SOURCE NOTES

• Dexter Hoyos, Mastering the West: Rome and Carthage at War (2015) — Best single-volume account of the Punic Wars, reliable and accessible.
• Serge Lancel, Carthage: A History (1995, trans. Antonia Nevill) — The standard modern history of Carthage, by the archaeologist who excavated the Punic residential quarter on the Byrsa. Essential.
• Richard Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization (2010) — Excellent popular history, good on cultural context, sympathetic to Carthage.
• Josephine Quinn, In Search of the Phoenicians (2018) — Challenges some conventional narratives about Phoenician identity, important for the foundation period.
• B.H. Warmington, Carthage (1960) — Older but still useful, particularly on the constitution and institutions.
• Aristotle, Politics, Book II (c. 340 BCE) — The primary source for Carthaginian constitutional arrangements. Available in translation online via the MIT Internet Classics Archive.
• Polybius, Histories (c. 140 BCE) — For the treaties with Rome and the Punic Wars. The most reliable ancient source for the period.

Note on the Tophet

The tophet debate is ongoing and technical. Listeners who want to dig into it should start with Quinn's In Search of the Phoenicians for a skeptical view of the sacrifice interpretation, and Xella et al. in Antiquity (2013) for the strongest recent case for sacrifice. The Oxford University press release (2014) on Quinn, Vella, and collaborators is freely available online and gives a readable summary of the archaeological evidence. The truth is that the debate is not fully resolved, and honesty requires saying so.