Foolishly, when writing about Marrakech and Fes, I leaned into how old they felt. That take was destined to age poorly, and it didn’t take long. I take it all back. Tunisia is fucking old.

Marrakech has been a continuously settled city for almost a thousand years. Carthage was settled by the Phoenicians in 814 BC. We’re a block from the ancient Ports Puniques, which were built by the Carthaginians between 300 and 200 BC. The Romans sacked Carthage and destroyed the Punic Ports, along with everything else, in the Third Punic War. In 146 BC.

And if that’s not enough, the Amazigh (they don’t like to be called Berbers, which is from the Latin for Barbarian), who are the only people who can legitimately call this home, have been living here for around 10,000 years. Of course, that part is true for Morocco, as well, as the Amazigh settled all across the Maghreb: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.

That all seems especially old to an American, as our history is so brief, compared to the rest of civilization. But only if you forget indigenous Americans, as we are taught to do. North America was settled between 16,000 and 25,000 years ago. We were just super attentive in Colonist School, and did a more thorough job of obliterating indigenous culture than our counterparts. Hooray for the slightly less brutal colonialists, who left a rich Amazigh culture largely intact.

Speaking of obliterating, it’s not like the Romans left any of Phoenician Carthage to paw through. Or Phoenicians. Carthage had a population estimated between 250,000 and 450,000 when the Third Punic War started. By the time the Romans were done, only 50,000 survived. And every one of those 50,000, man, woman, and child, was sold into slavery.

The vast majority of what we think of as the ancient ruins of Carthage is the residue of the Romans rebuilding the city about a hundred years after they erased the Phoenician Carthaginians. The Romans were nothing if not thorough, so pretty much all we have left is what they built.

Which, if it’s possible to put the context aside, is spectacular. There are Roman ruins all around Tunisia, and I’ll write separately about the ones we visit. But for now, I can fill up an entire meaty post just focusing on Carthage.

The stump in the picture above is the base of a Roman column. One of about half a dozen, hanging out on the Hannibal train station platform.

Rome’s ruins belong to the Italians. Roman ruins in Tunisia are just… here. There doesn’t seem to be any sense of ownership or patrimony, so the sites themselves are very lightly managed. You can pretty much clamber and climb wherever you like, and you have to work pretty hard to avoid picking up potsherds and mosaic tiles just sitting on the ground. It feels like one of those ponds stocked with fish so kids are sure to get a catch, except the fields haven’t actually been seeded. There’s just more material than science can absorb.

Our first morning here we walked to the local supermarché, and as we turned the corner on our block, we were walking alongside a field full of yellow daisies. And stone ruins. Turns out it’s the Paleochristian Museum. We didn’t know Paleochristians were a thing, and we weren’t expecting ruins literally on our corner.

After the grocery trip, one block towards the water brought us to the Punic Ports. Some of the spots are far enough away that we’ll take a cheap taxi, so we don’t wear our legs out getting to and from, leaving us too knackered to actually enjoy the experience. But if we were younger, the entire span of Carthaginian ruins would be walkable.

There’s a huge range in the ruins, from sprawling public facilities to pocket parks to entire residential neighborhoods. Let’s take a tour.

Thermes d’Antonin

The Baths of Antoninus, completed in 162 AD, are the third largest Roman baths in the world, and the largest outside of Italy.

What’s mostly left of the baths is the foundation, but that’s plenty epic in scale. One of the eight pillars that held up the Frigidarium in the center has been stood back up in what was the Palestre on the right. It’s 50 feet tall (the capital alone weighs eight tons), but that’s about it for verticality. You can walk through the smaller rooms in the top center, so there’s still an incredibly strong sense of the layout and scale of the structure.

We’re going to El Jem soon, a largely intact colosseum well south of Tunis, which I’m sure will be more jawdroppingly epic. Until then, the Baths of Antoninus are doing a fine job of filling the Holy Cow slot.

Floors

More than merely floor mosaics, these are actual floors. That you can walk on. That you’re meant to walk on.

Carved Stone & Decoration

The decorative work is amazing and detailed. I can only imagine what the baths were like intact. Because, sadly, I couldn’t find any artist’s renderings, so imagining is what’s left.

Marble

There’s a ton of natural marble columns scattered throughout the site. The marble itself qualifies as a work of art.

Le Quartier des Villas Romaines

The Roman Villas was the high-end residential neighborhood on the hill just above the Baths of Antoninus. What’s impressive about this site is the scale. It is for real an entire neighborhood, and had not only its own Odeon for performances, but even boasted a nymphaeum. Which, sadly, was merely a shrine to nymphs, and not the place where they lived. Only the toniest neighborhoods had their own nymphaeum. Movin’ on up!

Even though mostly what’s left is the foundations, there’s still more than enough to get across the extent of the grounds.

Floors

Just like the Baths of Antoninus, there’s plenty of floor mosaic here, almost all of which is actually floor. Walking on it isn’t merely encouraged, it’s required in some places just to get from Point A to B. I guess when you have the embarrassment of riches these sites are drowning in, some of this stuff is just floor.

Mosaics

But the true star of the show here is the mosaics. There are so many wall and floor pieces here, they are literally sitting in a field, leaning against walls and supports. For scale, each of the pieces in the picture below is between about four and six feet in each direction.

What follows are Greatest Hits from the Roman Villas. There are hundreds and hundreds of these mosaic slabs, and this is truly just a taste.

Les Ports Puniques

The Baths of Antoninus win the Carthage d’Or (which I just invented) for grandeur, and the Roman Villas take the prize for art. But the history award goes to the Punic Ports.

Rome nursed a hard-on for Carthage for ages. The First Punic War in 264 BC erupted over Sicily. No archdukes back then, so they worked with what they had. Rome defeated Carthage in 241 BC, taking Sicily and exacting reparations.

Punic War the Second broke out in 218 BC, and featured everyone’s favorite bedtime story, Carthaginian general Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps with elephants. The classics. Despite Hannibal’s early success, Carthage was again defeated, suing for peace in 202 BC. No one remembers that part.

Merchant ships entered the military horseshoe port for inspection before being guided through a canal (top right of the horseshoe) to the rectangular commercial port.

The Romans declared war in 149 BC, and the sacking of Carthage was complete by 146. There was no Fourth Punic War.

Roman Amphitheater

While there’s next to nothing left of it vertically, this is still a substantial structure, the fourth largest amphitheater in the Roman Empire. It presented a variety of popular entertainments: venationes (animal hunts), gladiatorum munera (just what you think), and damnationes ad bestias (condemnation to beasts, the crowd pleasingest form of capital punishment in Olde Rome).

Roman Theater

This is hardly Colosseum scale, but, unlike the Colosseum, it’s been restored for modern use. There’s a control booth, a modular stage, and a pretty substantial lighting rig. They host concert and events, and still seat to the original capacity, about 5,000.

Baths of Gargilius

Apparently, no one is 100% sure that these are, in fact, the Baths of Gargilius. There was such a thing, it was probably near here, and this might well be it. If it is said baths, it played a minor role in Christian history, as the site where St. Augustine called a conference of bishops in 411 (Nothing says “Here for business” like meeting in the baths).

Or not.

Either way, it’s notable for two reasons: 1) it sits literally on the roadside of a major thoroughfare, just hanging out. And 2) the gate below is the only attempt to manage control, which is a joke. The gate is unlocked, the site is unmanned, and the back end of the site opens into hiking trails through parklands. You could probably take a pickaxe to one of the columns to shear off a souvenir and no one would notice.

That said, it’s a lovely setting for what, in the context of Carthage, is a site so modest it’s not even worth locking up.

The Cisterns of La Maalga

Tucked up not far from the Baths of Gargilius are the Cisterns of La Maalga and the Carthage end of the Aqueduct of Zaghouan. The aqueduct brought water from Mount Zaghouan, about 56 km away, but the aqueduct’s route covered about 130 km. In addition to filling the cisterns for drinking water, the aqueduct also supplied the water for the Baths of Antoninus.

The cisterns were the primary water source for Carthage, and covered about 50 acres. With a capacity of 44,000 square meters, the 16 tanks, each about 100 meters long, were the largest cisterns in the Roman Empire.

Maison de la Chasse au Sanglier

This is literally hanging out on a street corner. It may warrant locking up, unlike The Baths of Gargilius, but it apparently doesn’t warrant any information. Not only is it lacking in explanatory signage of any kind, including its name (it’s a POI on Google Maps), there isn’t even any information on the interwebs about it. I can prove that it exists, but there’s pretty much nothing else.

Google Translate says it’s Wild Boar Hunting House. Sure. Why not.

Salammbô Tophet

This is a creepy little necropolis, and one of the few pre-Roman sites left. Dedicated to the Phoenician deities Tanit and Baal (even the Romans knew not to fuck around with Baal), the site is dominated by a cluster of child-sized stelae, either as funerary offerings or god tribute. The stelae appear to be child-sized for a reason: the funerary stelae were for the children entombed at the site.

It was long believed that the site was dedicated to child sacrifice, but the winners write the history, and the Romans had ample reason to demonize the Phoenicians. Even the name, Tophet, puts its thumb on the scale, as it refers to a place near Jerusalem synonymous with Hell.

We’ll never know, as the site is pretty jumbled up at this point, the land having been upheaved both by the native marsh it’s built on and the encroachment of urban development. The site butts right up against housing. Would it be awesome or terrible to have your deck overlook the possible site of child sacrifice? Please vote in the Comments below.

Musée Paléochrétien

Quartier Magon

The Magon District is interesting because it represents one of the few sites where the Romans left enough of the Punic buildings intact to repurpose them to their own ends. Mostly, they just reused the land and the building materials, as they did at the Ports.

The site had originally been Punic residential artisans’ quarters dating back to the fifth century BC. Post-sacking, the Romans repurposed it as workshops for their own craftsmen.

Bardo National Museum

The Bardo is in Tunis, but many of its treasures came from Carthage. The collection includes everything from Punic jewels to Roman sarcophagi to Christian baptisteries. But the highlight, to my mind, is the preposterous collection of Roman mosaic pieces, most of which originated in Carthage, many of them from the Roman Villas. They’re mostly in the 300-400 BC range, but there’s a handful of newer pieces.

And there truly isn’t very much to say about them. They speak for themselves so much better than I could.

The Site

We haven’t yet been to any buildings that were over the top, like the medersas and palaces of Morocco, so the Bardo was a delight. Built in the 15th century as a palace for the Hafsid Bey, it’s housed the museum since 1888.

Floors

I keep saying this, but it’s truly hard to get over the fact that you can just walk around on 2,000 year old mosaics. I have a feeling that will never not feel weird.

Artifacts & Sculpture

It’s not all mosaics. They’re just what tends to sear into the eyeballs.

Religous Representation

As one of the central commercial centers for the entire Mediterranean, and a major power, Tunisia was historically a crossroads that brought peoples from all over the Mediterranean and beyond. It is a distinctly tolerant culture, and it has been welcoming to people of all religious beliefs. It’s no surprise that the Bardo features artifacts from Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

The Mosaics

The Bardo has an outstanding collection, although I think it suffers from not being presented chronologically and telling Tunisia’s story. There’s art from throughout Tunisia’s history, but there’s no attempt at narrative, which feels like a missed opportunity. It definitely leans more art museum than history museum, but it’s an amazing art museum, so it’s hard to complain.

For me, the absolute standout is the ridiculous hoard of Roman mosaics. I’m not claiming the mosaics are the most important Tunisian art, simply that this particular collection of Roman mosaics is objectively mind-blowing. There are pieces both epic in their scale and delicate in their execution. The quality of the craftsmanship aside, it’s hard to wrap your head around the sheer effort required to create these pieces.

There’s a lot here, but sorry, not sorry. I thought it better to err on the side of showing the incredible range of the collection than to brutally cut it down to a few supposed highlights. So, please enjoy these, and let your mind be blown.

Epic in Scale

It’s not clear whether these pieces were originally wall or floor mosaics, but they’re displayed vertically, and they’re all in the two story tall range.

People & Figures

Animals

Still Life & Geometrics