Carthage in Tunisia
Friday, 28 January 2022 - 11:00 am (CET/MEZ) Berlin | Author/Destination: North Africa / Nordafrika Category/Kategorie: General , Museums, Exhibitions , UNESCO World Heritage , Union for the Mediterranean
Reading Time: 4 minutes
Reconstruction of Punic Carthage © flickr.com – damian entwistle/cc-by-sa-2.0
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Carthage was the capital city of the ancient
Carthaginian civilization , on the eastern side of the
Lake of Tunis in what is now
Tunisia . Carthage was one of the most important trading hubs of the Ancient Mediterranean and one of the most affluent cities of the
classical world . Today Carthage is a posh villa suburb of
Tunis , the
location of the largest university in the country and the location of the
Tunisian presidential palace . The Carthage excavations are one of the most important tourist attractions in Tunisia. Most tour operators offer day trips from the seaside resorts on the Mediterranean coast to Tunis, Carthage and Sidi Bou Said.
The city developed from a Phoenician colony into the capital of a Punic empire which dominated large parts of the Southwest Mediterranean during the first millennium BC. The legendary Queen Alyssa or Dido is regarded as the founder of the city, though her historicity has been questioned. According to accounts by Timaeus of Tauromenium , she purchased from a local tribe the amount of land that could be covered by an oxhide.
Map of Rome and Carthage at the start of the Second Punic War © Grandiose/cc-by-sa-3.0
The ancient city was
destroyed by the
Roman Republic in the
Third Punic War in 146 BC and then re-developed as
Roman Carthage , which became the major city of the
Roman Empire in the province of
Africa . The city was sacked and destroyed by
Umayyad forces after the
Battle of Carthage in 698 to prevent it from being reconquered by the
Byzantine Empire . It remained occupied during the Muslim period and was used as a fort by the Muslims until the
Hafsid period when it was taken by the
Crusaders with its inhabitants massacred during the
Eighth Crusade . The Hafsids decided to destroy its defenses so it could not be used as a base by a hostile power again. It also continued to function as
an episcopal see .
The regional power had shifted to
Kairouan and the
Medina of Tunis in the
medieval period , until the early 20th century, when it began to develop into a coastal suburb of Tunis, incorporated as
Carthage municipality in 1919. The archaeological site was first surveyed in 1830, by Danish consul
Christian Tuxen Falbe . Excavations were performed in the second half of the 19th century by
Charles Ernest Beulé and by
Alfred Louis Delattre . The
Carthage National Museum was founded in 1875 by
Cardinal Charles Lavigerie . Excavations performed by French archaeologists in the 1920s first attracted an extraordinary amount of attention because of the evidence they produced for
child sacrifice . There has been considerable disagreement among scholars concerning whether child sacrifice was practiced by ancient Carthage. The open-air
Carthage Paleo-Christian Museum has exhibits excavated under the auspices of
UNESCO from 1975 to 1984. The site of the ruins is a
UNESCO World Heritage Site .
Read more on
Wikivoyage Carthage ,
Wikipedia History of Carthage and
Wikipedia Carthage (
Smart Traveler App by U.S. Department of State -
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Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index ). Photos by Wikimedia Commons. If you have a suggestion, critique, review or comment to this blog entry, we are looking forward to receive your e-mail at
comment@wingsch.net . Please name the headline of the blog post to which your e-mail refers to in the subject line.
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