The Sahara & The Cattle Period

By 500 B.C. a new influence arrived in the form of the Greeks and Phoenicians. Greek traders spread along the eastern coast of the desert, establishing trading colonies along the Red Sea coast. The Carthaginians explored the Atlantic coast of the desert. Phoenician/Carthaginians colonized the Mediterranean coast in the 8th to 6th Centuries BCE. Greeks also had established colonies along the coast. Then Romans from the three legions stationed there added to the cultural mix of the Tarraconensis. Jewish artefacts exist from the 3rd century.

Germanic tribes and North African "Moors" arrived later. The most popular deity in Roman Spain was Isis, followed by Magna Mater, the great mother. The Carthaginian-Phoenician deities Melqart (both a solar deity and a sea-god) and Tanit-Caelestis (a mother-queen with possible lunar connections) were also popular. The Greek gods Demeter and Persephone and the Roman goddess Juno were adapted to later religious patterns of the Carthaginians. The turbulence of the waters and the lack of markets never led to an extensive presence further south than modern Morocco (Atlas Mountains.)

The Phoenician alphabet (Proto-Canaanite) served as the origin of the Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Arabic alphabets. The center of Phoenician power had shifted westward to the Tyrian colony of Carthage. The Phoenician alphabet has been termed an abjad or a script that contains no vowels. A cuneiform abjad originated to the north in Ugarit, a Canaanite city of northern Syria, in the 14th century BC. Their language, Phoenician, has been considered by some authorities as a Northwest Semitic language of the Canaanite subgroup. Its later descendant in North Africa is termed Punic.

The Phoenicians propagate the phonetic alphabet in the Mediterranean during the first millenium B.C. while Geometry is developed and the Pythagorean theorem proved. Pythagoras, a mainland Ionian of Hellen Greece, belonged to the Athenians in the peninsula of Attica.Pythagoras was born approximately 580 BC–500 B.C. on the island of Samos, off the coast of Asia Minor. He was born to Pythais (his mother, a native of Samos) and Mnesarchus (a merchant from Tyre). Pythagoras's theorem is a relation in Euclidean geometry between the three sides of a right triangle. Euclidean geometry is a mathematical system due to the Hellenistic mathematician Euclid of Alexandria. The method consists of assuming a small set of intuitively appealing axioms-any symbolism tends to follow a syllabary.

During the Dorian Hexapolis, the other two groups were the Dorians and the Aeolians. From the northern shores of the Aegean Sea in Thrace, Miletus colonists were home to Marseilles, France. Iona's Mycenaean Greek reconstruction is Iawones. Carthage engaged in war almost continually with Greece and with Rome for 150 years. Wars with Greece, beginning in 409 BC, concerned the control of Sicily, from Carthage and formed a natural bridge between North Africa and Italy. Carthage first encountered defeat in Sicily in 480 BC, when the Carthaginian general Hamilcar (flourished 5th century BC) commanded a force that hoped to expand Carthaginian influence throughout Sicily, but was defeated by Gelon, the tyrant (ruler) of Syracuse.

From Greek legend to mainland myth, the invading Dorians in the Heroic Age, leaving Attica as the only European outpost of the Ionian race.

The arrival of Alexander the Great in 333 – 332 B.C. is the main turning point, for Hellenistic Phoenicia lost its influential mercantile role, and the distinctive culture of its cities was Hellenized under Alexander and his Macedonian successors. After Alexander had defeated Darius for the second time at the Battle of Issus, his most obvious strategy would have been to move to the east together with his army and royal hostages, to the heart of the Persian Empire before Darius had time to recruit new soldiers. However he was determined to fulfill his first plan, which was to gain control over the coastal areas. He moved southwards down the Syrian coast. He reached Tyre in 332 BC and it refused to surrender; thus begins the Siege of Tyre and Gaza.

The First Punic War (264-241 BC) brought to the fore the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca. Defeated in Sicily, Hamilcar invaded Spain. His conquests in southern Spain were completed by his son-in-law Hasdrubal and by his son Hannibal. Carthage ceded its holdings in Sicily to Rome after the final Roman victory at the Aegates Islands. Hannibal established its supremacy over other great powers such as Carthage, Macedon, Syracuse and the Seleucid empire.

During the Second Punic War (218-201 BC), Hannibal marched eastward along the northern shore of the Mediterranean from Iberia-Spain over the Pyrenees and finally crossed the Alps into Italy which included war elephants. Hannibal's final defeat, however, resulted in the loss of Spain and various island possessions of Carthage. During his invasion of Italy he defeated the Romans in a series of battles, including those at Trebia, Trasimene and Cannae. After the Battle of Cannae, Capua, then the second largest city in Rome, defected from the Roman Republic and joined Hannibal. Cannae is estimated to be within the thirty costliest battles in all of recorded human history.

In the Third Punic War (149-146 BC), the Romans under Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus Numantinus destroyed the city of Carthage. In a final gesture of contempt, the Romans spread salt over the ruins. The victors thus fulfilled the wish of the Roman statesman Cato the Elder. Roman Carthage also became a center of Christianity, being the seat of a bishop from late in the 2nd century. St. Cyprian was bishop there in 248; Tertullian, a Christian ecclesiastical writer, lived and worked in Carthage in the 3rd century; and St. Augustine was bishop of nearby Hippo in the early 5th century.

For several centuries the Mediterranean was a "Roman Lake," surrounded on all sides by the empire. One portion of the empire was Judea, and in time, a religion founded in that region, Christianity, spread throughout the empire and eventually became its official faith. The western part of the empire, Gaul, Iberia, and the Maghreb with the Atlas Mountains. were invaded by nomadic horse peoples from the Eurasian steppe. These conquerors soon became settled, and adopted many of the local customs, forming many small and warring kingdoms. Carthage was fortified against barbarian attack in 425. In 439 the Vandal king Gaiseric subjugated the city. It remained the Vandal capital until 533, when the Byzantine general Belisarius captured the city, renaming it Colonia Justiniana Carthago in honor of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I.

The Greeks expanded throughout the Black Sea and south through the Red Sea. The Phoenicians spread through the western Mediterranean including North Africa and Spain. The Phoenician heartland in the Levant was still dominated by powers rooted east in Mesopotamia or Persia, and the Phoenicians often provided the naval forces of the Persian Empire. These eastern powers soon began to be overshadowed by those further west. In North Africa the former Phoenician colony of Carthage, a city on the Italian peninsula, Rome, that would eventually dominate the entire Mediterranean basin. The Romans soon spread east taking Greece, and the Greek heritage played an important role in the Roman Empire. Egyptian power moved from the Nile cities to the coastal ones, especially Alexandria. Mesopotamia became a fringe border region between the Roman Empire and the Persians.

Minorca, one of the Balearic Islands was called Nura by the Phoenicians in honoring their god Ba‘al Hammon was the chief god at Carthage and was also important in Hispania, with meaning 'island of fire.' The Roman occupation of Hispania had meant a growth of maritime trade between the Iberian and Italian peninsulas. Pirates took advantage of the strategic location of the Balearic Islands to raid Roman commerce, using both Minorca and Majorca as bases. The Imperial province of Hispania Tarraconensis lasted until the invasions of the 5th century, beginning in 409, which encouraged the Basques and Cantabri to revolt, and ended with the establishment of a Visigothic kingdom. The Cantabri in the northwest corner of Iberia (Cantabria, to the east on the Basque Country, to the south on Castile and León provinces of León, Palencia, and Burgos) were the last people to be pacified.

 

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