Punic Wars -- when Algeria was Carthage

On our one-day weekend Thursday we decided to visit the National Museum of the Army, war being one of the things most know about Algeria. This is supposed to be a pretty good museum in a beautiful marble hall with chandeliers. But mostly we found it was filled with amateurish models and bad art. We found ourselves counting pools of blood in paintings and mocking the weebles-ish dead people in the massacre models.

We did like a room devoted to French torture of Algerians during the War for Independence. They had a doll house set up with each room a square of pain -- the weeble dolls were getting electrocuted beaten, shackled. I imagined little Americans playing with such a horror before growing up and serving at Abu Qraib. And there was also an interesting section on Algeria's second post-Independence President Houari Boumediene -- he overthrew the first president and drove Algeria into socialism -- which included his wonderful Dracula-worthy black Morocco cape (he also was ghostly pale with swept back black hair, but this was more likely a result of the white blood cell cancer that killed him in 1978 than vampirism) and photos of him with Tito, Arafat, Hussein, the Shah of Iran and other dusty despots.

The museum trip might have been a complete bust except that it moved me to find out what the heck the Punic Wars were. I've heard of them, but never studied them. Why was it that in school in my era we learned about the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the the Civil War and that's it? No Vietnam, certainly, and little about the World Wars or Korea and those are only the American conflicts.

I now know that Carthage -- before the Romans razed it into rubble -- was a city-state in eastern Algiera. The city itself -- including the ruins -- are a suburb of Tunis in neighboring Tunisia.

My kids have all studied history in college --and are devoted to the History Channel. They filled in some other information.

From Marco:

The Punic Wars are some of the most famous of the ancient world. It was a power struggle between Carthage and Rome, the victor gained control of the sea and therefore controlled all the trade routes and movement of goods. Rome won all three.

The Second Punic war is the most famous, that's when Hannibal invaded Italy and destroyed all the armies Rome sent against him, but was ultimately unsuccessful because he lacked the proper force and siege equipment to sack Rome.

Eventually Rome sent Scipio Africanus
(Africa is named after him) to attack Carthage and therefore drawing Hannibal away from Italy.

Hannibal was defeated, from what I know, because he heavily relied on war elephants in that battle and Scipio had a technique he came up with to channel the elephants so men on both sides could spear the elephants and cut their trunks off. They go berserk when you cut their trunks off and will even turn on their own handlers and their own army.

And from Mikey:

The Second Punic War... is very roughly the ancient history's second world war. It was fought against the Roman Republic and the empire of Carthage (the two power houses of the time). Hannibal did the unthinkable and crossed through the Alps and almost took over the whole Roman government including Rome. He, however, lost focus and spend a number of years hiding in the boot of Italy before he escaped back to N. Africa. The Roman Republic ended up winning the war and almost doubled their land holdings and power. They were well on the path of becoming an empire. A few decades later, there was a 3rd Punic War, which was really the Romans going into to N. Africa and destroying everything, razing the city, and selling everyone into slavery. any questions? History class is over :)