Did the Phoenicians Ever Colonize The Coasts of West Africa and Build Cities, Mines, and Trading Posts as is Inferred In the Texts of Hanno the Navigator? If So, What Happened to These Settlements and the Phoenicians That Lived in Them?

by Palamono

So I have been reading the popular novel “King Solomon’s Mines” by H. Rider Haggard and in it the characters often point out how certain artifacts they come across in the heart of Africa have Phoenician and Hebrew characteristics. For example, once the explorers crossed the mountains they came across a long stone road that looked Roman or “Phoenician”.

Now I know the book is fiction but do the comparisons have any ties to reality? Did explorers of Subsaharan Africa at the time (1800s) believe that the Phoenicians had settled that south into Africa?

Alkibiades415

Evidence of pre-Arab trans-Saharan contact to the interior of Africa and the West Africa Sahel is very limited. This is almost certainly due to a lack of academic attention on the area, however. We can safely surmise that the Romans, at the very least, were traveling towards the interior in search of exotic beasts. That they relied entirely on nomadic tradespeople does not fit with what we know of Roman economic activity elsewhere in the Empire. But, as of now, there is essentially very very little evidence before about 800 CE.

One example, often mentioned, is the "Iron Age" necropolis at Kissi in Burkina Faso. The shells found there have been traced to Indian Ocean species, and the glass was sourced to the Near East and possibly the Maghreb. Dating the material is another matter. See here for a nice, well-sourced discussion (abstract in French but article in English).

The Phoenicians (not the Carthaginians) did seem to settle beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, and there is some pretty good evidence of a Phoenician settlement at Mogador, on the coast of Morocco. This site seems, like many others, to have been abandoned by the end of the 7th century BCE, though more excavation and study is needed there. But in general, besides the sailing adventures of the Carthaginians, they had no presence in greater Africa. The western African coast was extremely treacherous, both for modern sailing and for ancient boats. Safe harbors are few and far between (Mogador is one of the best for miles in either directions, and even Safi requires extensive breakwaters and moles). Things only begin to improve as you reach Dakar. It's a huge stretch of coast which, aside from Mogador, was very unpleasant for ancient ships.

As far as Punic penetration of the African interior by land: there is zero evidence, and that sort of thing is not in keeping with how the Carthaginians behaved. They were a sea-based people, and their outlook, from Carthage, was always to the sea. They controlled the litoral of the Maghreb but showed little interest in sending outposts further and further into the interior. The Romans, as I said above, were a different story. During the Imeprial period, we see an explosion of urbanisation in the Maghreb, and pushing far south into the pre-Saharan. Places like Sicca Veneria seem to pop up nearly overnight like Roman desert mushrooms. But even the Romans seem to have been largely contained by the Sahara, which was much less unpleasant 2,000 years ago but was already becoming more harsh season by season.