History written by the victor
Almost everything we read about Carthage was written by its enemies. Rome never got over Cannae; it told the story of Carthage its own way.
Carthaginian history books have come down to us
Punic author translated by Rome: Mago, because his treatise on agriculture was useful to it
Punic inscriptions recovered by archaeology, mostly religious
What Rome said / what we know
"Punic faith" became a Latin byword for treachery. Livy credits Hannibal with "more than Punic perfidy".
Carthage signed and honoured treaties with Rome for centuries. In 149, it was Rome that changed its demands once the city had disarmed.
Rome supposedly sowed salt so that nothing would ever grow again.
No ancient text mentions it: the story appears in European writers of the 19th–20th centuries. Rome in fact refounded Carthage a century later.
Carthage supposedly knew only trade — no art, no literature.
According to Pliny, in 146 Rome gave the libraries of Carthage to the Numidian kings. Their contents are lost — an absence of books is not an absence of culture.
Diodorus and Plutarch describe systematic child sacrifice.
Archaeologists remain divided over the tophet: some see sacrifice there, others mainly a cemetery for infants who died of natural causes. The tophet and the gods of Carthage →
Polybius was the friend of Scipio Aemilianus, who destroyed Carthage. Livy, writing under Augustus, produced a history to the glory of Rome, in which defeats are explained by the enemy's cunning.
Europe identified with "civilising" Rome and turned Carthage into a barbarous Orient — the image of Flaubert's Salammbô (1862), shortly before the French protectorate of 1881.
The UNESCO "Save Carthage" campaign (1972–1995), Tunisian scholars and international excavations are rebuilding the city from its own traces.