Free The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Roman Empire by Eric Nelson

Carthaginians’ role as sea traders and of the gradual westward exclusion of the Carthaginians from this strategic island.
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    Egypt is most often included with the cultures of Mesopotamia and the Near East, civilizations with whom it shares a rough chronology. Some scholars in the last century tended to treat Egypt as another early European outpost. More recently, books such as Martin Bernal’s Black Athena have made the case for Egypt being recognized as an African civilization. Even though subsequent investigation has not sustained many of Bernal’s sweeping claims, scholars have come again to see Egypt more like the Greeks and Romans did: as a distinct, and distinctly ancient, culture.
Egypt
    During the time of Rome’s birth and rise to power, Egypt was viewed as the rich old granddaddy of civilizations. By the time Greeks and Romans arrived, Egyptian higher culture was already 2,000 years old, isolated, and ingrained. Conquests by the Persians and later by Alexander the Great never really had all that much impact on it. Even the Ptolemaic dynasty, which ruled over Egypt for 300 years (from 323 B . C . E . until Cleopatra’s suicide in 30 B . C . E .), never really changed it. The Emperor Augustus took Egypt as his personal possession, and he and subsequent emperors used the riches of the province to stabilize the Roman empire’s finances until they had drained most of it.
Carthage and the Carthaginians
    The Phoenicians established trading colonies and ports wherever they went, sort of like the Hudson’s Bay Company did in North America. In about 800 B . C . E ., Phoenician settlers established the colony of Carthage in present-day Tunisia. The city’s position just south of Sicily gave it a powerful position to exploit trade routes to the west. It grew quickly through trade and colonization throughout the western Mediterranean, and by the third century B . C . E ., it was one of the Mediterranean’s richest cities.
    The Carthaginians were never in the mood for a land empire; they preferred to establish an empire of trade and of the sea, much as the Genovese and Venetians were to do in the late Middle Ages. They jealously guarded their trade routes and fought the Greeks and Etruscans for control of Sicily. A combined force of Etruscans and Greeks defeated them in 480 B . C . E ., and they were forced to the western part of the island.
    The Carthaginians were at first allies of Rome. The two cities made treaties in 509 and 348 B . C . E ., and Punic fleets helped the Romans defeat Pyrrhus in 280 B . C . E . As Roman power grew, however, the Mediterranean shrank and the two powers came into conflict. The Romans and Carthaginians fought three wars: the First Punic War (264–241 B . C . E .), in which the Carthaginians lost Sicily; the Second Punic War (218–210 B . C . E .), in which Hannibal invaded Italy and very nearly destroyed Rome; and the Third Punic War (149–156 B . C . E .), which Rome provoked to finish off its weakened rival. Rome destroyed Carthage completely and made its territory into the province of Africa.
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    Â  When in Rome Punic is derived from the Latin Punici, which the Romans called the Carthaginians. The word comes from their origin as Phoenicians. Classicists and historians therefore refer to the Roman wars with Carthage as the Punic, not Carthaginian, Wars.
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Libya and North Africa
    All of north Africa was known pretty much as Libya. Greek and Phoenician settlements dominated the north coasts west of Egypt, and Phoenicians appear to have sailed down the Atlantic Coast as far as Sierra Leone. Behind the coastlands, the most prominent people with whom the Romans came into contact were the Numidians and the Moors.
    Numidia was the region south and west of Carthage, populated by nomadic Berber tribes. The tribes had a loose coalition under a king. They were famous for their horsemanship; Hannibal used Numidian cavalry with great success against the