(continued...)
If you read older histories, those written in the modern era, but prior to the second world war, you may find the phoenicians referred to as a "hamitic" people. This is an obsolete and now discredited term, which was originally based on a shamelessly racist view of history. See the entry under "
hamitic" at wikipedia if you want to know more.
By nature, the Phoenicians and Carthaginians were an intensely mercantile people. They did not make war for glory, or for religion. They went to war only to gain or protect markets or resources. The original source of friction between Carthage and Rome was access and control of the Iberian tin mines.
The Phoenicians were arguably the master mariners of the ancient world, although they shared that distinction with the Carians. Carthage was quite familiar with the Atlantic outside the Gates of Hercules. Carthage worked the tin mines in Cornwall, and it has been suggested by one author that the people of Cornwall, with their distinctive appearance and accent, actually number Carthaginians among their ethnic antecendents.
Carthaginians also traded all down the west coast of Africa, and there is considerable evidence that they conducted gold mining operations at several locations in southern Africa.
Difficult to believe, I know, but the wave pattern found on the walls at the "Lost City of Zimbabwe", (for which the nation once known as Rhodesia is now named), are almost identical to the traditional wave pattern with which the Carthaginians decorated everything from pottery to buildings.
Again, the Carthaginians were all about trade. They bought goods cheaply at one port, and traded them at another port where they fetched a higher price. They bought raw materials and processed them into finished goods. They mined ores and refined them into ingots for sale, or combined them to make alloys. They are said to have been the inventors of the process whereby gold and silver were alloyed to form electrum. Certainly they mined copper and tin, alloyed the two, and sold them as bronze ingots.
They were not very interested in the arts, from what we can discover. As far as I know, no examples of carthaginian art have ever been found, other than some bronze figurines, which are tentatively suggested to have been family honor objects, much like the roman family masks.
Caveat - The idea of the Carthaginians having anything to do with Zimbabwe is emphatically not the accepted scientific explanation. Officially it is credited to the ancestors of the modern-day Shona tribe, and claimed to have been constructed in the 12-15th century AD. As you read that article at Wikipedia, remember that carbon-14 only works on organic matter. You cannot date a stone wall, because it was never alive.
