  This region of North Africa, which had already been multicultural and diverse before Roman rule (Fentress 2013), became even more so with the increased connectivity and colonization that followed. The most obvious point to make about language use in ancient North Africa is that it aptly reflected this multiculturalism. It is impossible to infer anything numerically accurate about the relative importance of speakers of the different languages from the inscriptions which survive of the various written forms of the languages that were in use (Prag 2013; on Phoenician-Punic language, see also chapter 15, this volume).

  From the extant literary and epigraphic material one can state that Punic continued to be widely spoken across North Africa, alongside indigenous languages that are represented by inscriptions bearing the Libyco-Berber script (Jongeling and Kerr 2005: 1–6; Kerr 2010: 13–24; Lepelley 2005). Other languages, such as Greek, Latin, and to a lesser extent Etruscan, coexisted with these in the urban settlements but also sometimes on rural estates (Heurgon 1969). The distributions of Libyco-Berber, neo-Punic, Latin, and Greek inscriptions overlap considerably; various bilingual and even trilingual examples exist and it seems beyond doubt that multilingualism would have been a natural fact in the lives of many (Adams 2003: 200–47; Camps 1994; Lepelley 2005; Wilson 2012).

  The term “Late Punic epigraphy” denotes the several hundred inscriptions articulating the Punic language which roughly postdate the fall of Carthage in 146 bce. Based on the type of script, this body of material can be divided into several categories: Punic, neo-Punic and Latino-Punic, all of which are known to be representations of essentially the same spoken language. Some earlier inscriptions from Constantine/Cirta also appear to be attempts to inscribe the Punic language using Greek characters and are referred to as Graeco-Punic (Kerr 2010: 227–30; Wilson 2012: 266). Somewhat unhelpfully, the term “neo-Punic” has often been used to refer to other artifacts or forms of material culture which do not contain the neo-Punic script—for example, the contemporary anepigraphic stelae which are derived from the same religious and funerary sites as their inscribed counterparts. Strictly speaking, however, the term “neo-Punic” refers only to a type of script, which by the first century bce had become standard for rendering the Punic language into text. The first examples of this script emerged perhaps as early as the third century bce, however, and one therefore imagines a long period of transition, not easily demonstrable on the basis of the rather loose dating criteria.

  By the fourth century bce Greek had become something like the lingua franca of the central Mediterranean (Lengrand 2005). The dominance of Punic in parts of the western Mediterranean and especially in North Africa, however, meant that Numidian and Mauretanian aristocracies would have been familiar with texts written in both languages. The Numidian royal dynasties especially displayed many strong contacts with the Hellenistic monarchies of the Greek-speaking east (Mattingly 1997), while the coinage, which they began to mint in the context of the Second Punic War and its aftermath, bore Punic legends (Alexandropoulos 2007, 2011; on coins, see also chapter 25, this volume).

  Following the destruction of Carthage a collection of surviving works written in Punic was given to the Numidian royal dynasty (Plin. HN XVIII.5; Sallust, Jug. XVII.7), and the coins of later Numidian kings and the first emissions of the Mauretanian kings had legends written in the neo-Punic script. Coins bearing a variant of the neo-Punic script were also minted in the hinterland of Gades between the mid-second and mid-first centuries bce (Jiménez 2014). Toward the end of the Republican period neo-Punic sometimes appeared in combination with Latin on the African coinages (Adams 2003: 207; Alexandropoulos 2007).

  While literary references to libri punici and numerous examples of neo-Punic or Latino-Punic ostraca and graffiti demonstrate that written Punic had a wide variety of uses, the vast majority of surviving “Late Punic” epigraphy has been recovered on stone stelae from tophet or funerary sites (For some notable exceptions, see Callegarin et al. 2016: 95–103; Al-Qusbat N 1 in Jongeling 2008: 41–44; Mattingly 1995: 258). Latin inscriptions were rare initially—only five have so far been recorded which predate 46 bce (Zucca 1996). They quickly eclipsed the use of neo-Punic on monumental public buildings in Tripolitania (Wilson 2012), however, during the first century ce, and numbered in their tens of thousands across North Africa generally by the second century ce. It is the religious context, therefore, in which written Punic remains disproportionately visible to us.

  Religious and Funerary Rituals

  Stefan Ardeleanu has recently observed that even in much current work the attempt to categorize the funerary archaeology within individual settlements in terms of ethnic or cultural origins remains the norm (Ardeleanu 2014: 478). This flies in the face of the fact that in Numidia apparently very few new necropolises were built and that the majority of towns appear to have retained their funerary topography. Current debate surrounds the often repeated fallacy that Roman colonists and the preexisting population created a segregated religious topography. On the contrary, we know, for example, that at settlements
such as Thugga they were integrated into the same cults from very early on (Ritter 2006; pace Saint-Amans 2004). Despite changes in iconography and language use, the continuities of ritual practice at cult sites have often been stressed (Schörner 2007; on funerary practices, see also chapter 20, this volume).

  The “late tophet” sites, for example, have long been seen as an indication of cultural continuity, in the sense that they, like the much smaller number of “classic” tophet sites which preceded them, also include ex voto sacrificial offerings, burnt and interred within an urn, followed by the erection of a stele above (McCarty 2012–2013: 93–94). Although some sites had an earlier origin, the diffusion of late tophet sites throughout North Africa appears to have gained its main impetus from the latter half of the second century bce. Indeed, a number of the late stelae sanctuaries even appear to have begun their life during the imperial period (Quinn and McCarty 2015: fig. 3). Such chronological patterning has led some scholars to associate the phenomenon with refugee groups resettling themselves at various places following the destruction of Carthage (McCarty 2012–2013: 93–94; D’Andrea 2015: 204; Shaw 2016: 275). Here, therefore, strands of change and continuity were intricately interwoven. Even the “Salammbó” tophet at Carthage, which used to be seen as the example par excellence of rupture in religious practice, given the destruction of the city in 146 bce, may have enjoyed a greater level of ritual continuity than was previously thought (Bénichou-Safar 2013: 244; Hurst 1999; on the tophet, see also chapter 21, this volume).

  The content of the neo-Punic inscriptions on the stelae from the late tophet sites is more or less similar to those at Salammbó, although sometimes they were dedicated by groups of citizens, or the entire community, rather than by a single individual (D’Andrea 2014a: 497; 2015; Quinn 2011: 402). While debate about the nature of the classic tophet sites continues (Xella et al. 2013; Shaw 2016: 264–66), it can be observed that the late tophet sites tend to lack unequivocal evidence for human sacrifice. Although some sites west of the Fossa Regia have presented human child remains, animal sacrifices appear to have become the norm (D’Andrea 2014a: 497; 2014b: 294). Nonetheless, the continuity is striking, given that similar ritual practices appear to have ceased at most other classic tophet sites outside of Africa significantly earlier than the Third Punic War (McCarty 2011: 203–204). The “Late Punic” stelae from these and other non–tophet-like funerary sites differ from their “Punic” predecessors in that they tended to be much larger and less commonly inscribed. In terms of their iconography and method of carving they display both continuities and developments (Bénichou-Safar 2013; Mendleson 2003). Many of the groups have distinct local characteristics which defy any simple categorization into “Punic,” “Roman,” or “Libyphoenician,” and offer much further potential in terms of the study of regional identities. The coastal and pre-desert zone of Tripolitania, for example, provides an interesting contrast, appearing to have been relatively autonomous in its development from that of Carthage (Mattingly 2005: 255–69).

  Conclusion

  North Africa’s various multicultural regions exhibited their own internal trajectories of historical and cultural development before and after the destruction of Carthage in 146 bce. While some of these were inevitably modified by the Roman conquest, the ways in which certain practices were adopted or maintained by individual communities may in fact have had little to do with identifying strongly with either the prior or newly ascendant imperial power. Knowledge of the impressive levels of multiculturalism and integration within North Africa throughout the first millennium bce and into the Roman period should motivate us to give greater nuance to the explanatory models which we attempt to build in future.

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