Carthage is one of those places I recall from High School history class, back when the subject seemed like an endless series of dates and battles and rote events, none of which resembled any lived experience. Carthage sits on the Mediterranean east of present-day Tunis; it’s located less than 100miles from Sicily, and thus in ancient times the two main powers in the Mediterranean world were the Romans in Italy and the Phoenicians in Carthage. They ended up not liking one another too much, and after a series of pissing contests (the Three Punic Wars), the Romans defeated the Phoenicians and razed the city of Carthage. Eventually the Romans, post-Caesar, resettled the land, and what remains today is mostly a series of Roman ruins, though archaeologists have dug up some Phoenician fragments as well. In some ways it’s similar to Settle or San Francisco, both of which currently sit atop cities that, for different reasons, were razed.

The large buildings in the photos are the National Museum; I didn’t take too many photos of the ruins mostly because they simply looked like exactly that: ruins. Brown crumblings that reveal, with a lot of imagination, what might once have been a structure. I suppose a pickier mind might find plenty to disagree with in that statement, but I was straining my mind and was still having a rather difficult time envisioning much.