About this project

Qart-Hadasht is an evolving encyclopedia of ancient Carthage, from its founding to its destruction in 146 BCE.

The name

𐤒𐤓𐤕𐤇𐤃𐤔𐤕 — Qart-Hadasht, "New City" — is what the Carthaginians called Carthage. "Carthage" itself is the Latin form, by way of the Greek Karchedon. Most of what survives about Carthage was written by its enemies; using the city's own name, on its own terms, is part of how this project tries to push past that.

How this site works

Every factual statement is modeled as a claim: atomic, individually citable, and tagged with one of:

• attested:directly stated in primary sources, not meaningfully disputed.
• inferred:reasoned from primary evidence; not directly stated, but well-supported.
• contested:genuinely disputed in the sources or among modern scholars.
• legendary:drawn from legendary or mythologized tradition; historicity uncertain.

Each claim links to the ancient and modern sources that support, qualify, or contradict it. Source pages, in turn, list every claim that cites them, with metadata on each source's reliability: author, language, date of composition, distance from events, and known biases.

Editorial takes

Where the evidence supports a synthesis, the site occasionally offers an editorial take: a labeled, signed position with explicit reasoning. These are clearly marked as the site's own judgment, never blended into the surrounding prose, and always open to revision.

Open questions

Where we genuinely don't know, that gap gets its own page. Knowing what we don't know, and why, is part of the history.

Scope

The current scope runs from the legendary founding (traditionally 814 BCE) to the destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE. The Roman Carthage that followed, and Carthage's long afterlife in literature and modern memory, are out of scope for this version but on the roadmap.

Licensing

Content is licensed CC BY 4.0: quote it, cite it, build on it freely with attribution. Code is MIT.