602 THE EXCAVATIONS OF CARTHAGE. 



So each day discloses antiquities surpassing in richness and artistic 

 interest any before known; and if Carthage had yielded nothing but 

 tombs they would have sufficed to give unexpected information, to him 

 who knows how to question them, upon Phoenician art and civilization 

 of the period preceding the overthrow of the queen of the sea by the 

 Romans. 



II. 



Few spectacles give the impression of the oblivion into which past 

 grandeur falls in the same degree as the ruins of Carthage. Nowhere 

 does Delenda Carthago strike one as such a vivid reality. The Eomans 

 acquitted themselves of their work conscientiously, and civilization has 

 completed what the conquerors left undone. The stones of Carthage, 

 after serving in the Eoman town, were used, and continue to be used, 

 for the houses of Tunis, and the marble of its columns adorns the cathe- 

 drals of Italy and southern France. 



From the promontory whence the bay of Tunis is seen in the dis- 

 tance, with the beautiful line of mountains that shut it in on the south, 

 the glance wanders over some earth heaps in which only the trained eye 

 can recognize the site of ancient Carthage. Not even ruins are visible. 

 Far off, toward Tunis, there gleam in the sunlight two lagoons, called 

 the ports of Carthage. They probably formed the inner harbor. The 

 orifices of the great cisterns, the circus a,nd the amphitheater, both of 

 the Eoman period, and the long line of aqueducts gliding toward Zag- 

 wam, this is all that remains of Carthage. Not far from the sea, in the 

 middle of a tract of land bought by France, on a hillock supposed to 

 have been Byrsa, rises the basilica of St. Louis, at which the antiqui- 

 ties of Carthage were deposited as soon as found. It was the first 

 museum for the purpose and the only one until Bene de La Blanchere 

 prepared the palace of Manuba to house the finds from excavations 

 made under the management of the Antiquites in Tunis. 



It is proper to say that to Cardinal Lavigerie belongs the chief merit 

 of these discoveries. After Dureau de La Malle, who restored the 

 topography of Carthage without ever having been on its site and 

 endeavored to found a society for the exploration of its ruins, and 

 after Beule, who more recently brought his artistic and arch^eologic 

 skill to bear upon them, Lavigerie was the first to comprehend the 

 necessity for making systematic excavations at Carthage and for main- 

 taining a permanent station there. 



Even before this the Academy, interested in collecting the material 

 of the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, had charged M. de Sainte- 

 Marie, dragoman of the French consulate at Tunis, to institute some 

 such action. In a little while he had a collection of more than two 

 thousand votire steles of dull sameness, proving, however, that the soil 

 of Carthage still hid Phoenician antiquities. He found, besides, numer- 

 ous bits of architecture, statues or fragments of statues, all of the 



