The Libyan Wars: Crisis, Climate, and Conflict in Carthaginian North Africa
Citation:
Hill, Andrew Martin, The Libyan Wars: Crisis, Climate, and Conflict in Carthaginian North Africa, Trinity College Dublin, School of Histories & Humanities, Classics, 2023Download Item:
Abstract:
Africa is mother to some of humanity's oldest civilisations, among them the maritime state of Carthage (ca. 814-146 BC). At its height, Carthage was one of the largest cities on earth and was the first truly urban centre of northwestern Africa. Yet the sustainability of populous urban civilisation is often subject to nature's whims, and food production in the Maghreb is deeply connected with the timing and spatial distribution of winter rains critical for agricultural planning. The growth of Carthage's African hegemony, which by the fourth century stretched from Morocco in the west to Libya in the east, posed new opportunities and new challenges in the administration of provinces of such pronounced environmental diversity as its rain-fed hinterland in northern Tunisia and the arid coastal region of Tripolitania in modern Libya. In 396, auxiliary troops from this latter region and other periphery zones of control joined the subaltern working population of Carthage's hinterland in the first of ten known internal wars occurring in the 250 years before the fall of the city.
Acknowledging the role of climate in influencing rapid social and political change in the modern regions Carthage occupied - I note, for example, the outbreak of the Arab Spring in the water-stressed region of Sidi Bouzid in 2011 - in this thesis I explore the possibility that the timing of internal war in the Carthaginian state was influenced by volcanically induced climatic perturbations via impacts on the agro-economy. Made possible by the publication of a revised chronology of explosive volcanic events back to 500 BC (Sigl et al. (2015)), statistical testing conducted for this thesis reveals a non-random temporal association with the timing of internal war. Recognising the complexity of the linkages between climate and conflict in states of agriculturally based economies, the hypothesis here proposed suggests that the non-uniform impacts of climatic shock across geographically and demographically diverse spaces, as well as between social strata within regions, acted to exacerbate pre-existing socio-economic stresses resulting from interstate war and other factors at certain points in Carthage's history, leading to a greater chance of internal war.
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Grant Number
Irish Research Council (IRC)
Trinity College Dublin
Description:
APPROVED
Author: Hill, Andrew Martin
Advisor:
Wallace, ShaneLudlow, Francis
Publisher:
Trinity College Dublin. School of Histories & Humanities. Discipline of ClassicsType of material:
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Full text availableKeywords:
Climate and society, North Africa, Punic, CarthageMetadata
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