Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

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Ever wonder why Spain was a civilized province while Gaul and Germany remained hostile frontiers for the Roman republic? Just take a look at the map in this article. Spain originally belonged to Carthage. Large parts of Rome's empire were civilized, not by Rome, but by Carthage and the Phoenicians.

I think you're right that the Phoenicians deserve more credit, as does Carthage. There is yet hope more of their history may come to light. We're unlikely to uncover records on the organic media the Phoenician alphabet was tailored for, but Mesopotamian cultures were contemporaries of the Phoenicians and we're discovering/translating new cuneiform tablets all the time. Entire Mesopotamian cities remain to be discovered, and some significant ones that we know of are likely buried beneath modern settlements.

We may never get the Phonecian's story from their own perspective, but we may yet get a better picture of them from people who didn't have a vested interest in erasing their history.

We have a lot of documents from Ugarit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugarit

This is mostly a matter of excavating the tells we can see with our eyes. The history is easy to discover, but there's very little interest, so it doesn't get done.

Note that the initial wave of archaeology in Mesopotamia was fueled by popular interest in the Bible. That sputtered out when archaeology turned out not to support most of what the Bible said. So now there isn't interest from people who'd like to see the Bible confirmed, and there also isn't interest from the general public who have no particular connection to the region.

Maybe with enough atheists the bible will turn from religion to mythology and people will become interested again.

Personally at least i find the cultural context the bible sprouted up in to be really interesting.

This isn't really what happened. Plenty of Christians are still interested in levantine excavations, and plenty of satisfying evidence has been found for biblical narratives -- eg the Pilate stone and the dead sea scrolls -- but there are now fewer Christians per capita in the West and the middle east has become significantly less stable.

> and plenty of satisfying evidence has been found for biblical narratives -- eg the Pilate stone and the dead sea scrolls

That's not what people wanted. The Pilate stone records the existence of a person named Pilatus. We infer that this was Pontius Pilatus, and there's nothing particularly wrong with that.

But it does nothing to confirm a Biblical narrative. Calling it "satisfying evidence" is similar to picking a fight with someone, losing as badly as you can imagine, and then issuing a press release afterwards to the effect that that outcome was what you wanted all along.

By contrast, a major controversy arising from Mesopotamian archaeology was the discovery of the Mesopotamian flood myth, which severely undermined the Bible by being the obvious source of the myth of Noah while contradicting it in pretty much every particular. That's the kind of thing that destroyed popular interest in Mesopotamian archaeology.

You got a citation crediting the Carthaginians rather than indigenous Iberian cultures?

Try "Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization" by Richard Miles. It is not in dispute that Carthage had a long presence in Spain. If you are arguing that this had no impact on local culture, you'd need to provide some compelling evidence.

Thanks for the recommendation but just to clarify the claim I am querying is that the reason Iberia was “civilised” was due to the Carthaginian presence.

> Large parts of Rome's empire were civilized, not by Rome, but by Carthage and the Phoenicians.

That’s more than a claim that that the Carthaginians held overlordship of southern and eastern Iberia.

This is painting the Gauls as far more primitive than they were. They weren’t particularly “uncivilized” (which is far more a compliment than I think you realize), they just didn’t want to be subjugated and thus were subjected to genocide by Julius Caesar.

Perhaps I should have put "civilized" in quotes. We're talking about populations becoming accustomed to living in an large, organized state, paying taxes, and relying on the state for security and redress of grievances rather than warring with their neighbors. Basically, being part of an empire.

It's easier to absorb populations that are already part of an empire into another empire than it is to stitch a collection of sometimes warring tribes with different forms of organization into an empire. When Carthage fell, Rome was able to assume rule of Carthage's former colonies with relative ease, Carthage having already done the hard work of empire building.

Forcing the Gauls to become Romans was a considerably harder thing to do that required much bloodshed. It wasn't all Caesar. Caesar didn't even finish the job. Rome's efforts to absorb Gaul started long before Julius Caesar and continued after him as well. He only led one campaign in Gaul that we happen to have a historical record of, written by Caesar himself, who was a master of self-promotion.

What I was trying to point out is that the difference between Gaul and Spain was that the Romans had to create an imperial province in Gaul, while they inherited one that had already been created by Carthage in Spain.

When you say stitch, I hear subjugate.

Fair point about the before and after Caeser. The historical record is pretty clear that enormous volumes of Gauls died during their “civilization” at the hands of Rome.

It’s true that populations that have already been brutalized into an empire are easier to absorb by other empires. I guess I was responding to the language you were using that (to me) presumes that being smashed down and genocided into the murky doublethink of empire is a net positive for the cultures being rapaciously absorbed against their will.

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