Where is Carthage today?

A Phoenician city on the African coast

Carthage was founded, tradition says, around 814 BC by Phoenician settlers from Tyre, in today’s Lebanon. They called it Qart Hadasht, New City. The site was well chosen: a promontory with the sea on two sides and the Lake of Tunis behind it, right where ships crossing between Sicily and Africa had to pass. From there Carthage ruled the western Mediterranean for centuries and fought Rome in three Punic Wars, the second led by Hannibal.

Destroyed and rebuilt

In 146 BC, after a three-year siege, Rome took the city, burned it and sold some 50,000 survivors into slavery. Cato the Elder had demanded it for years.

And in one thing he was even more savage, namely, in adding to his vote on any question whatsoever these words: “In my opinion, Carthage must be destroyed.”

No Roman sowed salt in its fields. No ancient writer says so; the story is modern. Rome cursed the site and banned anyone from living there. A century later Julius Caesar planned a new colony, and under Augustus Carthage rose again as a Roman city, capital of the province of Africa, the name that later spread to the whole continent. It grew into one of the great cities of the western empire until the Vandals took it in 439 (how Rome lost Africa). The Eastern Romans won it back in 533. In 698 an Umayyad Arab army destroyed it, and the region’s center moved to nearby Tunis.

What you can see today

Carthage is now a quiet, well-off suburb of Tunis, a municipality since 1919, with about 21,000 people. The Tunisian president’s palace stands on its shore, and the suburban TGM train from Tunis stops at stations called Carthage Salammbo, Carthage Byrsa, Carthage Hannibal and Carthage Amilcar. The ruins lie scattered among the houses.

• Byrsa hill, the old citadel, with the Carthage National Museum, a quarter of Punic houses from Hannibal’s time and the Saint Louis cathedral of 1884.
• The Punic ports, two harbors dug by hand: a rectangular one for merchant ships and a round one for the navy.
• The tophet, a cemetery of urns holding the burned bones of infants, at the center of a long debate over child sacrifice.
• The Antonine Baths, on the seafront, the largest Roman baths in Africa.
• Roman Carthage: villas, a theater, an amphitheater and early Christian basilicas.

Not the only Carthage

Don’t confuse it with New Carthage, the city the Barca family founded in Spain as their capital. That is today’s Cartagena, where Hannibal began his march to Italy (over the Alps), and the Spanish city in turn gave its name to Cartagena in Colombia. The original, the city of Dido, Hamilcar and Hannibal, is the one by Tunis.