Cartagena

Remember the movie Romancing the Stone? The whole point was to get the emerald to Cartagena. Cartagena, a city in Colombia, has the full name "Cartagena des Indes" as the original Cartagena lies on the southern coast of Spain.

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It got put there by Phoenicians from Carthage. The name means "New Carthage". How imaginative of them.

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Carthage itself had been founded by Phoenicians from Tyre. It means "New Settlement". Do you get the idea that these guys were more interested in profits than aesthetics?

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Carthage and Rome, its Italian neighbor to the north, fought a quarter-century war, with Rome eventually proving victorious. Some years later, the son of Carthage's military leader, the famous Hannibal, renewed the conflict, touching off another long war. A number of cities in the American South are named Carthage, or, alternatively, Hannibal after Carthage's most famous military leader. Did the South hope to re-fight the War Between the States?

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Mark Twain was born in Hannibal, Missouri. He later traveled abroad, including to Italy where he penned a piece deriding the Italian language. Carthaginian revenge?
122601

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