[Sca-cooks] lands

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Philip Troy <troy at asan.com> wrote:
>Not to change the subject or anything, but have I missed some of the
>research, and is there actually evidence suggesting Hannibal was black?
>(I mean, apart from the fact that he was African?) I understood the
>Carthaginians to be a largely Hellenized empire of caucasian ancestry.
>But I see your point, especially in a part of Europe (and there are
>several of them) where somebody with pale skin and brown hair and eyes
>is apt to be nicknamed "Blackie".

Uh, Carthaginians were essentially of Canaanite-Phoenician ancestry.
They were Semitic. The Punic language, derived from
Canaanite-Phoenician, was a Northwest Semitic language. The
Carthaginians did intermarry with local folks who were
Berber-Amazigh, and maybe some of the other ethnic groups who moved
there, such as Celto-Iberians. But basically they were Semites.

And they weren't particularly Hellenized - yes, a bit, but Carthage
was founded many centuries before Alexander the Great conquered the
Levant (Lebanon-Syria (including Jordan and Israel-Palestine)). The
Greco-Romano stuff there is from AFTER Rome rebuilt Carthage. Sure,
the Romans razed the city and supposedly sowed the soil with salt,
but it was an excellent port - the Carthaginians had done *a lot* of
work to alter the natural harbor - and the Romans discovered they
actually needed it, so they rebuilt Carthage not terribly long after
they destroyed it.

Anahita

Qadash Kinahnu, A Canaanite-Phoenician Temple
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/2938