Carthage

Carthage was an ancient city on the Lake of Tunis in present-day Tunisia, founded according to legend by the Phoenician queen Dido and grown into the capital of the Punic empire that dominated western Mediterranean trade through the first millennium BC. Rome destroyed the city in 146 BC at the end of the Third Punic War, razing walls that had run some 37 kilometers around a city whose two artificial harbors served both military and commercial shipping; Julius Caesar had it rebuilt as a Roman colony from 49 to 44 BC, and Roman Carthage grew into the second largest city in the western Roman Empire, with a population estimated near 500,000 at its height. The surviving archaeological remains include the Byrsa citadel hill, the Baths of Antoninus, the Punic ports known as the cothon, and the tophet burial ground, first surveyed in 1830 and under systematic French excavation since the 1920s. UNESCO inscribed the archaeological site of Carthage as a World Heritage Site in 1979.