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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
PUNIC SPAIN BEFORE THE BARCIDS
The story of the expanding and often conflicting interests of Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks and Etruscans in the western Mediterranean has been told in earlier volumes. With the decline of Tyre the string of trading posts, which the Phoenicians founded from Gades on the Atlantic shore of Spain round to Malaca, Sexi and Abdera along the south-west Mediterranean coast, gradually passed into Carthaginian hands. The process was apparently peaceful, but to us is quite obscure in detail. The Phoenician decline afforded greater freedom to the Spanish kingdom of Tartessus in the middle and lower Baetis valley. This rich realm which flourished in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. derived its wealth from its great mineral resources and its control of the tin trade-route to Brittany and Cornwall. It traded with Phoenicians and Carthaginians, and especially with the Greeks. The Phocaeans in particular had good relations with the Tartessian ruler Arganthonius, and founded a colony at Maenake, but the shadow of Carthage over the west gradually grew longer.
After the failure of Pentathlus of Cnidus to drive the Phoenicians completely out of western Sicily, Carthage gradually took over from the Phoenicians and became the champion of the Semitic settlements against the Greeks. Their Punic leader, Malchus, checked the Greeks in Sicily and then went to Sardinia, where Phoenician settlements existed at Caralis, Nora, Sulcis, and Tharros, while a strong hillfort was built c. 600 B.C. on Monte Serai a few miles inland from Sulcis. Malchus suffered a serious defeat at the hands of the native population; there is also evidence that the fort at Monte Serai was damaged. However, it was soon rebuilt and the Carthaginians established their control over the Phoenician settlements. But their penetration of the island was slow (though they succeeded in preventing any Greek colonization), and even by the early fourth century their grip was much weaker in the east than in the south and west.
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