Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/390

 368 HISTORY or ART IN PIKKMCIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. unable to attack the city for the want of ships, placed a guard at the mouth of the Leontes and at the springs of Ras-ct-Ain. At Arvad there were cisterns cut in the rock which are still in use. 1 In order to catch all the rain-water they could it is probable that the Phoenicians paved their streets, squares, and courtyards with large stone slabs ; we know that the Carthaginians did so. The aqueduct through which water flowed to the city from Mount Zaghouan, a work which has been lately re-established, dates only from the Roman epoch. The real Carthage, the great queen of the Mediterranean, drank nothing but rain-water, and in order that the autumn deluges and the rare showers of the other seasons should be gathered to the last drop, every surface had to be brought into requisition. The houses had flat roofs covered with concrete, whence the water poured down into hidden reservoirs. There were public cisterns in the lower parts of the town for the rain-water from the streets. The Carthaginians had the credit in antiquity of being the inventors of street paving. 2 When the soil is removed to any depth, these slabs are found still in place under the thick layer of ashes which represents the city of Hannibal. Under the slabs there are drains carefully laid, with their mouths under the edges of the foot-paths. 3 The visitor to modern Tunis as he sinks in the mud or dust of the unpaved streets must often wish that the degenerate heir of Carthage was more worthy of its ancestor in this matter of street engineering. At Malka, north of Byrsa, to the south-east of this citadel and near the harbour, considerable remains of the ancient reservoirs may be traced ; and it is difficult to discriminate in these ruins between what belongs to Roman and what to Punic Carthage. No doubt when the town was restored by her Roman Emperors and became once more a great and populous city, the remains of the ancient works must have been utilised for new reservoirs, but conduits which ran from it). His curious account of the blockade is quoted by JOSEPHUS (Ant.Jud., ix. xiv. 2). * RENAN, Mission, p. 40. 2 SERVIUS, Ad ALneidem, . 422; ISIDORE, Origines, xv. xvi. 6; " Primi Poeni dicuntur lapidibus vias stravisse." We are tempted to believe, with Servius, that Virgil was alluding to these paved streets of Carthage in the passage where he describes the astonishment of /Eneas at his first sight of the town built by Dido : Miratur portas, strepitumque et strata viarum. 8 Excavations of M. Gouvet, a French engineer in the service of the bey of Tunis. DAUX, Recherches snr les emporia phhriciens, p. 55.