Andrew M Hill

Hamilcar and Hannibal Barca embody a colossal father-son military legacy. Yet their family – the so-called ‘Barcid’ dynasty – has a murky history. Modern scholars have presumed that Hamilcar, the first notable historical figure to bear the name Barkas, received it as a ‘nickname’ meaning ‘lightning’. The rationale is that the name derives from the Phoenician word brq and is thus the equivalent to the Greek epithet Keraunos. There is, however, no evidence in our classical sources, to which exclusively we owe our knowledge of events, supporting this. Furthermore, the name Barca was passed on to Hamilcar’s sons, something suggestive of an inherited family surname. This article submits an alternative to the widely endorsed ‘lightning’ theory. This new perspective explores the possibility that the Barcid dynasty had roots in the city of Barce in Cyrenaica and was a relatively new addition to the Carthaginian aristocracy in the third century BC. Using textual evidence from Polybius, Diodorus and others, this fresh take clarifies other aspects of the Barcid dynasty’s tumultuous history, such as their animosity towards the Carthaginian Council of Elders and their departure to Spain in the 220s.

This thesis is the first monograph dedicated to internal war as an historical phenomenon in Carthaginian (pre-Roman) North Africa; a side-lined but important aspect of the life and development of Carthage’s civilisation which has been largely unexplored and uncontextualized in previous scholarship with respect to wider Mediterranean economic and environmental processes at play in the pre-Hellenistic and Hellenistic world. Ten internal wars (including two political coup attempts) are known to have occurred from literary evidence in the final 250 years till the fall of the city to the Roman Republic (396-146 BC). The most severe of these were the Libyan initiatives referred to throughout this thesis as the First (ca. 396-392), Second (ca. 378-368), and Third (241-237) ‘Libyan Wars’. Only the last of these (also called the ‘Mercenary’ or ‘Truceless War’) is relatively well-known to scholars working outside the area of Punic Carthage. Yet the extent to which issues of supply dictated its course, from the initial military mutiny over sitarchia (‘grain-allowance’), to Carthage’s funnelling of overseas supplies away from rebels in Africa to cause a famine which constrained the violence in its fourth year, has been frequently overlooked.

Maghrebian agriculture has always been vulnerable to climatic variability and change, and Carthage’s environmental sensitivity will have grown concomitant with its territorial and urban expansion. Recognising this, a main aim of this thesis is to examine the extent to which short-term environmental perturbations acted in concourse with other historical processes, such as interstate war and demographic changes, to influence periods of rapid societal change at Carthage. This thesis is thus also the first study to apply to Carthage, after the example of recent work on Ptolemaic Egypt (Manning et al. (2017); Ludlow and Manning (2021)), the rapidly developing discourse on the relationship between climatically effective volcanic eruptions and the timing of societal stress.

Explosive volcanic eruptions in the classical period are now datable with great precision due to the development of a high-resolution ice core chronology reaching back to antiquity (Sigl et al. (2015)). Statistical testing conducted for this thesis reveals a non-random temporal association between the timing of large volcanic eruptions and the start dates of Carthage’s internal wars. Over the course of this thesis, credible mechanisms are identified which may explain the association, such as the potential of explosive eruptions to negatively affect agriculture, and thus societal stability, by impacting temperature and precipitation; impacts which are likely to be more pronounced when occurring in times of other socio-economic stresses resulting, for example, from interstate war. Climatic events are thus argued to be a meaningful but overlapping context in Carthage’s history.