Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization

Richard Miles's Carthage Must Be Destroyed, The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization, published by Allen Lane in 2010, is a scholarly history of Carthage and its Phoenician Punic religious and civic culture, written by a classical archaeologist and historian who draws together textual and excavated evidence, including material from Carthage's own tophet sanctuary, into a single connected narrative for a general readership. Its strength is combining archaeological fieldwork based expertise with genuine narrative sweep, treating Carthage's own religious practice, including the still debated question of child sacrifice at the tophet, as a live scholarly question rather than settling it by assertion. Its limit is that Carthage survives almost entirely through Roman and Greek sources hostile to it, since Carthaginian written records were largely destroyed, so even a careful modern historian works from a record shaped by the civilization's eventual conquerors, a limit the book itself is honest about but cannot overcome.