Kim Bowes: belief

Transcript context

…Same with Rome, right? That’s true. I was getting to the second part of my answer. There’s been a great work over the years done on Carthage. The Romans so successfully built on top of the Carthage I think you’re talking about, Punic Carthage, that they eradicated huge swaths of it. It’s very difficult to get at those really early pre-Roman levels. When the Romans claimed that they destroyed Carthage, they didn’t so much completely level it as they just built a massive Roman city, which was extremely wealthy and very big on top of it. Actually getting underneath to find Hannibal’s Carthage is a really tricky business, complicated by the modern city. Of course, we didn’t care. We believed the Romans when they said they destroyed it. We believed the Romans when they said that they had eradicated those nasty Carthaginians, and we didn’t care. Now I think we’re realizing how important the Carthaginians were and how important the whole Punic-speaking world was. Now we’re going to go back and find them. It’s great. There’s very longstanding debates on why Rome declined. You look at Rome from a different perspective, that of the 90 percent using archaeological methods. Does that give you a different view on why Rome declined?…

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