Carthage

Kart Hadasht, in Phoenician (new city), Karthago in Latin, was born in 814 B.C. on the initiative of Elissa, the Phoenician princess from Tyr. Founded ex - nihil, on a land of an equal area to the size of an ox's hide, the place prospered all the more quickly as its occupiers were born-tradesmen! Indeed, after the fashion of their Phoenician forebears, the Carthaginians furrowed the seas buying from some what they sold to the others, always with a profit!
Thus, they traded with the Mediterranean populations - Greeks, Romans, Etruscans-and with more meridional ones, some were settled at the border of the Sahara, the others, beyond. To the former, they especially provided metals, the raw materials which they knew how to get in Spain as well as in England, in Cornwall; to the latter, the Numidian Berbers and Africans, they delivered fabric, ceramics, small glass-ware and some other shoddy goods…

Such a spirit of enterprise, surely, could but bring about the prosperity of this Carthage become rapidly one of the biggest economic poles of the Mediterranean. However, the Carthaginian civilization also shone through so many and so varied other bright sides that we are unable to enumerate all of them; are we not indebted to one of its sons, Magon, for the brilliant encyclopedia of agronomy whose translation the Roman Senate ordered on the morrow of the third Punic war?

Born navigators, the Carthaginians, constituted a real Thalassocracy; however, in this domain of the marine-whether it be merchant or military - their genius benefited other peoples. Furrowing the seas, reaching destinations scattered over Europe, Asia and Africa, they were true conveyor belts of transmission and diffusion of knowledge and technology!