What kind of fantasy culture would you create based on Carthage?

Also cause they're a bitch to take down and present unique problems in combat.

as said, it's not a meme yet it was a thing. a very large sum of Carthage's army where mercenaries yet consider the probability that most of the does where Carthaginian themselves.

Carthaginian culture was kind of Greek in a way since the empire itself began as Greek colonists merging with the locals.

have elephants involved in warfare, heavy reliance on mercenaries, trade and sea be an important factor to them and all in all make them an emerging empire keen on conquering and colonizing new lands.

Beating them was easy as fuck

Hindsight is 20/20. They wrecked the Romans until the Romans figured out how to fight them, at which point the roles reversed. I guess tha tonly goes to show you that there is no such thing as a wunderwaffe (until you get to nukes at least).

Salt desert nomads

Pheonician, not greek.
Punicus/Poenicus.
They come from Lebanon, not Greece.
Completely different people, completely different place.

All these maps of ancient empires always color in the areas between major cities and ports. In reality, political control rarely extend far from major cities.

the cities in Essos was pretty much that

You can make them Molock adoring Phoenicians with sacred prostitution.

I recommend reading "Carthage Must Be Destroyed" by Richard Miles.

Practically the most comprehensive book on Carthage there is.

You'll learn a lot about it and it could help you develop ideas. A fair amount of things mentioned ITT are flat out wrong.

>the majority of there army was mercs
That's an older meme. Their armies were heavily mixed due to empire having lands from Iberia to Africa, but mercs were by no means majority of armies, especially those used in Punic Wars.

Dunno, but it has to be black skinned

>In the recess of this bay there was an island, like the former one, having a lake, in which there was another island, full of savage men. There were women, too, in even greater number. They had hairy bodies, and the interpreters called them Gorillae. When we pursued them we were unable to take any of the men; for they had all escaped, by climbing the steep places and defending themselves with stones; but we took three of the women, who bit and scratched their leaders, and would not follow us. So we killed them and flayed them, and brought their skins to Carthage. For we did not voyage further, provisions failing us.

You know carthage had the two kings system that was also used by the spartans. Also to qualifies as carthagian you had to be a descedant of the original settlers and the kept using the names of their fathers to prove it so there were the same names recuring constantly. Also at some points their army was pretty similar to the greeks having phalanxes as well and light infantry for support. They also loves wine being one of the major thing they traded

Now you're just being racist.

Thank you.

Pic related for your troubles.

What culture would you create based on Phoenicia?

Don't give me the "like Greece but slightly different".

These motherfuckers worship bull gods by burning children alive.

>These motherfuckers worship bull gods by burning children alive

Said the romans.

Mediterranean magocracy with a strong focus on infernal magics and demon-summoning used by a small elite to rule over the population. The demons are used for hard work and war, while the population gives sacrifices readily. Capital punishments are sacrifice for demonic rites.

WE

WUZ

SKINZ

Elephants vs infantry is a terrible strategy as long as the infantry are trained and drilled. Elephants are nervous and panic if they're wounded. They can be a bigger danger to your own troops then. They should not be seen as tanks.

I'm practice, elephants are a hard counter to cavalry. Horses absolutely will not go near them. They also function as a stable platform for heavy archers, but don't have much in the way of numbers.

Jews too. Regardless, if it's a fantasy culture, why not?

Is this Vampire: the Masquerade?

>why not?

Because stereotyping is a microaggression. Please be more considerate in future.

If it's fantasy why not instead have romans and carthaginians having mixed relationships? Everything is political, you have the power to make a difference.

This is correct in the broad strokes but ancient rome had plutocratic elements, for example no one elected the roman senators, you just got to be one when you reached a certain amount of wealth. Also the citizen assemblies (that actually had more power before the punic wars) where heavily skewed towards wealthy property owners

I can't tell if you're baiting or not

Carthage was a large, long-lived country with a fascinating and little-known culture, as well as quite possibly a terrifying dark side. Some of the posts in this thread really oversimplify it to the point of not doing it justice at all.
Carthage was founded by the Phoenicians and developed into a oligarchic quasi-republic. It was very colonial, founding settlements all over the western Mediterranean.
Carthage's wars with the Romans are also quite interesting in that eventually the two peoples came to hate each other to an incredible extent, in a way that could only be resolved by the complete destruction of one or the other.
Given that much of what we know of Carthage comes from the Romans, it makes it hard to know exactly what is true about them. Supposedly, according to not exclusively Roman sources, the Carthaginians routinely practiced child sacrifice to appease their main God, Baal Hammon.
The Carthaginians derived their religion from their Phoenician forebears, who themselves were tied to the Canaanites. Due to the enmity between the Hebrews and Phoenicians, Baal was seen by some Jews and late Christians as a demonic entity associated with the biblical Moloch, which may have influenced their perspective on the Carthaginians. This is that 'dark-side', where one could see Carthaginians as child-murdering demon worshipers engaged in an ancient war with the noble descendants of Troy (the Romans). That's great material for a fantasy interpretation of Carthage: a wealthy and cultured cosmopolitan empire controlled by demonic cults.
Or of course one could take a more realistic approach, removing the supposed demon-worshiping elements.

>Carthage was the same as Rome!
Not really. We know very little about Carthage, because all our evidence comes from Roman authors and archaeological evidence. What we do know is that the Carthaginians were originally a Phoenician colony, the Phoenicians being the great sea-power of pre-Achaemenid Antiquity. They're the ones who invented the alphabet. So researching into what we know about Phoenicia would be a big help, because a lot more survived from them than did from Carthage.

What we do know is that the Cartheginians had an elective monarchy, with two kings serving per year, similar to the Roman system. The main difference is that the Romans had a plebeian elected official, the Tribune of the Plebs. The Carthaginians had their kings and their senate, although their senate was more a council of elders than an actual senate. Religiously we know very little, although the Romans accuse the Carthaginians of killing and eating children as part of their religion.

Militarily, they relied very, very heavily on mercenaries on land. What made them a military powerhouse wasn't their army, but their navy. They were, again, descended from the finest sailors of Early Antiquity. Not only that, but they had something very rare for the time- mass production. They could literally mass-produce ships, and their navy numbered somewhere in the three-hundreds. The only reason the Romans won the First Punic War is because they copied the style of shipbuilding, as well as inventing some pretty wonky tech like the Corvus.

tl;dr pick up a book

How could they mass-produce without factories?

To be fair, Phoenician culture really was a mix and match of all the cultures of their neighbors. So it looks like a mix of Greek and Egyptian with some sparkle of Hittite and Babylonian

Just speculating - but you make template parts and just have guys sit around all day making copies based on the template?

It would be a big improvement over the "everyone do whatever" system of manufacturing that most people of the time used.

You get a lot of skilled craftsmen and have them hammer out each part en masse.

Boats in antiquity were usually designed individually by master craftsmen, and then put together.

I think you meant "without industrial age machines".

It's not really unheard of. Standardization had MANY instances, some with bigass things (venetians had a very complex chain of production for ships already in the XVI century) or smaller (roman armors, indeed).
Basically you tell the artisan "do this shit without variations", assemble that, and voilà.

Manufactory is apparently nit the correct English term, but basically you have a bunch of craftsmen build identical ship parts and another bunch of craftsmen assemble those.
Like en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_Arsenal#Mass_production

In extreme short, you have standardized pieces in every single ship, built from a master design. You have each craftsman build each single part individually, building it to the exact specifications in the blueprint. People tell you Henry Ford invented the assembly line, but that's BS. The Carthaginians could (admittedly at a pretty steep cost) pump out three times as many ships a year as any other power. The Battle of Ecnomus is still known as the largest naval battle in history, since roughly 700 ships took part. Hell, the smaller battles, like Mylae, had something near 300 ships per fleet, which is close to the largest naval battle of WWII, Leyte Gulf, which had 367 ships taking part.

>and their reliance on sailing.

ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING and THE REASON THEY LOST.
Good thing their city was razed and their surviving population relocated away from the ocean so that they could finally start learnin' a decent set of replublican mores.

The mechanized assembly line is a tad bit different than taylorized production.

The latter was indeed already known and use in antiquity. The Romans too used it in their pottery-production until the slave revolts forced them to switch to a less inhuman mode of production.

>The only reason the Romans won is because they copied

Tl;dr history of Rome. Originality really wasn't their forte, but they could copy and pump out shit like they were Germans/Japanese/Chinese. Led to them fielding armies that marched with everyone as geared up as their opponent's nobility.

I was oversimplifying. But the Carthaginians definitely used a method of mass production which involved individual craftsmen making single parts. The Venetian Arsenal, which was similar in concept, could pump out a galley a day. That could take a full year in, say, Provence.

The two things that really define Roman foreign relations are the ability to adapt to changing times, and the ability to keep fucking going no matter what. There's always the story that so many young nobles died at Cannae that Hannibal was unable to count all the signet rings. But the Romans kept going in the war when it was quite frankly stupid to do so.

how do you think world would have turn out if carthage had won against rome ?

Ultimately probably not that different, as Rome got sacked plenty of times after all.

The thing is that beating armies really isn't enough, you have to actually counter the enemy's long-term strategy as well. Like we saw that with the Ottomans, who lost a whole lot of ships and men, but could successfully expand because they gained the necessary footholds required to limit their enemy's and expand their own fleet's operative range.

Or in Vietnam, where the US was unable to actually make reunification unattractive to the Vietnamese, even as they gassed southern civilians day in day out.

Which war are we talking about? Hell, which battle are we talking about? Rome lost most of the battles, but what mattered was that the Romans were determined as fuck to win. We remember the Battle of Cannae as one of the worst defeats in human history, but the Romans won the war because Scipio Africanus won in Iberia.

It's either sarcasm or bait, either way you can respond (or better yet, don't) as if it were sarcasm.
If they were serious, they wouldn't bother visiting this site.

Seriously though: When in doubt, assume sarcasm.
It won't feed trolls, it won't look funny to lurkers, and it will trick you into imagining this place as less toxic.

Very different
Carthage was very colonial and perfered trade
The most of europe they would get to and conquer would probably be spain and the british isles
That also means no christanity as the size of rome gave christanity the ability to spread pretty easily
That alone fucks everything in the world

An alliance of city-states evolving from colonies, each devoted to exploiting the local resources and trading them as far away as possible.

Those cities are based upon a citadel-temple-university which houses a sacred beastly demon. It provides benefits to individual not!-carthaginians in exchange for sacrifices of both wealth and children. Said benefits usually influence luck and fertility, so it's almost a profane tax.

cont...

The Romans wouldn't quit being a society built around nobles financing their political campaigns by means of plunder and backing up their claims by means of victories though, so they'd keep on keeping on.

The greek international legal system would still be around as well, so their chances to build their Empire inside the corpse of Alexander's would remain intact as well.

They're representations of influence and alliances.

>The Romans wouldn't quit being a society built around nobles financing their political campaigns by means of plunder and backing up their claims by means of victories though, so they'd keep on keeping on.
Presumably one or both of the anons were implying if Carthage gave Rome the treatment they received at the end of the 3rd Punic War, i.e. most of the population being put to the sword, the rest enslaved, and the city physically destroyed and turned into a mass grave of rubble.

Then the Romans would quit being a society.

Besides the resources, each city also buys the locals to create soldier-slave forces whose tactical role reflects the barbarians' styles of warfare. The cities regularly gift each other with their local warriors, making sure they all have a well balanced army.

The group of sacred demons are a pantheon which both make intrigues and alliances among themselves, agreeing only in not damaging their mortal worshippers, for these are the means by which they secure power in the mortal realm for which they escaped from the hellish dimension overcrowded with other powerful demons.

To both demon and mortal, having wealth and power is the most important goal.

Despite this background, the civilization itself accomplishes much: naval expeditions go further than any other peoples; trade networks are well secured; colonial armies made of surplus population engage in conquests of territory for new city-states; powerful walls and marveously engineered harbors; huge and exotic war beasts.

Carthege is elves, Rome is orks

I don't think that Hanibal's alliance or his mercs would really care enough to put all that work into such a pet project though.

The Romans most likely truly and unironically believed that they were doing the Carthageans a favour by razing their city and forcing the survivors to move inlands after they had defeated them.

>I don't think that Hanibal's alliance or his mercs would really care enough to put all that work into such a pet project though.
I see no reason his army would have an issue with putting the city to the sword. At all. They'd done it in Iberia several times and had experience, and his Gaulish recruits would equally have no issue. It'd be a none issue.

>The Romans most likely truly and unironically believed that they were doing the Carthageans a favour by razing their city and forcing the survivors to move inlands after they had defeated them.
No, they knew what they were doing. That demand was on top of demanding all their arms and armor in an attempt to provoke a response that could be used as casus belli.

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> They'd done it in Iberia several times

Do we have actual non-roman sources for that?

Yes. While not as common as practice as media would have people believe it also was not unheard of, making your question somewhat curious.

>I don't trust any Roman historians because they couldn't know what objectivity was

Objectivity in history didn't exist as such in the Roman era though. They didn't look at history in the same way we do, they viewed it as having a purpose. Hence why the Romans effectively wrote the Etruscans out of history (they basically wanted to dishonor them by not even mincing words about them), why the comprehensive "history of Rome" book Ab Urbe Condita was written when Augustus rose to power (he wanted to draw parallels between himself and the early Republic) and why we have only one written account of the eruption of the Vesuvius (it was Pliny the Younger writing to Tacitus how Pliny the Elder died. The eruption itself is basically background information that -in the eyes of the writer and reader- doesn't matter past it being what killed Pliny the Elder). This is why having multiple sources is better: to a certain extent we really can't trust them.

Hell, even today you can pretty much guess the nationality of a historian by reading his contents. Going by (pop) history books, there are more countries that invented everything and created the modern world than you can sneeze at.

This is a dumb comment, Rome was Multi-Cultural as fuck. If you look at the map in OP, the Heel and the Toes of Italy, around Tarentum were greek. Right above the greeks lived the Samnites. Around Rome lived the Latins but Above them lived Etruscans and Celts. To the East of the Latins lived the Umbrians and at the Eastern coast next to them lived another group of people

>Also at some points their army was pretty similar to the greeks having phalanxes as well and light infantry for support
Same goes for the Romans, until they started fighting the Samnites.

Deep Ones?

>They didn't look at history in the same way we do, they viewed it as having a purpose.

You're making a fool of yourself here. We absolutely do look at history of having a purpose and a direction and we 100% believe that we're its aphex. And with "we" I mean pretty much every single nation on this planet.

I mean that in the sense of "Did we find any traces of those massacres or is a roman writer's word all we got"? Because they were usually only as objective as absolutely necessary for their current political agenda.

>You're making a fool of yourself here
>Says the guy who didn't read the entire post
And even then while this shit does happen, we do at the very least have the pretense of being objective. This is why we have modern historical standards for what can and cannot be deemed reliable sources.

>We absolutely do look at history of having a purpose and a direction and we 100% believe that we're its aphex
We don't, we don't and we don't. Read Francis Fukuyama's: The End of History if you want a deeper discussion about those facts.

>Carthage was extremely similar to Rome in terms of government and administration
Not even close m8

Merge all the jewish stereotypes you can find except the monotheism related ones. Make them seafaring people. You got phoenicians.

>Read Francis Fukuyama's: The End of History

To clarify this, the only large group of modern historians that believe in historical determinism were the Marxists, and they have faded into the background.

I do not claim he is right, but I do think it's an interesting idea and his introduction gives a good look at the historiography of historical determinism.

I only recommend it because it's interesting not because I believe he is right.

>Supposedly, according to not exclusively Roman sources, the Carthaginians routinely practiced child sacrifice to appease their main God, Baal Hammon.

What sources? Because greeks writing for the romans don't really count as a different source. And I don't think the Bible mentions specifically Carthage.

No the sources are Jewish if I recall.

They weren't fans of the Phoenicians either. So there's that.

>And I don't think the Bible mentions specifically Carthage.
No jewish writing is not specifically about Carthage but about the Canaanites.

>We absolutely do look at history of having a purpose and a direction and we 100% believe that we're its aphex.

No we fucking don't. Any historian will tell you how random and chaotic history is. There is no clear, deterministic path that everything was destined to follow. We stand at the culmination of thousands of years of luck and happenstance.

The Industrial Revolution might have happened earlier in some worlds, later in others, not at all in yet more. The Carthaginians might have won the Punic wars in some other world, or even made allied with Rome to fight some other enemy. The agricultural revolution might never have happened because no-one ever figured out that planting seeds makes plants grow in a predictable location. A star in our local stellar neighbourhood might have exploded, and the expanding shell of gamma rays might have stripped Earth clean of life near the end of the last Ice Age. Hell, some revolutionary technology might have been invented in some other world, that makes our modern society look as primitive as cavemen.

Any number of fucking things could have happened. Progress is not guaranteed. It never was.

Then I don't think it's really valid. Canaanites were related to Phoenicians and thwrerefore Carthaginians, but so were the jews themselves.

I think classic greeks would've mentioned it if phoenicians regularly killed children. They didn't like them much and greek sources are always eager to include weird and morbid details about barbarians.

> Read Francis Fukuyama's: The End of History

The book about how history's over now that we have finally attained the eternal free market demoracy paradise of no commies anywhere? Please.

>They weren't fans of the Phoenicians either. So there's that.

The Jews routinely shat on everybody in the region who wasn't as much of a sandnigger as them though. They're the worst source.

This. Carthage wasn't just a jewy sea-Rome with elephants, there's more to them than that.

Sailing merchant Republic based put of a desert port city. Some human sacrifice, heavy reliance on mercenaries, and a boner for the Greeks under Alexander (Maceboos?).

The Romans also thought they were weird for not wearing belts.

oh Veeky Forums, sometimes you disappoint me. All these posts and not a single mention of Game of Thrones.

As always, no matter what new fantasy trope you think of, it's already been done. /Especially/ if we're talking about borrowing from a historical culture for a fantasy setting. And in this case the reference isn't even particularly subtle: Qarth - Carthage. The clue is in the name.

To a certain extent all of the eastern city states you see in GoT - Mereen, Astapor, Yunkai - are based on Carthage/Phoenicia, but they splice in bits of Ottoman and arab culture. But Qarth is obviously just a straight-up fantasy version of Carthage.

Did that, with Dwarves. Turned into honorable Ferengi.

But Carthage is not the greatest city that is, was, or ever will be.

The Punics actually called it Qart-ḥadašt, Carthago's just the Latin name.

Mind you at that point Romes military strategy became "Raise an army and then March it wherever Hannibal isn't". They gave him free reign of thr countryside but ensures he could never take Rome itself because there was always an army, just out of reach, ready to attack him. They just wouldn't on terms that Hannibal had set up. But Hannibal would only fight on terms he had set up, which was why he was so successful. Which led to two armies marching around each other. And to Hannibal wintering in Campagna and doing fuck all with his victory because his plan to get the Italian states to ally against Rome just wasn't working.

>All these posts and not a single mention of Game of Thrones.
Probably because we have taste and are discussing history.

To be fair, I think we should also mention that Hannibal was the only Carthaginian actually doing something. Even his brilliance is hard to exploit when Carthage is losing on every other front. The sea, Spain, Sicily and North Africa were all fronts the Romans pushed their shit in, so Hannibal and his army in Italy meant very little.

Goes to show you that having solid generals and solid organization trumps having brilliant generals and shit organization.

I'm glad you were disappointed, 90% of GoT's world building and storytelling is average to sub-par, and Qarth isn't one of the exceptions. Veeky Forums has discussed the topic in a much more in depth and engaging why by discussing actual history.

Umbrians were technically latin or "the same" as the Romans. Samnites and Oscans were also speaking a Latin language close to Roman's language. Etruscans as a culture was pretty much eradicated after being conquered.

This guy gets it