Punic language

Yeah.

Oh, dude, what are you talking about? So here's like some of the literary of Phoenician and Punic sources equate Baal-Haman with Kronos-Saturn.

So there you go.

A person who mentioned Saturn worship known in the Greco-Roman tradition for devouring children.

These fields are conventionally referred to as tofits by archaeologists after the location in the Bible.

When Carthaginian inscriptions refer to these locations, they use the terms house, temple, or sanctuary, or shrine, not tofit.

Archaeology reveals two generations of Punic Tophets, those founded by Phoenician colonists between 800 and 400 BCE, and those established under Carthaginian influence, direct or indirect, in North Africa from 14th century to BC onward.

No Carthaginian literary text survived that would explain or describe what rituals were performed at the Tophet.

He comes out, looks at the stone.

I think it's Iberian Punic.

I think I can translate it.

It's Iberian Punic?

Iberian Punic.

And, yeah, I mean, who can read that? Well, what is that? Well, Iberia is the Spain, that whole deal, right? So Punic is a form of ancient, ancient writing.

Oh, very cool.

Fun word.

And I first purchased the Mr. K many faces book from David Hatcher Childress, I believe in 1991, first part of 1991.

And I had looked at it, and I'd studied ancient alphabets and such, and it looked to me like some Punic characters, some Latin characters, but there wasn't enough really to study, par se.

And then when I teamed up with Paul, after I'd met him, then he was fluent in many, like eight languages, eight modern languages, and he also had studied ancient Latin alphabets, and Asia Punic, Egyptian hieroglyph and stuff like that in his earlier years.

So we kind of meshed together and hit it right off.

And he started looking at the scripted tablets out of the books and I ordered a couple of other books and then I ordered some pictures and he busted the language or the primary language on the stones in June of 1994.

Rome feared Carthage was creeping too close to their borders and simultaneously they just desperately coveted that Sicilian wealth.

And that paranoia and greed is what sparks the First Punic War, which, by the way, becomes this savage grinding meat grinder of a conflict that drags on for 25 grueling years.

25 years of just brutal warfare.

Yeah.

Totally.

And it didn't stop at highbrow poetry either.

Down in the dusty streets, Roman comedies featured actors speaking absolute, made-up gibberish, pretending it was the Punic language, designed specifically to make the Carthaginians look like ridiculous, uncultured barbarians.

It is the ancient equivalent of state-sponsored fake news, and it was deployed with legal efficiency.

[upbeat music] In the world where Carthage won, what do things look like? Well, let's start with the words coming out of people's mouths.

The language of the Western Mediterranean is Punic.

It was the tongue of Carthage.

Punic is a Semitic language.

It's a close cousin of Hebrew and a more distant relative of Arabic.

Uh, it's full of sounds and roots that really have nothing to do with Latin.

But two tiny things did survive, and they tell you how total the erasure was.

The actual spoken language of Carthage hung on in North Africa for centuries after the city was gone.

Now, I haven't mentioned the Greeks and Romans for a while, so I'm going to throw them in now.

While ancient Egyptian had its own sophisticated scribal tradition, Greek and Roman writers encountered a multilingual North Africa in which Punic, Latin and indigenous languages coexisted.

But the Greeks and the Romans weren't really doing comparative African linguistics.

They were principally concerned with the description of Greek and Latin, and when they encountered other languages, they tended to record individual words, names or anecdotes, rather than systematically analyse their grammatical structure.

One of our most interesting witnesses is Augustine of Hippo, which is a brilliant name.

Writing in the 4th and early 5th centuries AD, he repeatedly refers to Punic, which was still spoken in Roman North Africa.

He records individual Punic words and stresses the practical importance of people who could speak the language.

His evidence is particularly valuable because it shows that Punic survived as a vernacular alongside prestigious Latin, long after Carthage itself had disappeared.

Around 800 or so BCE, the Phoenicians established a seaside colony in the center of North Africa, shown here in the yellow circle.

It was named Kart Hadasht, or New City, in the Punic language.

We say Carthage.

So that just means new city.

The one, tall, dark, and wiry, with pure Semitic features and the limbs of a giant, was Magro, the famous Carthaginian captain, whose name was still a terror on every shore from Gaul to the Euxine.

The other, a white-bearded, swarthy man, with indomitable courage and energy stamped upon every eager line of his keen, aquiline face, was Gisgo the politician, a man of the highest Punic blood, a suffete of the purple robe, and the leader of that party in the state which had watched and striven amid the selfishness and slothfulness of his fellow countrymen to rouse the public spirit and waken the public conscience to the ever-increasing danger from Rome.

As they talked, the two men glanced continually with earnest, anxious faces towards the northern skyline.

It is certain, said the older man, with gloom in his voice and bearing, none have escaped save ourselves.

Upon the high bluff of Megara there stood a great concourse of the people of Carthage who had hurried forth from the city upon the news that the galleys were in sight.

They stood now, rich and poor, effete and plebeian, white Phoenician and dark Kabyle, gazing with breathless interest at the spectacle before them.

Some hundreds of feet beneath them the Punic galley had drawn so close that with their naked eyes they could see those stains of battle which told their dismal tale.

The Romans too were heading in such a way that it was before their very faces that their ship was about to be cut off.

This meant the voyage from Carthage to the Strait of Gibraltar, and then to Kern, took as long as the initial journey from Carthage to the Straits.

The name itself is believed to be a Greek corruption of a Punic word, meaning last outpost.

This suggests Kern might have been near the limit of prior exploration.

Scholars have debated Kern's location, though no consensus has ever been reached.

So, a- along the northern, northwest coast of Africa.

And no doubt for people who understand the Punic culture, uh, the, the Punic culture was basically a Phoenician culture.

Uh, and the Phoenicians came f- from all around, again as we know, even on the coast of, of Lebanon, and basically took, took over or, or, or nor- the north coast of Africa, et cetera, the islands.

Well, he refers to this, this basically Phoenician pillar, this, this pil- this two pillars of white, and it's, it's also referenced, or he, this, he's writing around 500 AD or so.

So that makes it extremely challenging, uh, to look at when you, to look at ancient history.

For them, it, they dealt primarily in, in oral traditions, um, rather than, um, inscriptions.

And so just a different type, which so at the end of the day, uh, you're like there, there's other, there, there is evidence if you look it up, which is completely, uh, dismissed by, I would say, modern American archeologists in that you do have examples of, of Punic, uh, being written here.

You have example of, uh, which is a Phoenician language.