Carthage, on Tunisia’s coast by the Lake of Tunis, began as a Phoenician foundation—its Punic name Qart-ḥadašt meaning “new city,” a kind of “new Tyre.” Legend casts its founder as Queen Dido, who famously cut an oxhide into strips to claim as much land as possible. Strategically perched between Sicily and Africa, Carthage built vast artificial harbors, massive sea-facing and land walls, and a carefully planned city around the Byrsa citadel, becoming one of the largest and richest urban centers of the preindustrial world.
From this base, Punic Carthage forged an empire of colonies and trading posts, managed by a complex republic praised by Aristotle for its stability. Its agricultural science, codified by Mago, and its manufacturing and maritime networks made it the “wealthiest city in the world” to Greek observers. But centuries of rivalry with Greeks and then Romans culminated in the Punic Wars. After Hannibal’s long campaign in Italy failed to break Rome, the Third Punic War ended in 146 BC with a brutal siege, enslavement of survivors, and systematic destruction.
A century later Rome refounded the site; Roman Carthage thrived as the capital of Africa, a major grain supplier, and a cradle of Latin Christianity, hosting councils that shaped the biblical canon. Conquest by Vandals, then Byzantines, made it a western bulwark of the Eastern Roman Empire until the Umayyad armies captured and deliberately dismantled it in 698 to prevent Byzantine return. The area later declined in political importance as power shifted to Kairouan and Tunis, before modern archaeology and French colonial interest turned Carthage into a symbol-laden suburb and a UNESCO-listed archaeological landscape.