Salicar Gisgon (Carthage)
Posts : 1 Join date : 2017-12-19
| Subject: "God has given to man no sharper spur to victory than contempt of death." - Hannibal Tue Dec 19, 2017 7:11 pm | |
| Name: Salicar Gisgon
Representative of: Ancient Carthage
Gender: Male
Age: Human: 37 Historical: Founded 9th century BCE.
Brief personality: Salicar is a smart and cunning man, his cool demeanor allowing him to outwit almost anyone under pressure. He has a silver tongue, able to convince just about anyone with his smooth voice to listen to his side of things. Slow to anger and with a love of humour, he gets along with just about anyone he meets. He is very good with money and trade, and he hardly ever makes dumb, impulsive decisions. Though when things get tough, he is not afraid to do anything to solve the problem. He would even cut out his own eye if he had to, just like the man he admires, Hannibal I. Just like how Carthage had the agora near the middle of town to have festivals and include the community, Salicar is big on spending time with others and helping them out.
Though his biggest flaw would be the fact that he’s still unable to face the shame from falling to Rome. It angers him that all that hard work he put into fighting Rome off went away instantly, and all those blood oaths from father to son to grandson meant nothing. Though he used to be bent on revenge when he was younger, he is no longer since Rome has fallen. He just hates to talk about Rome, and the sight of anything that reminds him upsets him, even angers him. It’s like a trigger, and once he is set off, it takes a lot to coax him back to normal. Another flaw is that since he’s had a lot of betrayals in battle in the past, he has trust issues with those he does not deem to be close to him. It takes a lot to get close to him, though once you are, it is worth it because he is a caring individual.
Brief physical description: Salicar has golden brown skin and dark brown hair, keeping it messy like it used to be during wars. Since hair was important back in his time, he doesn’t like to cut it, though he doesn’t ever style it like he used to since it brings back bad memories. Therefore, his hair looks strange to anyone who once knew him. He has thick and yet neat eyebrows, and a little bit of hair on his chin. Although he may have the body of a 37 year old male, he has aged quite nicely, and can pass for younger than his age. He is tall for his time at 5'11, and he has a scar-covered muscular body.
He often wears an ornamented shenti with an adorned lappet on it, the shenti parted towards the two sides. Other times, he may wear a close-fitting tunic with short sleeves. Both of these are common for higher ranked Phoenician men. He also ornaments himself in very elaborate jewellery. This would include armlets, bracelets, and finger rings. Since he’s trying to get used to today’s culture though, he may sometimes be found wearing modern clothes.
- Appearance:
Brief history: The Carthaginian republic was one of the longest-lived and largest states in the ancient Mediterranean. Reports relay several wars with Syracuse and finally, Rome, which eventually resulted in the defeat and destruction of Carthage in the Third Punic War. The Carthaginians were Phoenician settlers originating in the Mediterranean coast of the Near East. They spoke Canaanite, a Semitic language, and followed a local variety of the ancient Canaanite religion.
- History:
The fall of Carthage came at the end of the Third Punic War in 146 BC at the Battle of Carthage. Despite initial devastating Roman naval losses and Rome's recovery from the brink of defeat after the terror of a 15-year occupation of much of Italy by Hannibal, the end of the series of wars resulted in the end of Carthaginian power and the complete destruction of the city by Scipio Aemilianus. The Romans pulled the Phoenician warships out into the harbor and burned them before the city, and went from house to house, capturing and enslaving the people. About 50,000 Carthaginians were sold into slavery. The city was set ablaze and razed to the ground, leaving only ruins and rubble. After the fall of Carthage, Rome annexed the majority of the Carthaginian colonies, including other North African locations such as Volubilis, Lixus, Chellah, and Mogador.
The legend that the city was sown with salt remains widely accepted despite a lack of evidence among ancient historical accounts; According to R.T. Ridley, the earliest such claim is attributable to B.L. Hallward's chapter in Cambridge Ancient History, published in 1930. Ridley contended that Hallward's claim may have gained traction due to historical evidence of other salted-earth instances such as Abimelech's salting of Shechem in Judges 9:45. B.H. Warmington admitted he had repeated Hallward's error, but posited that the legend precedes 1930 and inspired repetitions of the practice. He also suggested that it is useful to understand how subsequent historical narratives have been framed and that the symbolic value of the legend is so great and enduring that it mitigates a deficiency of concrete evidence.
Starting in the 19th century, various texts claim that after defeating the city of Carthage in the Third Punic War (146 BC), the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus Africanus ordered the city be sacked, forced its surviving inhabitants into slavery, plowed it over and sowed it with salt. However, no ancient sources exist documenting the salting itself. The element of salting is therefore probably a later invention modeled on the Biblical story of Shechem. The ritual of symbolically drawing a plow over the site of a city is mentioned in ancient sources, but not in reference to Carthage specifically. When Pope Boniface VIII destroyed Palestrina in 1299, he issued a papal bull that it be plowed "following the old example of Carthage in Africa" and also salted. "I have run the plough over it, like the ancient Carthage of Africa, and I have had salt sown upon it...."
When Carthage fell, its nearby rival Utica, a Roman ally, was made capital of the region and replaced Carthage as the leading center of Punic trade and leadership. It had the advantageous position of being situated on the outlet of the Medjerda River, Tunisia's only river that flowed all year long. However, grain cultivation in the Tunisian mountains caused large amounts of silt to erode into the river. This silt accumulated in the harbor until it became useless, and Rome was forced to rebuild Carthage.
By 122 BC, Gaius Gracchus founded a short-lived colony, called Colonia Iunonia, after the Latin name for the Punic goddess Tanit, Iuno Caelestis. The purpose was to obtain arable lands for impoverished farmers. The Senate abolished the colony some time later, to undermine Gracchus' power.
After this ill-fated attempt, a new city of Carthage was built on the same land by Julius Caesar in the period from 49 to 44 BC, and by the first century, it had grown to be the second-largest city in the western half of the Roman Empire, with a peak population of 500,000. It was the center of the province of Africa, which was a major breadbasket of the Empire. Among its major monuments was an amphitheater.
Carthage also became a center of early Christianity . In the first of a string of rather poorly reported councils at Carthage a few years later, no fewer than 70 bishops attended. Tertullian later broke with the mainstream that was increasingly represented in the West by the primacy of the Bishop of Rome, but a more serious rift among Christians was the Donatist controversy, which Augustine of Hippo spent much time and parchment arguing against. At the Council of Carthage (397), the biblical canon for the western Church was confirmed.
The political fallout from the deep disaffection of African Christians is supposedly a crucial factor in the ease with which Carthage and the other centers were captured in the fifth century by Genseric, king of the Vandals, who defeated the Roman general Bonifacius and made the city the capital of the Vandal Kingdom. Genseric was considered a heretic, too, an Arian, and though Arians commonly despised Catholic Christians, a mere promise of toleration might have caused the city's population to accept him.
After a failed attempt to recapture the city in the fifth century, the Eastern Roman Empire finally subdued the Vandals in the Vandalic War in 533–534. Thereafter, the city became the seat of the praetorian prefecture of Africa, which was made into an exarchate during the emperor Maurice's reign, as was Ravenna on the Italian Peninsula. These two exarchates were the western bulwarks of the Byzantine Empire, all that remained of its power in the West. In the early seventh century Heraclius the Elder, the exarch of Carthage, overthrew the Byzantine emperor Phocas, whereupon his son Heraclius succeeded to the imperial throne.
The Roman Exarchate of Africa was not able to withstand the seventh-century Muslim conquest of the Maghreb. The Umayyad Caliphate under Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan in 686 sent a force led by Zuhayr ibn Qais, who won a battle over the Romans and Berbers led by King Kusaila of the Kingdom of Altava on the plain of Kairouan, but he could not follow that up. In 695, Hasan ibn al-Nu'man captured Carthage and advanced into the Atlas Mountains. An imperial fleet arrived and retook Carthage, but in 698, Hasan ibn al-Nu'man returned and defeated Emperor Tiberios III at the 698 Battle of Carthage. Roman imperial forces withdrew from all of Africa except Ceuta. Roman Carthage was destroyed—its walls torn down, its water supply cut off, and its harbors made unusable. The destruction of the Exarchate of Africa marked a permanent end to the Byzantine Empire's influence in the region.
The Medina of Tunis, originally a Berber settlement, was established as the new regional center under the Umayyad Caliphate in the early 8th century. Under the Aghlabids, the people of Tunis revolted numerous times, but the city profited from economic improvements and quickly became the second most important in the kingdom. It was briefly the national capital, from the end of the reign of Ibrahim II in 902, until 909, when the Shi'ite Berbers took over Ifriqiya and founded the Fatimid Caliphate.
Carthage remained a residential see until the high medieval period, mentioned in two letters of Pope Leo IX dated 1053, written in reply to consultations regarding a conflict between the bishops of Carthage and Gummi. In each of the two letters, Pope Leo declares that, after the Bishop of Rome, the first archbishop and chief metropolitan of the whole of Africa is the bishop of Carthage. Later, an archbishop of Carthage named Cyriacus was imprisoned by the Arab rulers because of an accusation by some Christians. Pope Gregory VII wrote him a letter of consolation, repeating the hopeful assurances of the primacy of the Church of Carthage, "whether the Church of Carthage should still lie desolate or rise again in glory". By 1076, Cyriacus was set free, but there was only one other bishop in the province. These are the last of whom there is mention in that period of the history of the see.
Modern Day Carthage is some 15 kilometres (9.3 miles) east-northeast of Tunis; the settlements nearest to Carthage were the town of Sidi Bou Said to the north and the village of Le Kram to the south. Sidi Bou Saint was a village which had grown around the tomb of the eponymous sufi saint (d. 1231), which had been developed into a town under Ottoman rule in the 18th century. Le Kram was developed in the late 19th century under French administration as a settlement close to the port of La Goulette.
In 1881, Tunisia became a French protectorate, and in the same year Charles Lavigerie, who was archbishop of Algiers, became apostolic administrator of the vicariate of Tunis. In the following year, Lavigerie became a cardinal. He "saw himself as the reviver of the ancient Christian Church of Africa, the Church of Cyprian of Carthage",[80] and, on 10 November 1884, was successful in his great ambition of having the metropolitan see of Carthage restored, with himself as its first archbishop. In line with the declaration of Pope Leo IX in 1053, Pope Leo XIII acknowledged the revived Archdiocese of Carthage as the primatial see of Africa and Lavigerie as primate.
The Acropolium of Carthage (Saint Louis Cathedral of Carthage) was erected on Byrsa hill in 1884.
Taken from Wikipedia.
Religious affiliation: A local variation of the Ancient Canaanite religion. (Later converted to Christianity.) More info here.
Any special powers or abilities: He can make the best tasting olives.
This character's hexcode is #999966. |
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