Français – عربي – ⵜⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵜ – English
The Hebrew Bible contains several mentions of a city or region named Tarshish, or Tarsis (Hebrew תַּרְשִׁישׁ), located far over the sea. Some sources claim that Tarshish is a reference to Carthage. Is this true?
Tarshish in the Bible
Tarshish is mentioned in several historical and prophetic Bible passages, usually as a source or precious metals – mostly silver, but also gold, tin and iron. One of those passages says that King Solomon “had at sea a navy of Tarshish with the navy of Hiram: once in three years came the navy of Tarshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.” (1 Kings 10:22)
The book of the prophet Jonah (Yunus يونس in the Quran) tells how, after God told him to go to preach in Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, the prophet refuses to go to the enemies of his people, and, in disobedience to the divine order, boards on a ship to Tarshish (Jonah 1:3). After his ship gets caught in a storm, he is thrown into the sea and swallowed alive by a huge fish. In this account, Tarshish is mostly a symbol, not a determined location: the prophet tries to flee as far as he can in the opposite direction to the one God indicated him.
Those passages show that Tarshish was very far to the East of Palestine, over the Mediterranean Sea, and was exporting precious metals and other riches.
Tarshish in other sources
Tarshish is also mentioned in an inscription in honor of the Assyrian King Esarhaddon, and on the Nora Stone, a Phoenician inscribed stone found in Sardinia, considered as the oldest Phoenician inscription outside their original territory.
Tarshish and Carthage
The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, translated in the 3rd Century BCE by the Alexandrian Jewish community, translates “Tarshish” as “Καρχηδών” (Karkhedon), the Greek name for Carthage. The Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Christian Bible, also uses this translation.
King Solomon reigned about one century before the traditional date of the foundation of Carthage. It could be, however, that the city was founded earlier, and thus already existed at Solomon’s time. The fact that Solomon undertook this expedition together with Hiram, King of Tyre, the Phoenician city-State that founded Carthage, seems to indicate this.
The identification of Tarshish with Carthage was largely admitted in Antiquity and the Middle Age, but today, specialists doubt it. The best argument against this identification is the discovery of a Phoenician inscription that mentions Tarshish (the Nora Stone, discovered in 1773): the Phoenicians knew Carthage, so why would they call it by another name?
Which other possibilities are there? The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus identifies Tarshish with Tarsis in Cilicia (modern-day Turkey). This location is however unlikely, as it seems too close to Palestine.
After the Nora Stone was discovered, some specialists translated the inscription as saying that Tarshish was located in Sardinia. However, other specialists prefer another translation of the inscription.
The most likely theory today is that Tarshish was actually Tartessos, an ancient civilisation that flourished at the same time as the Carthaginian Empire, in Southern Spain. The Tartessians were important trading partners of Carthage: they produced metals, especially silver and tin – an essential element for the fabrication of bronze, which they sold to the Carthaginian traders.
It is interesting to mention that this theory is actually quite close to the old identification of Tarshish with Carthage: Phoenician (and Hebrew) trade ships buying precious metals from the Tartessians certainly travelled through the port of Carthage, and probably also through the other Punic ports in Spain.
