The Founding of Carthage

Phoenician settlers from Tyre founded a colony on the North African coast that grew into the dominant commercial power of the western Mediterranean. Carthage built its wealth on shipping rather than farming, ran a navy to protect its routes, and planted trading posts from Spain to Sicily. Its merchants may have sailed down the Atlantic coast of Africa and up to Britain for tin. For six centuries it was the richest city in the west — an African metropolis at the center of Mediterranean trade long before Rome mattered.