It was the battle which, effectively, moulded Spain into a country from a mere collection of tribes and really has effects as wide and far reaching as battles such as Charonaea, Gaugamela or others, yet nobody had ever found it, and without this, the centrepiece of an entire war, we have at best an outline to this vast jigsaw… it was something which I set out to find five years ago: first a lost battle, and then a lost war.” Key to this whole war, in essence, was this one great battle. The story of Hannibal, as it is told to us, largely brushes over Hannibal’s campaigns in Iberia and those of Hamilcar and Hasdrubal before him and I have often said that, if the life of Hannibal were ten chapters of a book, it is as if the very first chapter was always missing. I have studied Hannibal for years but always came back to this, his first battle on the Tagus in 220BC.
These are the things which get a historian going the hunt for the past and seeing something which nobody else has seen before. “Hannibal has always fascinated me,” said Phillips, “and I love mysteries. The battle of the Tagus by Dionisio Cueto, the only modern depiction of the battle (public domain) The Great Battle of Tagus And it isn’t just any Hannibal battlefield which he has uncovered either, but the site of Hannibal’s first ever battle: the battle of the Tagus. Yet, this is what Ricky D Phillips, an Edinburgh-based military historian, has just done. Whilst archaeological discoveries will, of course, turn up from time to time to help us understand more of Hannibal and of Carthage, it is rare indeed, and perhaps the rarest of all things for an historian to discover a whole Hannibal battlefield. The history of Hannibal Barca, one of the greatest military commanders of the ancient world, is one which has fascinated historians and generals throughout the last two millennia, and yet his final secrets seem often set to never reveal themselves, and especially since Hannibal’s exact route over the Alps – the great secret so long disputed for centuries – seems to have at last been uncovered with the recent discovery of petrified elephant droppings, the historian has to sometimes ask himself, what else is there to find?
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