In the various independent Phoenician city-states—on the coasts of present-day Lebanon and western Syria, the Punic colonies on the Mediterranean Sea, and in Carthage itself—the šūfeṭ, called in Latin a sūfes, was a non-royal magistrate granted control over a city-state, sometimes functioning much in the same way as a Roman consul.
Livy's account of the Punic Wars affords a list of the procedural responsibilities of the Carthaginian sufet, including the convocation and presidency of the senate, the submission of business to the People's Assembly, and service as trial judges.
[5] Further inscriptional evidence of sufetes found in the major settlements of Roman Sardinia indicates that the office, having endured there for three centuries under Carthaginian sovereignty, was utilized by the descendants of Punic settlers to refuse both cultural and political assimilation with their mainland Italian conquerors.
[10] Three sufetes serving simultaneously appear in first century CE records at Althiburos, Mactar, and Thugga, reflecting a choice to adopt Punic nomenclature for Romanized institutions without the actual, traditionally balanced magistracy.
[11] In those cases, a third, non-annual position of tribal or communal chieftain marked an inflection point in the assimilation of external African groups into the Roman political fold.