Numidia was the ancient kingdom of the Numidians in northwest Africa, initially comprising the territory that now makes up Algeria, but later expanding across what is today known as Tunisia and Libya. The polity was originally divided between the Massylii state in the east and the Masaesyli state in the west. During the Second Punic War, Masinissa, king of the Massylii, defeated Syphax of the Masaesyli to unify Numidia into the first unified Berber state for Numidians in present-day Algeria. The kingdom began as a sovereign state and an ally of Rome and later alternated between being a Roman province and a Roman client state.
Phoenician is an extinct Canaanite Semitic language originally spoken in the region surrounding the cities of Tyre and Sidon. Extensive Tyro-Sidonian trade and commercial dominance led to Phoenician becoming a lingua franca of the maritime Mediterranean during the Iron Age. The Phoenician alphabet spread to Greece during this period, where it became the source of all modern European scripts.
Utica was an ancient Phoenician and Carthaginian city located near the outflow of the Medjerda River into the Mediterranean, between Carthage in the south and Hippo Diarrhytus in the north. It is traditionally considered to be the first colony to have been founded by the Phoenicians in North Africa. After Carthage's loss to Rome in the Punic Wars, Utica was an important Roman colony for seven centuries.
The Punic religion, Carthaginian religion, or Western Phoenician religion in the western Mediterranean was a direct continuation of the Phoenician variety of the polytheistic ancient Canaanite religion. However, significant local differences developed over the centuries following the foundation of Carthage and other Punic communities elsewhere in North Africa, southern Spain, Sardinia, western Sicily, and Malta from the ninth century BC onward. After the conquest of these regions by the Roman Republic in the third and second centuries BC, Punic religious practices continued, surviving until the fourth century AD in some cases. As with most cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, Punic religion suffused their society and there was no stark distinction between religious and secular spheres. Sources on Punic religion are poor. There are no surviving literary sources and Punic religion is primarily reconstructed from inscriptions and archaeological evidence. An important sacred space in Punic religion appears to have been the large open air sanctuaries known as tophets in modern scholarship, in which urns containing the cremated bones of infants and animals were buried. There is a long-running scholarly debate about whether child sacrifice occurred at these locations, as suggested by Greco-Roman and biblical sources.
Althiburos was an ancient Berber, Carthaginian, and Roman settlement in what is now the Dahmani Delegation of the Kef Governorate of Tunisia. During the reign of emperor Hadrian, it became a municipality with Italian rights. It was the seat of a Christian bishop from the 4th to 7th centuries. The settlement was destroyed during the Muslim invasions and the area's population center moved to Ebba Ksour on the plain. This left Althiburos's ruins largely intact; they were rediscovered by travelers in the 18th century.
M'hamed Hassine Fantar is a professor of Ancient History of Archeology and History of Religion at Tunis University.
The Punic-Libyan bilingual inscriptions are two important ancient bilingual inscriptions dated to the 2nd century BC.
The Libyco-Punic Mausoleum of Dougga is an ancient mausoleum located in Dougga, Tunisia. It is one of three examples of the royal architecture of Numidia, which is in a good state of preservation and dates to the second century BC. It was restored by the government of French Tunisia between 1908 and 1910.
Naïdé Ferchiou was a Tunisian archaeologist whose work dealt mainly with Roman North Africa. She excavated at several important sites, including Abthugni.
The Maktar and Mididi inscriptions are a number of Punic language inscriptions, found in the 1890s at Maktar and Mididi, Tunisia. A number of the most notable inscriptions have been collected in Kanaanäische und Aramäische Inschriften, and are known as are known as KAI 145-158.
The Bourgade inscriptions are approximately 40 neo-Punic inscriptions, found in the 1840s and early 1850s in Husainid Tunisia, which had just been opened up to French influence following the 1846 meeting between Ahmad I ibn Mustafa and Antoine, Duke of Montpensier.
The Hadrumetum Punic inscriptions are Punic votive inscriptions found in the Old City of Sousse.
The Cirta steles are almost 1,000 Punic funerary and votive steles found in Cirta in a cemetery located on a hill immediately south of the Salah Bey Viaduct.
The Carthage Administration Inscription is an inscription in the Punic language, using the Phoenician alphabet, discovered on the archaeological site of Carthage in the 1960s and preserved in the National Museum of Carthage. It is known as KAI 303.
The Pricot de Sainte-Marie steles are more than 2,000 Punic funerary steles found in Carthage near the ancient forum by French diplomat Jean-Baptiste Evariste Charles Pricot de Sainte-Marie in the 1870s. The find was dramatic both in the scale—the largest single discovery of Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions—and also due to the finds almost being lost in the sinking of the French ironclad Magenta at Toulon.
The KNMY inscription is an inscription in the Punic language from Carthage that is believed to record a so-called "molk" child sacrifice. The text is inscribed on a 55 cm high stela that was discovered in 1922.
The Carthage tophet, is an ancient sacred area dedicated to the Phoenician deities Tanit and Baal, located in the Carthaginian district of Salammbô, Tunisia, near the Punic ports. This tophet, a "hybrid of sanctuary and necropolis", contains a large number of children's tombs which, according to some interpretations, were sacrificed or buried here after their untimely death. The area is part of the Carthage archaeological site, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The Quintus Marcius trilingual inscription is a Latin-Greek-Punic trilingual inscription on a stone object found in 1899 in Henchir-Alouin, near Uthina, in the outskirts of Tunis, Tunisia. The Phoenician script is considered to be between the Punic and the Neo-Punic phases, between the fall of Carthage and the beginning of the Christian era.
The Sanctuary of Thinissut is an archaeological site located in Tunisia, whose excavation started in the early 20th century. It is situated in the present-day locality of Bir Bouregba in the Cap Bon region, approximately five kilometers from the town of Hammamet and sixty kilometers southeast of the capital, Tunis.
The Villaricos Phoenician stele is a 5th-century BCE Phoenician or Punic limestone funerary stele found in 1903–04 in the Villaricos necropolis, Spain. Villaricos is located south of Cartagena, which was once an ancient Punic city at the mouth of the river Almanzora. The stele was discovered by Luis Siret, who was conducting excavations in the region. Siret sent a photograph of the stele to Alfred Louis Delattre, a scholar of Punic epigraphy. Delattre, in turn, communicated the finding to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in a letter to Philippe Berger in 1904. It is on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid.
