Norwich bulletin., 1915-03-29
GAITY OF CARTHAGE
 SHOWN BY ITS TREASURES.
Described in Lecture in Washington by
 Frank Edward Johnson.

Members of the Washington chapter of the Archaeological Institute of Amer ica who heard Frank Edward Johnson talk about the Phoenician and Roman art treasures of Tunisia in the national museum in Washington needed but lit tie imagination, says the Star, to step back two or three thousand years to place themselves squarely in the mid dle of the Phoenician cities whose ruins are shown by MT. Johnson on the screen. MT. Johnson's close intimacy with his subject, the fine choice of pic- lures and the rare coloring of many of the slides made it entirely possible to see in the minds eye a swiftly run ming history of northern Africa from the time the elusive Dido made her famous real estate deal with a bulls hide cut into strips down to the day when the Arabian hordes swept over the Roman cities of the northern Afri- can plains after that part of the empire had become soft and luxurious from a six hundred year peace.
 MT. Johnson showed by pictures on the screen Byrsa as it now stands, crowned with monastery of doubtful architecture. The Byrsa was Carthage, The New City, as it was called when the Phoenicians were padding up and down the short coast of the known world, and the bulls hide deal, as ev- cry high school boy knows, was getting as much land as could be covered by a bulls hide. The leather, cut in shoe string lengths, was stretched out over a. considerable area.
 Traces of the three remarkable walls aroundN Carthage were shown by MT. Johnson. The city was thrice engir- died, for strategic and siege purposes, with wide zones between each wall. to permit agricultural operations within the walls in case beleaguring force sat outside and occasionally threw. a few tons of rocks at the gate.
 The walls were thick and contained armories for horses. war elephants and men, and also had granaries capable of holding fve-year food supply and yet Scipio tore up the city at the end of the three wars, and, acting on in- Structions from the war office, wiped Rome's greatest and bitterest rival off the face of the earth, so that a blow liberally traversed the site of one of the greatest towns of the world. This was 147 B. C.. and after that, for sew eral times as many centuries as the United States has been alive, the Ro- mans held sway in Carthage, their traces being shown at the national museum yesterday.
 According to the Phoenician things of Carthage which have been found beneath the wreck left by Scipio, it was lively town. a Paris or a Vienna. Its women were loud dressers, and on the word of MT. Johnson himself, used
 
 women of the modern city. Moreover, they were fine looking women, accord ing to the likenesses in bronze and stone which have been found by arch eologists. and, according to the lecturer yesterday, wore their hair in a marcel wave, with a sort of Psyche knot at the back. In things of luxury the Car thagians took great care; their artists had fine talent and some remarkable pictures of their handiwork were shown by MT. Johnson.
 After Carthage fell, and the Romans took possession, the mark of Rome was placed on the Tunisian plains. MT. of the well paved streets of northern Africa As in many another old Ro- man town, one could see the grooves worn in the paving by the linousines of that day--chariots drawn by the finest horses the world had seen up to that time MT. Johnson showed the re- markahle water system of that time, aqueducts which carried to Roman Carthage 8,G00,000.000 gallons of water a day, and also aQueduct bridges in other parts of old Tunis which had withstood the high water of score of centuries.
 The lecturer had taken remarkable care to obtain many pictures of the pIayhouses the Romans had built in Africa These were amphitheatres in which the casts were composed of Christians, prisoners, and the wild beasts of the interior, their roles re- quiring them to perish for the pleasure of the populace. One of the amphi- theatres shown by MT. Johnson, re- markably impressive ruin, would have held more spectators than the Yale bowl or the Harvard stadium, where from 50,000 to 75,000 gather to see more scientific and less brutal football.