When most people think of Carthage, they picture Hannibal and his elephants or Dido, the suicidal queen, cursing her perfidious lover, Aeneas. But as every schoolboy used to know, Carthage is inextricable from the Punic wars – its very own 100-year conflict with Rome (264-146 BC). Almost all our stories of this once-great north African empire, says Richard Miles, come to us through a biased Roman filter. Carthage never had a chance to tell its own tale – its library was lost to its Numidian neighbours. But drawing on archaeological and written sources, Miles helps to fill in the blanks with this thoughtful and meticulous book. Carthage was rather more sophisticated than history gave it credit for, and its people were certainly no more war-mongering than their regional neighbours.

The first Carthaginians were Phoenicians from the Lebanese coast, who had dominated Mediterranean trade in the pre-classical age, giving the world interest-bearing loans, maritime insurance and an alphabet. But Carthage would soon outshine its motherland. Built on a natural harbour amid rich agricultural land, Carthage became a prosperous city, and its citizens the masters of the fourth-century Mediterranean. Financed by the vast silver mines of Tartessus (Andalusia), Carthaginians were the frontline in naval production – inventing the quinquireme, the sturdiest fighting ship of the day. Foreshadowing Ikea 24 centuries later, some of them were built flat-packed, each section stamped with a letter for ease of assembly.

But by the third century BC, Rome was on the rise and showing an almost insatiable hunger for conquest; the empires drifted into the first Punic war "less for reasons of strategy and more for lack of political will to prevent it". Rome's nemesis came in the form of Hannibal, a ruthless and daring general. Departing from Spain in 218BC with 50,000 troops, Hannibal attempted the unthinkable: to invade Italy by land, marching through Spain, France and the trackless, snow-covered Alps, meeting hostile tribesmen at every turn.

Audacious perhaps, but any other route would have been too dangerous, says Miles: the Romans had mastery of the sea, not the Carthaginians. But Carthaginian luck would run out. Once the Roman general Scipio "Africanus" had successfully invaded Spain, Hannibal was forced to try his hand too early. His invasion of Rome was a failure, and he retreated to Calabria, where he remained for the next few years "living like a minor Hellenistic princeling, surrounded by the wreckage of his Italian dreams".

After a two-year siege of Carthage in the third Punic war, Scipio Aemilianus set the city alight, and for six days and nights his death squads ranged the streets slaughtering men, women and children who had survived the blaze, with teams rotated to maximise efficiency. When the city finally surrendered in 146BC, its centre was levelled, and 50,000 traumatised citizens went into slavery. Carthage would not rise again.

Bertolt Brecht found in Carthage a metaphor for German hubris: "Great Carthage drove three wars. After the first one it was still powerful. After the second one it was still inhabitable. After the third one it was no longer possible to find her." Luckily, Miles has found more than enough of her in this fascinating read.

Daniel Metcalfe's Out of Steppe is published by Hutchinson.