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In several ancient Semitic-speaking cultures and associated historical regions, the shopheṭ or shofeṭ (plural shophetim or shofetim; Hebrew : שׁוֹפֵט, romanized: šōp̄ēṭ, Phoenician : 𐤔𐤐𐤈, romanized: šōfēṭ, Punic : 𐤔𐤐𐤈, romanized: šūfeṭ, the last loaned into Latin as sūfes; see also Ugaritic : 𐎘𐎔𐎉, romanized: ṯāpiṭ) was a community leader of significant civic stature, often functioning as a chief magistrate with authority roughly equivalent to Roman consular powers. [1]
In Hebrew and several other Semitic languages, shopheṭ literally means "Judge", from the Semitic root Š-P-Ṭ, "to pass judgment". Cognate titles exist in other Semitic cultures, notably Phoenicia.
In the Book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible, the shofṭim were chieftains who united various Israelite tribes in time of mutual danger to defeat foreign enemies.
In the various independent Phoenician city-states—on the coasts of present-day Lebanon and western Syria, the Punic colonies on the Mediterranean Sea, and in Carthage itself—the šūfeṭ, called in Latin a sūfes, was a non-royal magistrate granted control over a city-state, sometimes functioning much in the same way as a Roman consul. For example, both offices served a one-year term in pairs of two. [2]
The officeholder's role as a diplomatic executive, representative of a collective citizenry, is evidenced by an inscription written by the šūfeṭ Diomitus at Sidon in the late third century BC. He boasts of his chariot race victory at the Nemean Games in Greece, perpetuating political favor as "the first of the citizens" to do so. [3]
By the time of the Punic Wars, the government of Ancient Carthage was headed by a pair of annually elected sufetes. Livy's account of the Punic Wars affords a list of the procedural responsibilities of the Carthaginian sufet, including the convocation and presidency of the senate, the submission of business to the People's Assembly, and service as trial judges. [4] Their number, term, and powers are therefore similar to those of the Roman consuls, with the notable difference that Roman consuls were also commanders-in-chief of the Roman military, a power apparently denied to the sufetes.
The term sufet was not, however, reserved for the heads of the Carthaginian state. Towards the end of their Western Mediterranean dominance, political coordination between local and colonial Carthaginians was likely expressed through a regional hierarchy of sufetes. For example, some epigraphic evidence from Punic-era Sardinia is dated with four names: the years' magistrates not only on the island, but also at home in North Africa. [5]
Further inscriptional evidence of sufetes found in the major settlements of Roman Sardinia indicates that the office, having endured there for three centuries under Carthaginian sovereignty, was utilized by the descendants of Punic settlers to refuse both cultural and political assimilation with their mainland Italian conquerors. Punic-style magistracies appear epigraphically unattested only by the end of the first century BCE, although two sufetes wielded power in Bithia as late as the mid-second century CE. [6]
Official state terminology of the late Republic and Roman Empire repurposed the word sufet to refer to Roman-style local magistrates serving in Africa Proconsularis, [7] although a sufet appears as far-flung as Volubilis in modern-day Morocco. The institution is attested in more than forty post-Carthaginian cities, ranging from the Third Punic War to the second century CE reign of Commodus. [8] Settlements governed by sufetes included Althiburos, Calama, Capsa, Cirta, Gadiaufala, Gales, Limisa, Mactar, Thugga, and Volubilis. [9]
Unlike the continuity of Punic inhabitance in Sardinia, the sufet's prevalence in interior regions of Roman Africa, which were previously unsettled by Carthage, suggests that settlers and Punic refugees endeared themselves to Roman authorities by adopting a readily intelligible government. [10]
Three sufetes serving simultaneously appear in first century CE records at Althiburos, Mactar, and Thugga, reflecting a choice to adopt Punic nomenclature for Romanized institutions without the actual, traditionally balanced magistracy. [11] In those cases, a third, non-annual position of tribal or communal chieftain marked an inflection point in the assimilation of external African groups into the Roman political fold. [12]
The Roman approximation of the term, sufes, appears in at least six works of Latin literature. [13] Erroneous references to Carthaginian "kings" with the Latin term rex betray the translations of Roman authors from Greek sources, who equated the sufet with the more monarchical basileus (Greek : βασιλεύς). [14]
Carthage was an ancient city in Northern Africa, on the eastern side of the Lake of Tunis in what is now Tunisia. Carthage was one of the most important trading hubs of the Ancient Mediterranean and one of the most affluent cities of the classical world. It became the capital city of the civilisation of Ancient Carthage and later Roman Carthage.
The Punic Wars were a series of wars between 264 and 146 BC fought between the Roman Republic and Ancient Carthage. Three wars took place, on both land and sea, across the western Mediterranean region and involved a total of forty-three years of warfare. The Punic Wars are also considered to include the four-year-long revolt against Carthage which started in 241 BC. Each war involved immense materiel and human losses on both sides.
The Third Punic War was the third and last of the Punic Wars fought between Carthage and Rome. The war was fought entirely within Carthaginian territory, in what is now northern Tunisia. When the Second Punic War ended in 201 BC one of the terms of the peace treaty prohibited Carthage from waging war without Rome's permission. Rome's ally, King Masinissa of Numidia, exploited this to repeatedly raid and seize Carthaginian territory with impunity. In 149 BC Carthage sent an army, under Hasdrubal, against Masinissa, the treaty notwithstanding. The campaign ended in disaster as the Battle of Oroscopa ended with a Carthaginian defeat and the surrender of the Carthaginian army. Anti-Carthaginian factions in Rome used the illicit military action as a pretext to prepare a punitive expedition.
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 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.
The Punic language, also called Phoenicio-Punic or Carthaginian, is an extinct variety of the Phoenician language, a Canaanite language of the Northwest Semitic branch of the Semitic languages. An offshoot of the Phoenician language of coastal West Asia, it was principally spoken on the Mediterranean coast of Northwest Africa, the Iberian Peninsula and several Mediterranean islands, such as Malta, Sicily, and Sardinia by the Punic people, or western Phoenicians, throughout classical antiquity, from the 8th century BC to the 6th century AD.
In the Hebrew Bible, Tophet or Topheth is a location in Jerusalem in the Valley of Hinnom (Gehenna), where worshipers engaged in a ritual involving "passing a child through the fire", most likely child sacrifice. Traditionally, the sacrifices have been ascribed to a god named Moloch. The Bible condemns and forbids these sacrifices, and the tophet is eventually destroyed by king Josiah, although mentions by the prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah suggest that the practices associated with the tophet may have persisted.
The Province of Sardinia and Corsica was an ancient Roman province including the islands of Sardinia and Corsica.
The naval Battle of Alalia took place between 540 BC and 535 BC off the coast of Corsica between Greeks and the allied Etruscans and Carthaginians. A Greek force of 60 Phocaean ships defeated a Punic-Etruscan fleet of 120 ships while emigrating to the western Mediterranean and the nearby colony of Alalia.
Maktar or Makthar, also known by other names during antiquity, is a town and archaeological site in Siliana Governorate, Tunisia.
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.
The Punic people, usually known as the Carthaginians, were a Semitic people who migrated from Phoenicia to the Western Mediterranean during the Early Iron Age. In modern scholarship, the term Punic, the Latin equivalent of the Greek-derived term Phoenician, is exclusively used to refer to Phoenicians in the western Mediterranean, following the line of the Greek East and Latin West. The largest Punic settlement was Ancient Carthage, but there were 300 other settlements along the North African coast from Leptis Magna in modern Libya to Mogador in southern Morocco, as well as western Sicily, southern Sardinia, the southern and eastern coasts of the Iberian Peninsula, Malta, and Ibiza. Their language, Punic, was a variety of Phoenician, one of the Northwest Semitic languages originating in the Levant.
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.
The city of Carthage was founded in the 9th century BC on the coast of Northwest Africa, in what is now Tunisia, as one of a number of Phoenician settlements in the western Mediterranean created to facilitate trade from the city of Tyre on the coast of what is now Lebanon. The name of both the city and the wider republic that grew out of it, Carthage developed into a significant trading empire throughout the Mediterranean. The date from which Carthage can be counted as an independent power cannot exactly be determined, and probably nothing distinguished Carthage from the other Phoenician colonies in Northwest Africa and the Mediterranean during 800–700 BC. By the end of the 7th century BC, Carthage was becoming one of the leading commercial centres of the West Mediterranean region. After a long conflict with the emerging Roman Republic, known as the Punic Wars, Rome finally destroyed Carthage in 146 BC. A Roman Carthage was established on the ruins of the first. Roman Carthage was eventually destroyed—its walls torn down, its water supply cut off, and its harbours made unusable—following its conquest by Arab invaders at the close of the 7th century. It was replaced by Tunis as the major regional centre, which has spread to include the ancient site of Carthage in a modern suburb.
Carthaginian Iberia was a province of the larger Carthaginian Empire. The Carthaginians conquered the Mediterranean part of Iberia and remained there until the 2nd Punic war and the Roman conquest of the peninsula.
Phoenicia under Roman rule describes the Phoenician city states ruled by Rome from 64 BCE to the Muslim conquests of the 7th century. The area around Berytus was the only Latin speaking and Romanized part of Aramaic-speaking Phoenicia.
Ancient Carthage was an ancient Semitic civilisation based in North Africa. Initially a settlement in present-day Tunisia, it later became a city-state and then an empire. Founded by the Phoenicians in the ninth century BC, Carthage reached its height in the fourth century BC as one of the largest metropoleis in the world. It was the centre of the Carthaginian Empire, a major power led by the Punic people who dominated the ancient western and central Mediterranean Sea. Following the Punic Wars, Carthage was destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC, who later rebuilt the city lavishly.
Human habitation in the North African region began over one million years ago. Remains of Homo erectus during the Middle Pleistocene period, has been found in North Africa. The Berbers, who generally antedate by many millennia the Phoenicians and the establishment of Carthage, are understood to have arisen out of social events shaped by the confluence of several earlier peoples, i.e., the Capsian culture, events which eventually constituted their ethnogenesis. Thereafter Berbers lived as an independent people in North Africa, including the Tunisian region.
The Phoenicians were an ancient Semitic group of people who lived in the Phoenician city-states along a coastal strip in the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean, primarily modern Lebanon. They developed a maritime civilization which expanded and contracted throughout history, with the core of their culture stretching from Arwad in modern Syria to Mount Carmel. The Phoenicians extended their cultural influence through trade and colonization throughout the Mediterranean, from Cyprus to the Iberian Peninsula.
Josephine Crawley Quinn is an historian and archaeologist, working across Greek, Roman and Phoenician history. Quinn is a Professor of Ancient History in the Faculty of Classics and Martin Frederiksen Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Worcester College, University of Oxford.
The constitution of Carthage is the political regime of the city in Punic times.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain : Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Judges". Catholic Encyclopedia . New York: Robert Appleton Company. Judges