The cothon of Carthage belongs to the years before the Common Era — dated here to c. 400 BCE at Carthage, Tunisia. The date is a scholarly centre of gravity, not a foundation-stone timestamp.
A circular military harbour with an island admiralty, ringed by sheds for scores of warships — Punic naval architecture as a city organ.
How it was made
Appian’s description matches the surviving ring. Merchant and military basins were separate on purpose.
Why it still counts as a wonder
It never needed a Greek list to be a wonder: the labour, the alignment, or the survival is enough.
Rome salted the myth, not the soil. The round harbour is still the plan of a thalassocracy.
On dating
BCE in this series means years before the traditional birth of Christ, counted backward. A monument listed as c. 400 BCE may have been founded earlier, rebuilt later, or famous only in one phase. Where ancient writers disagree — as they do for Babylon’s gardens — we say so.
This is story 72 of 100 in The Trend Ledger’s illustrated desk on world wonders raised before the Common Era.