The written history of the ancient Maghrib is presented as emerging from the collision between Carthage and Rome. Before the second century BCE, the surviving literary record offers only scattered notices, including material associated with Herodotus and other Greek historians. For the earlier Punic phase, archaeology and epigraphy are indispensable because the written tradition is exceptionally limited.

Even during Carthage’s confrontation with Rome and its temporary survival afterward, the principal written accounts are rarely Punic. The extract notes that the Periplus of Hanno, preserved in Greek and once treated as an early account of Atlantic Africa, is now considered spurious and no earlier than the first century BCE. The agronomical work attributed to Mago survives only through extracts preserved by Latin authors.

From approximately 200 BCE to 100 CE, Greek and Latin authors provide a dense but uneven body of evidence for Carthage, Roman Africa, and the surrounding Maghrib. Polybius is identified as the chief source for the Punic-Roman struggle, while Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Sallust, Livy, Appian, Pliny, Tacitus, Plutarch, and Ptolemy also contribute to the record.

The source tradition reflects an asymmetry between historical experience and surviving documentation. Carthage’s own records are largely absent from the literary corpus, so reconstruction depends on external narratives, legal texts, inscriptions, and archaeology. This makes the city both a major subject of ancient African history and a clear example of how political memory can survive through the writings of its opponents.