Friends I hope you will not mind if I engage in some History chat in this venerable thread. Here is something you may find interesting, and it keeps the link with the Monty Python references earlier on in this discussion.
An A.D. 400 Hellenistic Greek joke was recently translated and it shows similarities to the Dead Parrot sketch. It was written by the duo of Hierocles and Philagrius and was included in a compilation of 265 jokes titled "Philogelos: The Laugh Addict". In the Greek version, a man complains to a slave-merchant that his new slave has died. The slave-merchant replies, "When he was with me, he never did any such thing!"
Carthage was the capital of the last computer against which i lost my last game. Burn them all, and burn the ashes, and put the ashes of the ashes in the dirt, then burn the dirt, give it to eat to some monster and burn the monster.
I am a little concerned that all this talk of cabbages and arson and ancient jokes (was that one of Bob Monkhouse's, by the way?) is distracting us from the matter at hand....
That the destruction of Carthage is making a late surge, and is now only 4 votes behind those wanting to save our animal loving city.
If Carthage falls, the only place left holding out against the Romans will be that plucky little village in Armorica!
I am a little concerned that all this talk of cabbages and arson and ancient jokes (was that one of Bob Monkhouse's, by the way?) is distracting us from the matter at hand....
That the destruction of Carthage is making a late surge, and is now only 4 votes behind those wanting to save our animal loving city.
If Carthage falls, the only place left holding out against the Romans will be that plucky little village in Armorica!
Catullus alone carries my desire to switch votes on his filthy little shoulders, but I admit that as someone who has played a Baali in old WoD, I do want to see Carthage preserved so that vampires and sacrificial cattle alike can...uh, I mean so that vampires and mortals alike can live in harmony!
If Carthage falls, the only place left holding out against the Romans will be that plucky little village in Armorica!
Never fear, the Parthians and Sassanids have a very good record against them, especially on the defensive. Emperor Valerian could tell you a thing or two about that!
(Or just, like, anybody with lots of archer cavalry.)
Old Cato thought that Rome was the best But one point he thought should be stressed When he spoke in the Forum With no regard for decorum He'd say "Carthago delenda est"
Friends I hope you will not mind if I engage in some History chat in this venerable thread. Here is something you may find interesting, and it keeps the link with the Monty Python references earlier on in this discussion.
An A.D. 400 Hellenistic Greek joke was recently translated and it shows similarities to the Dead Parrot sketch. It was written by the duo of Hierocles and Philagrius and was included in a compilation of 265 jokes titled "Philogelos: The Laugh Addict". In the Greek version, a man complains to a slave-merchant that his new slave has died. The slave-merchant replies, "When he was with me, he never did any such thing!"
A man is traveling to Greece. His friend asks "will you bring back two 15 year old slaves"? His friend responds "yes, and if they don't have two I'll bring back a 30 year old one!"
Have you seen or read Barbarians by Terry Jones? If not, I urge you to do it.....
Reading it right now, and since it is essentially a polemic on Roman Propaganda, and authored by a Pythonite, it seems a perfect accompaniment to this thread. (It's also immensley readable).
One paragraph stood out for me:
Rome's original assumption of a world-ruling role had been over the dead body of Carthage, which it had not only conquered, but extirpated as completely as it could. In 146 Be the city had some 700,000 inhabitants. When it was captured, the Roman soldiers spent six days in an orgy of killing, setting fire to buildings so that their work would be illuminated at night. More than half a million people were said to have been slaughtered without any regard to age or sex. Not even the most virulent anti-Barbarian propagandists ever ascribed such ruthless, inhuman savagery to anyone else. Genocide was a peculiarly Roman speciality.
Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Akkadians and Egyptians all had that science of massacre down pretty solid long before Rome was a twin glimmer in a she-wolf's eye.
That said, the Imperial Ambition came from somewhere, and that was Greece via those places...since the very first Kings wanted to be Emperors, whatever words they used for those sin-caked titular assumptions of superiority and authority over us all, there've been massacres.
Look, honestly Rome and Carthage as states were toxic plagues of imperial ambition, echoes of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, etc as those were echoes of Sumer's authoritarian horrorshow, and even in death the corpses of Carthage and Rome burst and spread the toxin of that idea to ambitious sociopaths far and wide through time and space both. We still suffer the consequences of their sins, the amplified echo reaching its most cacophonous and ear-rending noisewall in global capitalism's deterritorialization and reterritorializing of authoritarian forms of political power into authoritarian forms of economic power which can make or break political forms at an accelerated rate unprecedented in world history.
So Rome and Carthage both needed to go, honestly...but Carthage need not have fallen to Rome's imperial ambitions! Two wrongs don't make a right, and it would have been right and just for Romans to rise up and abolish Rome just as it would have been right and just for Carthaginians to rise up and abolish Carthage. No destruction of the city needed, just good ol' fashioned people's war against state authority to seize the Power Over All held by some, and spread it amongst the All so as to eliminate the Over. That doesn't necessitate massive loss of life, just a fraction of the population has to die at the hands of the majority, substantially cleaner than a war of empire against empire.
Carthaginian People's Front and People's Front of Rome, rise up in solidarity and mutual aid with one another, strike at your tyrants and their sycophants together, you have nothing to lose but your chains and you have a world to win!
I have alway hate figs. An there no doubt figs are the made of some evil infant.
Carthage grown and sell this bitter seed of despair. We have no choice but burn the city and the all country to make sure not a single plant stay alive.
Meanwhile, we Greeks were a peaceful and prosperous people, unstained by the plague of imperialistic ambitions *
*slaves sold separately, ethnic cleansing not included
Alexander was technically a Macedonian, right? The Greeks who went with him on a series of imperialist conquests were technically being Macedonian imperialists, right? *ίδρωμα*
@GenderNihilismGirdle has some excellent points, and Rome's extirpation of Carthage was needlessly savage. However, I have to admit that I am against human sacrifice, esp. of children so Carthage must go.
Have you seen or read Barbarians by Terry Jones? If not, I urge you to do it.....
Reading it right now, and since it is essentially a polemic on Roman Propaganda, and authored by a Pythonite, it seems a perfect accompaniment to this thread. (It's also immensley readable).
One paragraph stood out for me:
Rome's original assumption of a world-ruling role had been over the dead body of Carthage, which it had not only conquered, but extirpated as completely as it could. In 146 Be the city had some 700,000 inhabitants. When it was captured, the Roman soldiers spent six days in an orgy of killing, setting fire to buildings so that their work would be illuminated at night. More than half a million people were said to have been slaughtered without any regard to age or sex. Not even the most virulent anti-Barbarian propagandists ever ascribed such ruthless, inhuman savagery to anyone else. Genocide was a peculiarly Roman speciality.
Wait until you get to the chapter about Ceasar's invasion of Gaul. The estimated figures of dead gauls because of this is so sickening it makes even the mongols look like choir boys. Compared to that, a little child sacrificing seems like the lesser of two evils.
Besides, Carthage was an 'empire' built primarly on trade and not military conquest. I don't get if @GenderNihilismGirdle's post was irony or not, but the two empires; Rome and Carthage, are not 1-to-1 comparable in that sense.
This whole dispute could have been solved peacefully but unfortunately Dido created a culture in Carthage where giving in was not an option. When Roman ambassadors went to negotiate a peaceful surrender apparently the response was:
But I will go down with this ship And I won't put my hands up and surrender There will be no white flag above my door
@GenderNihilismGirdle has some excellent points, and Rome's extirpation of Carthage was needlessly savage. However, I have to admit that I am against human sacrifice, esp. of children so Carthage must go.
I'm pretty sure that was Roman propaganda, it's not sourced anywhere outside of Roman propaganda of the time that I'm aware of anyway (and, of course, of later Roman "historical" references to Carthage that were backwards-justifying such extreme actions based on what only existed inside their own pro-war propaganda of the period) and it's worthwhile to note that despite it very likely being Roman propaganda, Roman troops actually did slaughter a bunch of kids (and infants) in Carthage, and bragged about it afterwards. So the only ones proven to have engaged in the systematic killing of children in Carthage were Romans who felt Carthage should be destroyed.
It's sort of like how, yeah Emperors were often bad people, but Caligula and Nero set the example for what to say about bad Emperors to the extent that we know some detractors of later Emperors were just trying to paint them posthumously with a bad brush by asserting stuff as bad as what Caligula and Nero did (and even some of what Caligula and Nero did is only sourced in the writings of their detractors and nowhere else, which isn't to say there weren't tons of things sourced every which way that they definitely did that were heinous, just that those things gave Roman writers liscence to heap on stuff they didn't do, and then in the future continue to heap those same things on them as if it was definitely the case based on one very biased writer that says things no other contemporary source attests).
In other words, it's kind of a Roman tradition to lie about people and places they want others to hate or destroy or condemn, and the bigger and more sensational the lies the better.
This whole dispute could have been solved peacefully but unfortunately Dido created a culture in Carthage where giving in was not an option. When Roman ambassadors went to negotiate a peaceful surrender apparently the response was:
But I will go down with this ship And I won't put my hands up and surrender There will be no white flag above my door
And as the tide of battle turned a bloodied and badly wounded Carthaginian soldier stumbled into the command tent and found a despondent General, a full cup of tea unfinished on a side table, gazing wistfully at the portrait of Queen Dido hanging at the back of the tent and mumbling to himself:
My tea's gone cold, I'm wondering why I Got out of bed at all The morning rain clouds up my window moistens my tentflap And I can't see at all And even if I could it'd all be grey But your picture on my wall It reminds me that it's not so bad It's not so bad
Have you seen or read Barbarians by Terry Jones? If not, I urge you to do it.....
Reading it right now, and since it is essentially a polemic on Roman Propaganda, and authored by a Pythonite, it seems a perfect accompaniment to this thread. (It's also immensley readable).
One paragraph stood out for me:
Rome's original assumption of a world-ruling role had been over the dead body of Carthage, which it had not only conquered, but extirpated as completely as it could. In 146 Be the city had some 700,000 inhabitants. When it was captured, the Roman soldiers spent six days in an orgy of killing, setting fire to buildings so that their work would be illuminated at night. More than half a million people were said to have been slaughtered without any regard to age or sex. Not even the most virulent anti-Barbarian propagandists ever ascribed such ruthless, inhuman savagery to anyone else. Genocide was a peculiarly Roman speciality.
Wait until you get to the chapter about Ceasar's invasion of Gaul. The estimated figures of dead gauls because of this is so sickening it makes even the mongols look like choir boys. Compared to that, a little child sacrificing seems like the lesser of two evils.
Besides, Carthage was an 'empire' built primarly on trade and not military conquest. I don't get if @GenderNihilismGirdle's post was irony or not, but the two empires; Rome and Carthage, are not 1-to-1 comparable in that sense.
It was a silly little post, but it has seeds in it of what I actually feel about it.
State violence, whether it's "military conquest" or not, in that era was generally done with their military, including violence to maintain (and expand) borders but I'm also counting population control here, that was their standing military that intervened quite violently on the part of the state to maintain an ethnic caste-based supremacy of Phoenician-descended folks over indigenous African populations comingling with them, including suppressing the occasional rebellion.
But aside from that, military conquest was something Carthage never stopped participating in since it's founding. There were indigenous African communities around them that the Phoenicians who settled there initially made sure to clear out (with the aid of other indigenous African communities it can probably be said, although there's scant evidence of that being true it seems probable anyway, but it's still Phoenician empire-building the same way Europeans later enacted their own brand of it by making alliances of convenience with traditional enemies of the peoples whose land they most coveted) and even at their height they were regularly engaged in raiding the surrounding indigenous African communities for slaves for their primary piece of Empire you mentioned: trade!
But founding aside, Carthage definitely held territories nearly all the way East to Egypt along the North African coast, as well as large chunks of what is now Spain and Portugal and held, lost, and retook again many Mediterranean islands over the course of it's existence...through military conquest, not trade! They also joined wars on the side of allies throughout their history, putting their standing navy to use (and to a lesser extent their standing military, as they relied more heavily on mercenaries outside NW Africa) even in conflicts they weren't directly involved in as pretty much every single state in the region, with aspirations towards empire or not, engaged in at the time (and Carthage definitely aspired towards Empire, something Rome found absolutely intolerable since that meant they had shared targets for imperial ambitions). Intricate alliances and regional powerplays concerned everyone in the region, very few powers with standing militaries/navies, of which Carthage was one, could afford to play Switzerland in that era (although they did also play Switzerland, in the sense of constantly selling their navy's services as mercenaries in peacetime for profit). In fact their navy was huge and nearly always active, either in mercenary activity that paid to the state or in official state actions jumping into wars, and before their fall it was considered the equal of Rome's navy at some points in its history, and superior to Rome's navy at every other point in its history. It was often just as much of a statement to not jump into the fray if a trade ally was involved as it was to pick a side, and Carthage had actually picked a side with Rome fairly infrequently in its history up to that point, so some of that praise actually came from Romans speaking of the efficiency and size of their navy glowingly since they were writers who were speaking on this topic in the afterglow of a successful joint venture (and even in the period of their destruction, contemporary Roman writers like Polybius were very explicit in their assessment of Carthage as a dangerous naval power who frequently used their naval power).
So it was built "primarily" on trade, but some of that trade was mercenary deployment of military/navy conquest, and in between that they kept on expanding their territory with, y'know, their extremely powerful navy conquering islands and the rest of the African coast of the Mediterranean and the Iberian peninsula (and fairly far inland as well, that was not "trade conquest" that secured them those territories).
So it's all connected, and you can't really tease apart any one part of it without revealing the violent military actions contributing to the their trade empire even apart from the near-constant exercise of their naval power in one form or another, or their constant conflicts over islands they wanted to be part of their imperial patrimony.
tl;dr you can't maintain an empire, even a trade empire, without spilling blood every once in a while, but a trade empire in one localized region is rarely an empire, and an empire stretching far enough requires much more frequent blood-spilling, which Carthage participated in.
@GenderNihilismGirdle has some excellent points, and Rome's extirpation of Carthage was needlessly savage. However, I have to admit that I am against human sacrifice, esp. of children so Carthage must go.
While there actually is some evidence (not conclusive) that Rome's tales of Carthaginian child sacrifice were not entirely propaganda, Rome wasn't a stranger to human sacrifice either: the last large-scale human sacrifice in Rome took place when Hannibal appeared about to imminently besiege the city after Cannae.
@GenderNihilismGirdle has some excellent points, and Rome's extirpation of Carthage was needlessly savage. However, I have to admit that I am against human sacrifice, esp. of children so Carthage must go.
While there actually is some evidence (not conclusive) that Rome's tales of Carthaginian child sacrifice were not entirely propaganda, Rome wasn't a stranger to human sacrifice either: the last large-scale human sacrifice in Rome took place when Hannibal appeared about to imminently besiege the city after Cannae.
That's fascinating, I did not know that factoid about Roman human sacrifice in the face of a Carthaginian invasion! On the topic of things I did not know, what's the inconclusive evidence outside of Roman sources that the tales weren't propaganda, re: Carthage?
That's fascinating, I did not know that factoid about Roman human sacrifice in the face of a Carthaginian invasion! On the topic of things I did not know, what's the inconclusive evidence outside of Roman sources that the tales weren't propaganda, re: Carthage?
There's two main sources of evidence; literary and archeological. Literary is of course suspect, because it is primarily from Roman or Roman-influenced sources - but it's worth noting that it is a thing said by a LOT of different sources, including in some not-obviously-hostile contexts. Against that is that a few prominent sources (such as Livy) never mention it.
Archeological evidence, however, is harder to doubt. Several Tophets have been discovered in Carthage and other Punic cities, containing urns with the remains of children (ranging from fetuses to several years old); the soil in the area is full of olive-wood charcoal, indicating sacrificial pyres. Further evidence is that some urns hold animal remains, which are generally accepted to have been religious sacrifices and not merely beloved pets or something similar.
There has been much wrangling over exactly what these mean. Some archeologists have argued that the necropoli hold stillborn children and ones dying of natural causes (obviously the fetuses weren't killed to be sacrificed; on the other hand, they're often interred with the remains of an older child); others argue that there's clear evidence of actual religious sacrifices (for instance, a study of surviving uncremated remains in a tophet in Sicily seemed to show that the still-extant bones of children had no sign of disease). Arguing has also happened over whether the age distribution of dead children indicates natural causes (there are many children ranging from pre-birth to just under five years old in tophets) or not (there appear to be a suspiciously high percentage of remains that are just around two months old). Children being interred in tophets appears to rise during times of war, famine and disease, which could be evidence for either side.
My personal unprofessional opinion is that there probably was child sacrifice, given Occam's Razor. There was human sacrifice in many places all around the Mediterranean (as noted with the Roman example, amongst others), and the fact there were clearly sacrificial animals occasionally interred in the same way as the children seems hard to reconcile if the children weren't religious sacrifices. Also, sure Roman writers had no allegience to the truth over propaganda, but it is notable that so many of them make the same accusation. One thing that some Roman writers definitely exaggerated was frequency - an archeologist studying the Salammbo Tophet in Carthage estimated that about 25 children a year were interred there (adding up to a lot over several centuries); in a city of about 500,000, that's too low a number to cover all the natural deaths (though it could be the tophet was restricted to only the Punic elite, of course), but a more reasonable number for a truly sacred and profound human sacrifice offered for only the greatest of boons.
I'd argue that you gave a more relevant accounting of the sins of Qart Hadasht in your post before; it was a rapacious, marauding Mediterranean power-broker. They committed probably less crimes than the Romans in their time, but only because their specific brand of empire wasn't as reliant on naked military force. When they did need to use military force, however, they were just as pitiless as anyone else of the time period. But people get very emotional about the idea of sacrificing children, of course, so it seems that it remains a hot topic that in some ways feels like weighing judgment on the Punics as a people.
@Ayiekie that is some seriously cool stuff, didn't know any of the archaeological posits one way or the other on that one! Thanks so much for the detailed reply!
Elephants are cute. Therefore Rome needs to go find somewhere else to invade.
More fun historical facts: the Carthaginian elephants made so famous by Hannibal (even though most of them didn't survive the Alps crossing and they actually weren't relevant to his famous battles with Rome) were a now-extinct species (or subspecies; debate is ongoing) of North African elephant that was about 2 meters tall, significantly smaller than the two extant elephant species'. They MAY also have been easier to tame than the generally untamable African elephants; unfortunately, as the species has been extinct since ~100 AD or so (thanks, Rome, and your incessant games and probably use of ivory), it's hard to be certain.
In a weird coincidence, this means the proportions for the in-game models in (extremely loose) tacstrat reenactment of the Second Punic War, Tears to Tiara II, are actually about right. Well, the proportion of people to elephant, anyway.
(Although, just to make things confusing, Hannibal's own personal elephant, Surus, may have been a Syrian elephant, another now-extinct subspecies that was significantly bigger. It is attested to be bigger than a standard elephant, and the name might mean "the Syrian". It also might mean "one-tusker", which... also seems very valid as an elephant name. The more you find out about history, the more you realise that "may" and "might" should preface practically everything!)
A Roman walked into a bar and ordered a martinus. "Don't you mean a martini?" asked the bartender. The Roman replied "If I wanted a double I would have asked for it!"
The next day the Roman comes back with four of his friends. He holds up two fingers and says "Five beers please"
A Roman walked into a bar and ordered a martinus. "Don't you mean a martini?" asked the bartender. The Roman replied "If I wanted a double I would have asked for it!"
The next day the Roman comes back with four of his friends. He holds up two fingers and says "Five beers please"
Comments
An A.D. 400 Hellenistic Greek joke was recently translated and it shows similarities to the Dead Parrot sketch. It was written by the duo of Hierocles and Philagrius and was included in a compilation of 265 jokes titled "Philogelos: The Laugh Addict". In the Greek version, a man complains to a slave-merchant that his new slave has died. The slave-merchant replies, "When he was with me, he never did any such thing!"
Carthage was the capital of the last computer against which i lost my last game. Burn them all, and burn the ashes, and put the ashes of the ashes in the dirt, then burn the dirt, give it to eat to some monster and burn the monster.
That the destruction of Carthage is making a late surge, and is now only 4 votes behind those wanting to save our animal loving city.
If Carthage falls, the only place left holding out against the Romans will be that plucky little village in Armorica!
(Or just, like, anybody with lots of archer cavalry.)
But one point he thought should be stressed
When he spoke in the Forum
With no regard for decorum
He'd say "Carthago delenda est"
Those whacky Romans and their slave jokes.
Asked the barkeep what he had in stock,
Don’t give me no wine,
You’re wasting my time,
Real men drink only hemlock
One paragraph stood out for me:
Rome's original assumption of a world-ruling role had been over the dead body of Carthage, which it had not only conquered, but extirpated as completely as it could. In 146 Be the city had some 700,000 inhabitants. When it was captured, the Roman soldiers spent six days in an orgy of killing, setting fire to buildings so that their work would be illuminated at night. More than half a million people were said to have been slaughtered without any regard to age or sex. Not even the most virulent anti-Barbarian propagandists ever ascribed such ruthless, inhuman savagery to anyone else. Genocide was a peculiarly Roman speciality.
That said, the Imperial Ambition came from somewhere, and that was Greece via those places...since the very first Kings wanted to be Emperors, whatever words they used for those sin-caked titular assumptions of superiority and authority over us all, there've been massacres.
Look, honestly Rome and Carthage as states were toxic plagues of imperial ambition, echoes of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, etc as those were echoes of Sumer's authoritarian horrorshow, and even in death the corpses of Carthage and Rome burst and spread the toxin of that idea to ambitious sociopaths far and wide through time and space both. We still suffer the consequences of their sins, the amplified echo reaching its most cacophonous and ear-rending noisewall in global capitalism's deterritorialization and reterritorializing of authoritarian forms of political power into authoritarian forms of economic power which can make or break political forms at an accelerated rate unprecedented in world history.
So Rome and Carthage both needed to go, honestly...but Carthage need not have fallen to Rome's imperial ambitions! Two wrongs don't make a right, and it would have been right and just for Romans to rise up and abolish Rome just as it would have been right and just for Carthaginians to rise up and abolish Carthage. No destruction of the city needed, just good ol' fashioned people's war against state authority to seize the Power Over All held by some, and spread it amongst the All so as to eliminate the Over. That doesn't necessitate massive loss of life, just a fraction of the population has to die at the hands of the majority, substantially cleaner than a war of empire against empire.
Carthaginian People's Front and People's Front of Rome, rise up in solidarity and mutual aid with one another, strike at your tyrants and their sycophants together, you have nothing to lose but your chains and you have a world to win!
Carthage grown and sell this bitter seed of despair. We have no choice but burn the city and the all country to make sure not a single plant stay alive.
*slaves sold separately, ethnic cleansing not included
Besides, Carthage was an 'empire' built primarly on trade and not military conquest. I don't get if @GenderNihilismGirdle's post was irony or not, but the two empires; Rome and Carthage, are not 1-to-1 comparable in that sense.
But I will go down with this ship
And I won't put my hands up and surrender
There will be no white flag above my door
It's sort of like how, yeah Emperors were often bad people, but Caligula and Nero set the example for what to say about bad Emperors to the extent that we know some detractors of later Emperors were just trying to paint them posthumously with a bad brush by asserting stuff as bad as what Caligula and Nero did (and even some of what Caligula and Nero did is only sourced in the writings of their detractors and nowhere else, which isn't to say there weren't tons of things sourced every which way that they definitely did that were heinous, just that those things gave Roman writers liscence to heap on stuff they didn't do, and then in the future continue to heap those same things on them as if it was definitely the case based on one very biased writer that says things no other contemporary source attests).
In other words, it's kind of a Roman tradition to lie about people and places they want others to hate or destroy or condemn, and the bigger and more sensational the lies the better.
My tea's gone cold, I'm wondering why I
Got out of bed at all
The morning rain
clouds up my windowmoistens my tentflapAnd I can't see at all
And even if I could it'd all be grey
But your picture on my wall
It reminds me that it's not so bad
It's not so bad
State violence, whether it's "military conquest" or not, in that era was generally done with their military, including violence to maintain (and expand) borders but I'm also counting population control here, that was their standing military that intervened quite violently on the part of the state to maintain an ethnic caste-based supremacy of Phoenician-descended folks over indigenous African populations comingling with them, including suppressing the occasional rebellion.
But aside from that, military conquest was something Carthage never stopped participating in since it's founding. There were indigenous African communities around them that the Phoenicians who settled there initially made sure to clear out (with the aid of other indigenous African communities it can probably be said, although there's scant evidence of that being true it seems probable anyway, but it's still Phoenician empire-building the same way Europeans later enacted their own brand of it by making alliances of convenience with traditional enemies of the peoples whose land they most coveted) and even at their height they were regularly engaged in raiding the surrounding indigenous African communities for slaves for their primary piece of Empire you mentioned: trade!
But founding aside, Carthage definitely held territories nearly all the way East to Egypt along the North African coast, as well as large chunks of what is now Spain and Portugal and held, lost, and retook again many Mediterranean islands over the course of it's existence...through military conquest, not trade! They also joined wars on the side of allies throughout their history, putting their standing navy to use (and to a lesser extent their standing military, as they relied more heavily on mercenaries outside NW Africa) even in conflicts they weren't directly involved in as pretty much every single state in the region, with aspirations towards empire or not, engaged in at the time (and Carthage definitely aspired towards Empire, something Rome found absolutely intolerable since that meant they had shared targets for imperial ambitions). Intricate alliances and regional powerplays concerned everyone in the region, very few powers with standing militaries/navies, of which Carthage was one, could afford to play Switzerland in that era (although they did also play Switzerland, in the sense of constantly selling their navy's services as mercenaries in peacetime for profit). In fact their navy was huge and nearly always active, either in mercenary activity that paid to the state or in official state actions jumping into wars, and before their fall it was considered the equal of Rome's navy at some points in its history, and superior to Rome's navy at every other point in its history. It was often just as much of a statement to not jump into the fray if a trade ally was involved as it was to pick a side, and Carthage had actually picked a side with Rome fairly infrequently in its history up to that point, so some of that praise actually came from Romans speaking of the efficiency and size of their navy glowingly since they were writers who were speaking on this topic in the afterglow of a successful joint venture (and even in the period of their destruction, contemporary Roman writers like Polybius were very explicit in their assessment of Carthage as a dangerous naval power who frequently used their naval power).
So it was built "primarily" on trade, but some of that trade was mercenary deployment of military/navy conquest, and in between that they kept on expanding their territory with, y'know, their extremely powerful navy conquering islands and the rest of the African coast of the Mediterranean and the Iberian peninsula (and fairly far inland as well, that was not "trade conquest" that secured them those territories).
So it's all connected, and you can't really tease apart any one part of it without revealing the violent military actions contributing to the their trade empire even apart from the near-constant exercise of their naval power in one form or another, or their constant conflicts over islands they wanted to be part of their imperial patrimony.
tl;dr you can't maintain an empire, even a trade empire, without spilling blood every once in a while, but a trade empire in one localized region is rarely an empire, and an empire stretching far enough requires much more frequent blood-spilling, which Carthage participated in.
Archeological evidence, however, is harder to doubt. Several Tophets have been discovered in Carthage and other Punic cities, containing urns with the remains of children (ranging from fetuses to several years old); the soil in the area is full of olive-wood charcoal, indicating sacrificial pyres. Further evidence is that some urns hold animal remains, which are generally accepted to have been religious sacrifices and not merely beloved pets or something similar.
There has been much wrangling over exactly what these mean. Some archeologists have argued that the necropoli hold stillborn children and ones dying of natural causes (obviously the fetuses weren't killed to be sacrificed; on the other hand, they're often interred with the remains of an older child); others argue that there's clear evidence of actual religious sacrifices (for instance, a study of surviving uncremated remains in a tophet in Sicily seemed to show that the still-extant bones of children had no sign of disease). Arguing has also happened over whether the age distribution of dead children indicates natural causes (there are many children ranging from pre-birth to just under five years old in tophets) or not (there appear to be a suspiciously high percentage of remains that are just around two months old). Children being interred in tophets appears to rise during times of war, famine and disease, which could be evidence for either side.
My personal unprofessional opinion is that there probably was child sacrifice, given Occam's Razor. There was human sacrifice in many places all around the Mediterranean (as noted with the Roman example, amongst others), and the fact there were clearly sacrificial animals occasionally interred in the same way as the children seems hard to reconcile if the children weren't religious sacrifices. Also, sure Roman writers had no allegience to the truth over propaganda, but it is notable that so many of them make the same accusation. One thing that some Roman writers definitely exaggerated was frequency - an archeologist studying the Salammbo Tophet in Carthage estimated that about 25 children a year were interred there (adding up to a lot over several centuries); in a city of about 500,000, that's too low a number to cover all the natural deaths (though it could be the tophet was restricted to only the Punic elite, of course), but a more reasonable number for a truly sacred and profound human sacrifice offered for only the greatest of boons.
I'd argue that you gave a more relevant accounting of the sins of Qart Hadasht in your post before; it was a rapacious, marauding Mediterranean power-broker. They committed probably less crimes than the Romans in their time, but only because their specific brand of empire wasn't as reliant on naked military force. When they did need to use military force, however, they were just as pitiless as anyone else of the time period. But people get very emotional about the idea of sacrificing children, of course, so it seems that it remains a hot topic that in some ways feels like weighing judgment on the Punics as a people.
(Cothons are still amazing and cool, though.)
In a weird coincidence, this means the proportions for the in-game models in (extremely loose) tacstrat reenactment of the Second Punic War, Tears to Tiara II, are actually about right. Well, the proportion of people to elephant, anyway.
(Although, just to make things confusing, Hannibal's own personal elephant, Surus, may have been a Syrian elephant, another now-extinct subspecies that was significantly bigger. It is attested to be bigger than a standard elephant, and the name might mean "the Syrian". It also might mean "one-tusker", which... also seems very valid as an elephant name. The more you find out about history, the more you realise that "may" and "might" should preface practically everything!)
"Don't you mean a martini?" asked the bartender.
The Roman replied "If I wanted a double I would have asked for it!"
The next day the Roman comes back with four of his friends. He holds up two fingers and says "Five beers please"