Putting Carthaginian Stelae Back Into Context: The ASOR Punic Project Digital Initiative
March 2025 | Vol. 13.3
By Brien Garnand
In 1891, less than two years after David Gordon Lyon had established the Harvard Semitic Museum — now the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East (HMANE) — he expanded the museum’s epigraphic teaching collection with the purchase of gypsum plaster casts of Phoenician inscriptions sent from the Netherlands by the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (RMO; fig. 1). Besides outright purchase (as in this instance), throughout the 19th century institutions traded gypsum casts in a process of collection exchange, which expanded the range of sculptural and epigraphic resources that could be deployed for the study of their symbols and inscriptions. Like an entomological collection, with representative butterflies of each genus and species, such exchanges provided participating institutions with a varied repertoire of Phoenician genres, letter forms, and iconography across a broad chronological range. Plaster casts allowed for hands-on study at full scale, with participating institutions providing access to a common repertoire of texts shared across Europe and, later, across North America. However, with limited display space and with a priority given to authentic artifacts, full-scale gypsum casts were at best forgotten in deep storage and at worst discarded. With the ASOR Punic Project digital initiative, based at the HMANE but working at the RMO, we are bringing the modelling of artifacts full circle with renewed collection exchange of accessible models.
Fig 1: Casts of Phoenician inscriptions after transfer to the newly-opened Harvard Semitic Museum, 1903. (Cambridge, HMANE Lyon slide 976 ©2025 Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East)
1825: Aristocratic Antiquarians & Plaster Casts
These plaster casts were only recently rediscovered in an attic corner of the HMANE and include not only some of the earliest artifacts in their own collection but also casts of the very first inscriptions taken from Carthage. In 1817, Jean Emile Humbert was the first European diplomat to acquire stelae dedicated in the precinct of Tinnit and Ba‘l. He eventually transferred these to the Dutch state, where they formed a kernel around which the state museum of antiquities developed. Just as French officers had seized Egyptian artifacts and as the Earl of Elgin removed sculptures from the Athenian acropolis, so too the period after French colonization of Algeria (1830) witnessed a surge in military-antiquarian interest in North African artifacts. For example, the competitive environment within the diplomatic corps to the bey of Tunis encouraged a Danish military attaché stationed at Carthage to bring back stelae to Copenhagen (fig. 2).
Fig. 2: C. T. Falbe gypsum cast of Numidica secunda / NP 8 / Copenhagen NMD ABb91, cf. London BM C.211 (Leiden, RMO CF*7 ©2025 Rijksmuseum van Oudheden). See also our Sketchfab 3D imaging workspace. [https://sketchfab.com/ASOR_Punic-Project]
The philologist Wilhelm Gesenius visited London and Leiden in 1835 to inspect Phoenician inscriptions and casts, after which he published a catalog that gave them sequential Latin names with numeration, site-by-site in order of discovery — they became the vulgate titles for these common inscriptions. In Leiden he was able to study nine of the first thirteen known Punic inscriptions (Carthaginensis) and five of eight North African Neo-Punic inscriptions (Numidica). These same common stelae from the Netherlands and Denmark have formed the basis of our test scanning for the ASOR Punic Project digital initiative.
1875: The Magenta; Squeezes & Catalogs
Early excavations were sponsored by museums, with much more attention paid to antiquarian interests and specimen collection than to stratigraphic contexts. Nevertheless, amateur investigations led to new catalogs of inscriptions that built upon Gesenius’ efforts. Alongside gypsum casts, which mitigated the expense of travel to distant sites and museums, the publication of precise drawings of stelae also facilitated study of inscriptions. At nearly the same time as each other, both Paul Schröder (1869) and Julius Euting (1871) produced lists of the first few hundred specimens, the latter with lithographs for nearly every stela. After a successful military/scholarly campaign across the Levant, Ernst Renan gained support from the French Academy to publish the Phoenician tomes of the Corpus Inscripitionum Semiticarum, pars prima (CIS I). This lavishly-illustrated, definitive collection reshuffled the previous common order and incorporated newer inscriptions that had been gathered largely through French efforts, including a few thousand inscriptions that were being transported abord the flagship Magenta when it exploded in the harbor of Toulon (1875). While some stelae were pulverized, many were recovered from the seabed immediately afterward (with a few hundred more found in the 1990s).
Fig. 3: Stela recovered in 1997 from the wreckage of the ship Magenta which exploded in the harbor of Toulon in 1875, already published as CIS I.1077 thanks to a squeeze made prior to the explosion. Mission Sainte-Marie no458 / Fouille du Magenta MGS 258 (Paris, Louvre AO 31158 ©2025 Musée du Louvre), see also the online catalog, no. 734.
Because multiple squeezes had been made prior to shipment, useful for exchange, the pulverized and sunken stelae could still be published in a way that preserved their condition at the moment of discovery. Today the Corpus can be found in a very limited number of libraries, it commonly lacks clear images, and the scholastic Latin of its commentaries is no longer user-friendly. Our initiative seeks to provide detailed images of Phoenician inscriptions, but as an open-access resource.
1925: F. W. Kelsey Excavations (University of Michigan) & the Creation of Typologies
The first organized excavations at the precinct of Tinnit and Ba‘l at Carthage were undertaken in 1921 by two amateurs, a French customs agent and a police inspector. Ever since Humbert’s activities, artifacts had regularly appeared on the market without known provenance. After having followed a trafficker in illicit antiquities and having purchased the plot of land where the stelae had been found (propriété Regulus-Salammbô), the two officials commenced digging there themselves with limited supervision. Theirs and the following campaigns at this single site have produced more than 90% of the entire Phoenician-Punic epigraphic corpus. An American dilletante and self-styled “count,” Byron Kuhn de Prorok soon presented himself as the site’s true excavator and maneuvered to purchase this plot and other properties threatened by the suburban expansion of Tunis. He had the financial backing of his father-in-law and the cooperation of the abbé J.-B. Chabot and the Rev. A.-L. Delattre MAfr, both esteemed scholars who lent legitimacy to his efforts, and in 1924 his so-called “Franco-American” team of young and inexperienced volunteers began removing stelae.
The following year, F. W. Kelsey from the University of Michigan was enticed to undertake an exploratory season for what was envisioned as a multi-year campaign. Upon arrival in 1925, however, Kelsey found to his dismay that the returning enthusiastic and unsupervised volunteers had already begun excavation. Extraction of urns and stelae continued at a breakneck pace, although three phases of use were recognized in the stratigraphy. One of the young volunteers, Donald B. Harden, gained responsibility over ceramics, but his research was soon derailed due to difficulty in exporting artifacts, a scandal that enveloped de Prorok, and the untimely death of Kelsey. Harden persisted despite these challenges and revisited Carthage, returning to England with small selection of urns that he donated to the British Museum and Ashmolean Museum. His resulting urn typology remains a standard reference.
Our research in the Kelsey Museum archives has uncovered brief descriptions of stratigraphic contexts in excavation diaries and on registry cards, as well as site plans.
Fig. 4: “Area of Tanit” site-plan blueprint (Ann Arbor, Carthage Excavation Archives ©2025 Kelsey Museum of Archaeology).
Certain stelae from 1924-1925 seasons were photographed for the abbé Chabot, accompanied by squeezes and line drawings. With few stratigraphic contexts but with records of their positions in plan, alongside annotated photographs, we can (re)place stelae from the campaigns back into their stratigraphic context. Note that one stela from the 1924 campaign found its way from hands of de Prorok to the hands of Chabot (fig. 5).
Fig. 5: CIS I.3708, Collection Chabot (Louvain-la-Neuve, Musée L MB402 ©2025 Université Catholique de Louvain).
1975: L. E. Stager / ASOR Punic Project Excavations (University of Chicago); Stratigraphy
After Kelsey, two excavations of limited merit occurred without publication in the 1930s and 1940s. Following the disruptions of war and Tunisia’s struggle for independence, the area around Carthage faced land-speculation pressure. When a multinational UNESCO campaign was mounted in response during the 1970s, an American team led by Lawrence E. Stager resumed excavation in the same terrain that de Prorok had purchased. Excavations began where Kelsey’s team had left off but, instead of rapid extraction of artifacts by gangs of workmen, only a few 5x5m grids were opened yearly, each worked by one graduate student and one workman at a time.
Fig. 6: Annotated field photo from 1978 grid CT5 (ASOR Punic Project ©2025 Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East)
Fig. 7: Precinct of Tinnit and Ba’l, Regulus-Salammbô sector plan (ASOR Punic Project ©2023 Journal of Ancient History 11.2: map 4)
Although they had the epigrapher Paul Mosca on staff, the ASOR team put greater emphasis on site stratigraphy and relations between urns and their contents than on epigraphic specimen extraction. However, both the Kelsey and Stager campaigns have annotated field photos (see above) and site plans that allow for our reconstructions. The ASOR Punic Project campaigns ran from 1975-1979, after which funding was exhausted. With the 50th and 100th anniversaries of American excavations at Carthage approaching, we have proposed an exhibition that will put the inscribed stelae (most removed by de Prorok and Kelsey) and the uninscribed cippi (most removed by Stager or left in situ) back into context.
2025: I. ben Jerbania / INP Excavations and the ASOR Punic Project Digital Initiative
Since 2014, starting with sondages near the Villa Prier and then followed by excavations under rue Jugurtha, the Tunisian Institute national du Patrimoine (INP) has undertaken excavations led by Imed ben Jerbania in an adjacent sector. Collaborating with the INP, the ASOR Punic Project began our digital initiative in 2023 in order to create a scale site model of the American sector. A scale site model will serve as a central component of our anniversary exhibition, with our test scans made possible by an ASOR Dar Ben Gacem Fellowship. The coordinates of stelae and cippi scanned in situ can be matched to archival photos and plans, thus allowing the recovery of legacy excavation contexts for a representative sample of stelae (specifically CIS I.3709-3905 / Musée Alaoui Cb—255-478).
Fig. 8: draft site model of Regulus-Salammbô (ASOR Punic Project ©2023 Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East). See the live model in our Polycam 3D modeling workspace.
Instead of full-scale plaster casts and squeezes forgotten in the store rooms of individual museums, our initiative will provide digital files of individual stelae that can be viewed on screen or 3D printed at any scale. Instead of expensive and outdated volumes found only at certain exclusive institutions, our digital initiative will offer an open access resource accessible anywhere at anytime. Finally, our project will allow for reconstruction of the entire Regulus-Salammbô sector in the precinct dedicated to Tinnit and Ba‘l which, when combined with legacy archival data, can provide long–sought–after context for the vast majority of the Phoenician epigraphic corpus.
Brien K. Garnand is co-director of the ASOR Punic Project, Research Associate at the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East (HMANE), and Visiting Researcher at the Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten (NINO).
How to cite this article:
Garnand, B. K. 2025. “Putting Carthaginian Stelae Back Into Context: The ASOR Punic Project Digital Initiative.” The Ancient Near East Today 13.3. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/carthaginian-stelae-into-context/.
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