Carthaginians Beyond the Ocean: Comparison, Justification, and Inversion in the Hypothesis of the Carthaginian Discovery of America

Abstract

After the American continent was discovered, Spanish intellectuals exerted their ingenuity in an attempt to explain the existence of those hitherto unknown territories, and engaged in controversies about the moral and legal right to exploit them. The use of classical sources as authorities was common in those debates. In this article, we focus on the mention by Ps.-Aristotle and Diodorus of an island in the Atlantic Ocean, discovered and exploited by Carthaginians until the colonization process came to a dramatic end. We study the use of this story in connection with America, exploring its role in the controversy about rights of discovery and its implications for the debate about the ethnicity of indigenous peoples and the justification of their conquest. This led to the establishment of a comparison between the ancient colonization of Spain by the Carthaginians and the colonization of America by the Spaniards, where the latter was presented as an improvement or positive reverse of the former. Finally, we present the hypothesis that this Carthaginian colonization, as it was imagined in the early sixteenth century, was inspired by contemporary events taking place in America, and that this had an impact on the understanding of ancient Spanish history for centuries.