Who Were the Carthaginians?

By Brandon Pilcher Actor Vin Diesel has recently announced that he and Denzel Washington will star in two movies that are both directed by Tony Scott and set in the ancient northwest African city of Carthage. Diesel says he will play the famous general Hannibal Barca, the man who led an army of elephants across the Alps towards Rome, in the second movie whereas Washington will be Hannibal's father Hamilcar in the first movie (WorstPreviews 2010). The decision to cast the dark-skinned AfricanAmerican Washington as a Carthaginian leader brings to mind a heated debate that has surrounded the Carthaginians: were they black Africans? Perhaps the first man to bring up the question of Hannibal and his compatriots' ethnic background was the Jamaican-born journalist Joel Augustus Rogers (18831965), who in numerous writings asserted that a number of famous historical figures traditionally portrayed as white were really black or had recent black ancestry. Hannibal was among the many individuals Rogers claimed were black or mulatto (Adams 2005), his logic being that since Hannibal lived in Africa, he must have been black. Not only is this poor reasoning, but it betrays a lack of knowledge about Carthage's origins. What Rogers overlooked is that Carthage was not an indigenous African civilization in the way ancient Egypt, Mali, and Great Zimbabwe were, but was rather a colony founded by Phoenician settlers from the area now called Lebanon in 814 BC. Those people were no more African than the Dutch settlers who would become South African Boers; their true biological and cultural affinities lay with the Middle East. That said, the Carthaginians did eventually expand their empire to cover much of the northwest African coastline, so no doubt they assimilated some indigenous populations. There is thus no guarantee that the Barcas' bloodline was purely Phoenician. For Hannibal or anyone in his family to be black, we must assume that they mixed with black peoples who were already living in northwestern Africa prior to Phoenician colonization, raising the question of just who were the people aboriginal to that part of the continent. Given that northern Africa has historically been invaded and settled many times not only by Phoenicians but also Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Arabs, Turks, and others from Europe and the Middle East, and given the extensive importation of both sub-Saharan and European slaves into the area during the Islamic period, it would be nave to conclude that the original northwest African population necessarily resembled the area's modern inhabitants. A better solution would be analyzing the skeletal remains left behind by northwest Africans who lived in

ancient times, for populations vary in skeletal morphology and especially the features of the skull (or cranium). What does this type of anthropological analysis have to say about the biological relationships of the ancient northwest Africans? It appears that coastal northwest Africans like the ones whom the Carthaginians would have ruled have been physically distinct from black African populations as long as recorded history. For example, one study carried out by Pierre M. Vermeersch (2002) compared the skulls of ancient northwest Africans with those of ancient Egyptians, Sudanese, prehistoric Saharan, and sub-Saharan Africans. He found that while the Egyptians, Sudanese, and Saharans were closely affiliated with sub-Saharan peoples, those from the northwestern coastline had a very distinct appearance from the rest. Another researcher named SOY Keita (1990) reported similar results, finding that while ancient Egyptians and Sudanese were predominantly of sub-Saharan affinity, northwest Africans were more varied: some did resemble sub-Saharans, but others were more similar to Europeans, and generally the northwest Africans had a morphology intermediate between subSaharan and European populations. Why would northwestern Africans look any different from other Africans? The answer becomes clear when we look at the region's geography. The northwest African coastline is cut off from the rest of the continent not only by the Sahara Desert (which admittedly has only existed for roughly five thousand years) but also the Atlas Mountains. By contrast, the Iberian Peninsula is comparably a stone's throw away---in fact, one can actually see northwest Africa from the top of Gibraltar Rock in southern Spain. It would have therefore been much easier for southern Europeans to populate the area north of the Atlas Mountains than for Africans living further south. This is not to say that black people were completely absent from the Carthaginian Empire. Not only did Keita find some skulls with sub-Saharan traits in northwest Africa mixed with the more European or intermediate-looking ones as mentioned earlier, but Pittard (1924) does cite one example of a Negroid (i.e. sub-Saharan African) skeleton being found in an ancient sarcophagus belonging to a Carthaginian priestess. Furthermore, Bovill and Hallet (1995) report that black Africans were present in the Carthaginian army which invade Sicily in the early fifth century BC, while the Greek writer Diodoros claimed that one Greek military leader campaigning in what is now Tunisia came across people similar in appearance to Aethiopians or Sudanese (Mokhtar 1990). The totality of the evidence indicates that northwestern Africa in ancient times was ethnically heterogeneous, neither wholly black nor completely free of a black presence. If the Barca family ever interbred with the local northwest Africans, then Hannibal or his father Hamilcar having significant black ancestry, while not

guaranteed, is a real possibility. Bibliography Adams, Cecil. "Was Ludwig van Beethoven of African ancestry?" The Straight Dope. Accessed June 12, 2011. Last modified May 27, 2005. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2598/ was-ludwig-van-beethoven-ofafrican-ancestry. Bovill, E. W., and Robin Hallet. The Golden Trade of the Moors: West African Kingdoms in the Fourteenth Century. 2nd ed., 21-2. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995. Keita, SOY. "Studies of Ancient Crania from Northern Africa." American Journal of Physical Anthropology 83 (1990): 35-48. Mokhtar, G. Ancient civilizations of Africa, 427. Vol. 2 of General History of Africa. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990. Pittard, E. Race and History. New York: Knopf, 1924. Vermeersch, Pierre M. Palaeolithic quarrying sites in Upper and Middle Egypt. Vol. 4 of Egyptian prehistory monographs. Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2002. WorstPreviews.com Staff. "Denzel Washington to Join Vin Diesel in 'Hannibal the Conqueror' Biopic?" WorstPreviews. Accessed June 12, 2011. Last modified August 9, 2010. http://www.worstpreviews.com/headline.php?id=18607.