Coinage of Tunisia: The Beginning

From “the Remotest Spot on Earth,” a brand description of the last coin issuing entity we looked at (Tristan da Cunha, tiny volcanic island in the South Atlantic, few hundred people), we hop to northernmost North Africa: Tunisia. The sociology is as different as can be. The remote island has only hosted humans for a few centuries. There were people in Tunisia before there were modern humans.

Tunisia has had written history almost as long as there has been writing. People have been making coins there almost as long as we have been making coins.

North Africa is five countries. From west to east they are Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. They are big countries, except for Tunisia. Little Tunisia is only a bit smaller than the American state of Washington, which is not tiny, but Libya, on the east, is twenty percent larger than Alaska, and Algeria, to the west, is almost twice as large as the largest American state.

Tunisia has the northernmost point in Africa. That actual point, a couple of hundred miles from Sicily, is currently sparsely inhabited. The modern city of Tunis is somewhat to the south, built on the landward side of a big lake. The ruins of Carthage are on a coastal salient, about ten miles away.

There is a story that Tunis, the city, was a Berber settlement that grew into a commercial-military operation, to do business with and keep an eye on what the Phoenicians were doing in Carthage. Carthage took over Tunis in the earliest days of its imperial expansion.

Tunisia is part of what is now called the Maghreb, which is Arabic for “the west.” West refers to west of Egypt, which was pretty much the center of things in the Mediterranean region for a couple of millennia. From the Egyptian point of view, to the west was Libya, where wild enemies lived. Further west was “the West,” with people in it, but the Egyptians didn’t have that much to do with them. The Egyptians did most of their trade with Asia, where there were people who made things and did business, rather than being herding nomads who liked to fight.

But let’s go back further, into the paleontology. You know how there are all these fossils in the fossil market that come from Morocco? There are 500 million year old trilobites from Morocco, and 200 million year old dinosaur bones.

There are similar fossils found in Tunisia. The internet had a picture of a complete dinosaur skeleton in a museum in the town of Tatouine (name borrowed for the planet in the Star Wars series of movies).

There is not much of a fossil market in Tunisia though.

And you may have run into the large handaxes of homo erectus, who roamed most of Africa and Asia about 1.5 million to 250,000 years ago.

A bit later there were Neanderthal people there. The internet told me that it seems that all of us have a bit of Neanderthal DNA. There seems to be somewhat more of that going on in Africa, where we all came from, they say, than elsewhere.

The internet also says that there is a 100.000 year old site in southern Tunisia. That would be Neanderthal.

According to the standard archeological story, field agriculture started in Mesopotamia and spread to Egypt by about 5000 BC. By 4000 BC it had spread to the Maghreb. The agricultural settlements that developed in the Maghreb are reckoned to be ancestral Berber.

People from the eastern Mediterranean began coming to the western Mediterranean in the prehistoric time of myths. Hercules had been mucking around in Spain with an army when he died. His soldiers, it was said, dispersed in all directions and founded little colonies of settler soldiers. Some of them went to Africa. This is all legend, isn’t it?

Persians were said to have migrated to the area, mated with locals, and founded Numidia, home of the nomads, which at one point was an empire that held all of North Africa except Egypt. There were Medes, also from Persia, who settled and developed into the “Moors,” who at one point had a kingdom called Mauritania.

Then came the Phoenicians.

Phoenicia was the coastal region of Lebanon and nearby areas. Before the Hebrews arrived in Judaea, a bit south of the Phoenician core, it was called Canaan, and was part of the Phoenician culture complex. We’re looking at maybe 1300 BC for the Hebrews in the Holy Land, the Phoenicians were there when they got there.

What made Phoenicia special, in commercial-political tems, was that it was the eastern terminus of the Mediterranean maritime trade, and the western terminus of the Silk Road, the series of caravan routes that crossed Asia all the way to China.

The archeology of Phoenicia is extensive. The western art canon does not showcase Phoenician art, like we do for the Egyptians and the Greeks. This is probably because their figuration was kind of crude. Their art tends to be “not pretty.”

At that time, about 1200 BC, Egypt was still a big thing. Mesopotamia and Syria had regional kingdoms like Ugarit and Babylon. Up in Anatolia, big as Egypt, was the Hittite Empire. There was stuff going on in Crete. Everywhere else was nomads and little agricultural settlements.

The Phoenicians started to get rich from transfer activities. They invented writing so they could keep accounts. Their alphabet spread and was adapted by nearby cultures, among which were the Greeks. The Romans then adapted the Greek alphabet, and that’s the one we use today. Thank you, Phoenicians.

Keeping accounts worked so well for them that they got very rich. They sent out entrepreneurs.

In the east little settlements of Phoenician traders would occupy a quarter in some major cities, where they would do business. In the west the population density was much less, the governance was very light, they could just land their ships and build some houses. Sometimes maybe they’d get hassled by the natives, but mostly no one bothered them, back then. The stories are that they came and didn’t have to conquer. Paid some tribute to the local lords with their spare glass beads and so forth.

The ship technology then was they had square sails that they could put up when the wind was going right, otherwise they had to row. If the current was against them they had to row day and night until the situation changed.

You could raise money, get a bunch of free volunteers to sign up with you, and go adventuring, shares of the gain regulated by the signed contract, which in most cases would have to be self-enforced, unless you were on good terms with the local powers of exactly where you happened to be.

Or you could buy slaves to be the rowers. Both methods were used.

There were apparently plenty of slaves in the ancient world. They were all over the place, in every culture. If you were rich you could buy them and make them work for you.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a peculiar feature of that Phoenician culture that gave us our alphabet. They were apparently in the habit of sacrificing children in religious rituals. It seems they didn’t do it all the time, but they did do it. In the Bible, when God gave that famous command to Abraham, Abraham thought “well, OK,” because that was standard behavior where he grew up. Someone would take a vow or ask a divine favor, and take one of their children and kill it, to demonstrate that they really meant it.

They thought that was normal and they did it for a long time. The Romans eventually suppressed the practice, but it took centuries. There were still apparently people doing it in early Christian times.

Anyway, back to business. The Phoenicians were at the height of their influence in the late barter period. Commerce then worked strictly on the “on the spot” agreement system. Here’s the wool. There’s the cedarwood. If we trade my wool for your cedar my wool is worth more, you have to give me 14 jars of honey and a crate of those clay cups you make here.

There is only the haziest evidence that there was a pre-coinage “bronze ring” system in the Mediterranean region. The thought that something like that was more likely in China seems reasonable, though there is no real evidence there either. There are Egyptian pictures of piles of metal rings being used in commerce, but we don’t find large quantities of them in the ground (they do in China), nor of any other kind of item of the same size and weight until the advent of coins.

And there’s a story of the old iron spits used as money in Athens before the coins. They gathered them together and hung them from the ceiling of the Temple of Athena. But no specimens of those spits have been found.

The Phoenicians, then, had settlements in the Maghreb in the 13th century BC. One of their settlements in Tunisia was Utica. There is a town named Utica in New York state. Another Phoenician settlement grew into Carthage.

What is now northern Tunisia is called, in the ancient context, Zeugitania. To the south was part of Numidia.

The traditional date for the founding of Carthage was 814 BC. The colonists came from Tyre, now in Lebanon.

One of the problems the Phoenicians had in their homeland was that large empires developed around them. They, themselves, didn’t in any way ever really unite, in a political power way.

When the Phoenician homeland was conquered by the Assyrian Empire in the 600s BC, Carthage became independent. Kind of like what happened in the Spanish American colonies after Spain was conquered by Napoleon.

The African city proceeded to grow to be rich. It undertook colonial ventures in Spain and Sicily and Sardinia.

The word “Punic” is associated with things Carthaginian of this period. Thus the Carthaginian offshoots in Sicily, and their coins, are referred to as Siculo-Punic, and we find those coins in Sicily more than we find Carthaginian coins in Tunisia.

They didn’t have absolute monarchs in Carthage. They had a council kind of government, where committees decided what to do. The ancient world is full of famous monarchs of various kinds. The famous Carthaginian individuals were generals working for the “war department,” as it were.

In due course Carthage attempted to exert central control on the colonial operations. There was some success to that project, and Carthage grew to administer an Empire.

Their wide ranging activities brought them in contact with the expanding Empire of the Roman Republic. Rivalry developed, which became war, which Rome eventually won.

So, coins.

The homeland Phoenicians got the idea of coinage from Greeks living in Lydia, in Anatolia (Asian Turkey). They didn’t take to it particularly quickly. The Lydian Greek coins of Croesus, etc. date from the mid-7th century BC. The Phoenician cities in the Levant didn’t get their coinage going until about two centuries later.

Carthage started making coins when they started fighting with the Greeks in Sicily. That was the early 4th century BC. They saw these pretty silver things the Greeks were using in their business. Of course they wanted to do business with the Sicilian Greeks, that’s what Phoenicians did. With the Phoenicians the fighting was to do business, not for glory or anything like that.

And Sicily was rich. Excellent farmland, decorated pottery, wine.

The Greeks wanted to business with coins, so the Carthaginians made them for the soldiers to use in Sicily. Apparently they made a lot of them, and once they started making coins they kept on doing it until they were conquered by Rome.

The first coin series, the so-called Siculo-Punic, struck in Carthage for use in Sicly, is given dates of about 409 – 339 BC. The coins are silver and bronze, in Sicilian denominations.

The silver coins were mostly tetradrachms, and a few dekadrachms, which were occasionally made and used in Sicily. Sear lists an electrum trishekel, a shekel being equivalent to a didrachm. The silver types were imitations of contemporary Greek Sicilian types with, on the reverse, the horse badge of Carthage, with or without accompanying palm tree.

The bronze coins were Sicilian weight litrae and hemilitrae. They have the head of Tanit, one of the major deities of Carthage, with the horse on the other side.

The artistry of most, but not all of the Siculo-Punic coins is high style, leading many to suppose that the Carthaginians either hired or captured Greek die makers to make the coinage.

A rarer series are the coins struck for Carthaginian colonies on Sardinia. Sardo-Punic coins are what we might call “specialized,” if we don’t want to just admit that they’re rare. There was an auction of them in early 2022. All were bronze. The normal female head left has different hair arrangement and headgear and is called “Kore” rather than “Tanit.”

If you weren’t looking carefully you might think they were Siculo-Punic.

By 340 BC coins were being used in Carthage itself. Commerce was just so much easier with coins. You could keep track of stuff.

Once they started using coins themselves they made a lot of them, including gold, for the rich people to spend.

Actually, the first gold coins were electrum. Electrum is base gold, assumed usually to be a natural alloy. The Carthaginians made their electrum coins about three hundred years later than the Greeks did. Did they have a bunch of natural electrum on hand and just put it out there because they had it? Did they “make” electrum because the finances required it?

The people who put out electrum coins were always hoping that they could get away with making people use them like gold. One could conceive of a situation in which naïve or hopeful political appointees would take the electrum and just put it out there, but how would anyone be able to figure out what it was really worth?

No. Everyone would say, “Hey, there’s silver in that gold.” You had to force people to use electrum. Or else that had to be the only thing around.

In the 4th century BC coins were a new thing for the Carthaginians. Maybe they imagined they could get away with valuing them as if they were gold. But that kind of thing didn’t happen often in those days. Once made, everyone immediately figured out what the game was, and the only way you could get them into commerce was to declare a value and to be prepared to enforce the decree.

I mean, they were saying that the little, variable fineness “gold” drachms were worth two of the big silver tetradrachms. How would they get away with that if they weren’t forcing people to accept the exchange rate?

The government was in straightened circumstances for 120 years, after all.

And then again, these were coins for rich people. Maybe they could get away with it in the midst of war, but how long could they pull that off before the rich people started to lose their taste for the sacrifice?

At any rate, they stopped using electrum and started making pure gold coins. The rich people were so relieved. They didn’t have to guess any more, or take losses on every transaction.

The earlier Carthaginian types are almost entirely head of Tanit and horse. Occasionally there is a palm tree. A few later issues have heads of other deities. Many of them have the Greek artistic touch, some are cruder than that. There were gold, silver, and bronze coins of various sizes.

Carthage fought three major wars with Rome over about 120 years. It lost all of them. After the final defeat the Romans razed the old city and sold the survivors into slavery, putting a definitive end to the story of Phoenician Carthage.

Then the Romans went and rebuilt in the same place and brought in settlers and it grew again into the major city of the Western Mediterranean again, in the time when that Sea was Roman all the way around.