# Talk:Siege of Carthage (Third Punic War)

I am new to Wikipedia editing and so don't want to do this myself, but I suggest amending the "Causalities and Losses" sidebar in the "Siege of Carthage" page from 450,000 killed to 150,000 killed and replacing the source with Ben Kiernan, “The First Genocide: Carthage, 146 BC,” Diogenes 51.3 (2004), 27, link at https://gsp.yale.edu/sites/default/files/first_genocide.pdf
Any casualty figure for an ancient battle is a guess, but Kiernan's is much more reasonable and better sourced, and Diogenes is a peer-reviewed jouurnal. The current figure of 450,000 seems to have been arrived at by deducting Roman reports of 50,000 slaves taken from a guess at the pre-destruction population of 500,000--not a good way to do it. UofTprof (talk) 13:24, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

I'd agree with this. From what I can gather, the source of the casualty numbers is:
"The Romans plundered the city (Scipio took nothing for himself) and utterly demolished it. The 50,000 survivors of Carthage, all that remained of a presiege population of 500,000, were sold as slaves." (pg. 67)
That excerpt is from Spencer Tucker's Battles That Changed History: An Encyclopedia of World Conflict. The casualty numbers on Wikipedia are not reflected in that work, nor are the reflected in the sources referenced by that work. I checked Adrian Goldsworthy's The Punic Wars (A reference in Tucker's work) and could not corroborate numbers.
I don't have the confidence to edit the article, but I would agree with adjusting the figures based on some research. 2601:346:E80:FE7:1DA5:DCE6:8780:54D7 (talk) 04:45, 25 May 2025 (UTC)