A Planned Giant on a Hill
At its height, Punic Carthage was one of the largest cities of the Hellenistic world. Behind its walls lay a carefully ordered landscape: four equal residential quarters, religious districts, markets, a council house, towers, theatres, and a huge necropolis.
Towering over everything was the Byrsa, a fortified citadel whose heights were the last to fall in 146 BC. Here stood the temple of Eshmun, god of healing, approached by sixty stone steps, and likely a temple of Tanit, the city’s queen goddess. Luxury homes clustered nearby, mixing piety, power, and privilege on a single hill.
Houses, Workshops, and Everyday Life
Recent excavations on the Byrsa’s slope have exposed the so‑called “Hannibal district”: city blocks laid out on a grid of straight, 6‑meter‑wide streets with clay roadways and stairs carved into slopes. Houses, blank to the street but opening around interior courtyards, rose multiple stories—some ancient authors claimed up to six.
Cisterns in basements captured precious water; mosaics of punica pavement in red mortar decorated floors. Nearby, workshops smelted iron, fired pottery, and processed wool. The same slopes held both fine homes and some of the city’s earliest graves, the living and the dead sharing tight urban space.
The Agora and the Tophet
Between sea and citadel stretched the agora, a bustling marketplace and civic core where festivals, assemblies, and justice in the open air bound citizens together. Yet just beyond the early city limits lay a starkly different space: the tophet.
This ancient cemetery, near the commercial harbor, held the Salammbô sanctuary of Tanit, filled with upright stone stelae. Among them archaeologists found infant remains.
Were these children sacrificed, as Greek, Roman, and biblical sources claim? For decades, many scholars argued the tophet was simply an infants’ cemetery. More recent studies, however, suggest that child sacrifice did take place in Carthage, a conclusion many modern researchers now accept.
Within a short walk, Carthaginians moved from busy squares and family courtyards to a silent field of stelae and tiny bones—a city where everyday life and ritual death were never far apart.