I finished the story of Urashima Tarou. After what feels like a year in the dragon's palace, Tarou suddenly remembers his mother and his hometown and becomes homesick. He tells the princess that he must return home. She is sad, but gives him a box (玉手箱) and tells him never to open it, and that as long as he keeps it closed, he won't age. Tarou returns to his hometown but he doesn't recognize anything. He goes to his home, but there is only grass, and no one has even heard of him. He finally encounters an old man who (conveniently) knows that Urashima Tarou disappeared into the sea three hundred years earlier. At a loss, Tarou sits on the beach, and then decides to open the box. Smoke comes out, in which he is delighted to be able to rewatch all the wonderful moments he enjoyed in the dragon palace. When all the smoke is gone, though, he becomes a wizened old man with a beard. Did he die? I don't know.
Apparently this 玉手箱 is the Japanese translation of Pandora's box, which is easy to see. I don't think this story has a moral, but it was interesting to think about, because if so it's about the evils of nostalgia. Tarou thinks that he can return home, but when he gets there he finds that everything is different. So then he spends the rest of his life remembering the good times in the dragon's palace. Does this mean that I should choose a nice place to live and never return to my family? Hahah.
I also read a story about an old man who really loved sakura. He would stop his farm work every year during the cherry blossom season and spend all day watching one particular cherry tree. He even collected all the fallen petals and buried them at the base of the tree. Eventually he became old and realized that he would die soon, but he told his grandson that he would like to see the cherry blossoms one more time. The grandson starts to reply that there's nothing to be done since it's the middle of February, but instead he runs out to his grandfather's beloved sakura tree and prays it to bloom. The grandson loses consciousness in the night due to the cold, but then he awakes from a mysterious warmth and looks up to see cherry blossoms. He returns to the tree with his grandfather, who cries from joy. He declares it the most beautiful sakura he has ever seen, and dies happily. Ever since then, that sakura tree blossoms on February 16th.
Back in "Carthage Must Be Destroyed", Assyria tightened its grip on Tyre and absorbed some of its subordinates like Sidon, but permitted it to be independent (if only in name) for the sake of trade efficacy. But then the value of silver dropped because of oversupply, and the Babylonians showed up and absorbed Tyre. This allowed Carthage to become great, not having to compete with its parent state.
There are some myths about the founding of Carthage, but they sound very dramatically Greek and are unlikely to be true. What we know (as far as we can know) is that Carthage grew rapidly. At first it imported food from other parts of the Mediterranean, such as Sardinia, but eventually it expanded and cultivated its own farmland. Carthage was oligarchic, with one noble family typically ruling with the support of a council of nobles. The ruling family apparently wasn't dynastic and changed many times.
The author spent an exorbitant amount of time considering the topic of child sacrifices. The Canaanites are mentioned in the Bible as making child sacrifices to molech. The children were burned in a place called a tophet, which is also used as a simile for hell in the Bible. In Tyre the evidence that survives suggests that these sacrifices were mostly stillborn or just a few months old. In Carthage however, it's not uncommon to find the remains of older children. The author posits that live child sacrifice became less popular in Phoenicia, becoming replaced by the more palatable sacrifice of already dead children or animals. In Carthage, however, the old tradition of burning live children remained strong. Despite this being a historical book, as the discussion went on it gave me a feeling of dark supernatural horror, something akin to the Cthulu in Lovecraft.
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