Carthage
"Carthage was destroyed so thoroughly that what remains is almost an absence — and that absence is strangely more powerful than most ruins I've visited."
Hannibal’s city does not look like a ruined city. It looks like a wealthy Tunisian suburb with a lot of archaeological sites embedded in it. The hills above the gulf of Tunis are dense with villas and gardens, and between them — sometimes in front of them, sometimes beside a resident’s parked car — are fragments of the civilization that Rome spent three wars destroying. A tophet here. A string of Roman columns there. The antonine baths at the water’s edge, enormous and roofless and open to the sea breeze.
The combination of historical enormity and residential ordinariness is one of the most disorienting things I’ve experienced in North Africa.
What Carthage Was
At its height, around the third century BCE, Carthage controlled a maritime empire stretching from the western Mediterranean coast of Africa to Spain and parts of southern France. It had a population of roughly half a million, a double harbor whose design was so sophisticated that Roman engineers spent years trying to figure it out after they’d conquered it, and a culture whose writing, religion, and trade networks reached everywhere around the inland sea.
Rome destroyed it completely in 146 BCE — burned it, salted the earth (probably, though historians debate the salt specifically), and sold the population into slavery. They then built a new Roman city on the same site, which is why the ruins present this layered confusion: Punic structures below, Roman ones above, medieval interventions beside them.
The Antonine Baths
The baths built under Emperor Antoninus Pius in the second century CE were the third largest Roman bath complex ever constructed. The columns still standing give a sense of the original height, and the platform above the sea gives a sense of the deliberate drama of the placement — an enormous building perched at the edge of the gulf with the water visible from every angle. I climbed to the top of the exposed walls and sat for a while watching the ferries cross below. The scale of what had been there was impossible to reconstruct mentally, which was itself interesting.
The Tophet and the Controversy
The Punic tophet — a sacred burial ground at the southern edge of the archaeological zone — is where the question of child sacrifice gets complicated. Hundreds of urns containing the cremated remains of infants and small animals were found here over decades of excavation. Roman sources claimed the Carthaginians sacrificed children to Baal Hammon. Modern scholarship debates whether the deaths were sacrificial or whether the tophet was simply an infant cemetery for those who died in childbirth or early infancy.
The site itself is surprisingly affecting regardless of how you resolve the historical question. The urns have been reinterred. Votive stelae, carved with simple geometric figures and crescents, stand in rows. It is quiet and entirely unsuperstacular, which makes the weight of what happened here — whatever exactly it was — easier to feel.
The Museum and the Portraits
The National Museum of Carthage sits on the hill of Byrsa, the original Punic citadel, and houses material from all the site’s archaeological periods. The Punic portrait masks — fired terracotta faces in various emotional states, used in burials — are the most affecting objects in the collection. They stare at you with an intensity that is hard to attribute to craft alone.
Lia spent forty minutes with the masks. I walked through the Roman section twice and came back to stand beside her. We didn’t say much. Some things in museums produce a silence that is more useful than commentary.
When to go: Year-round, but March through May and October through November offer the best conditions. The site is outdoors and unshaded; summer visits require an early start before ten in the morning, when the heat on the exposed ruins becomes prohibitive. The TGM train from Tunis makes Carthage a very easy half-day trip.