The Greatest Story in the World, Period 1 by Horace G. Hutchinson

Carthage was one of the colonies founded by the Phœnicians. It / was not one of the earliest, but it had the advantage of a good / harbour for the protection of the ships of those days. It grew in / importance and in numbers of inhabitants, so that it soon became the / chief of all the stations of the kind which the Phœnicians had / planted, sending their colonists out from their native capital cities / of Tyre and Sidon.

Now Tyre and Sidon were captured by that great king Nebuchadnezzar of / Babylon about a hundred years or so before the Persian attacks on / Greece, and the effect of that capture of the two capital cities was / to leave Carthage as the most powerful city belonging to the / Phœnicians. Carthage, then, from that time, became the capital, / the chief city, of this great naval power. It was the headquarters / of naval power in the Mediterranean. Greek colonists from many / different states of Greece had already spread themselves along the / shores of Sicily, and even so far as the shores of Spain and those / Balearic Islands (or islands of the slingers) where, as we are told, / a boy's dinner was always set up on top of a pole and he was not / allowed to eat it until he had knocked it down with a stone from his / sling. Naturally, the inhabitants learned to be good slingers.