Carthage est delenda

Yesterday, DH and I took a sightseeing trip to see the ruins of Ancient Carthage. I thought it was a single archeological sight, and boy was I surprised!

Using the maps in a guide book is tricky. They are not updated often enough to really show detail and they never give you indications of one way streets. We reviewed the directions on the Internet, marked the pages in the guidebook and hit the trail.

It was a lovely day for schlepping about outside. The weather was about perfect. The skies were clear and blue and there was a slight breeze off the water. The first site we found was the Roman Baths, called the Antonin Baths for the Byzantine Emperor who supposedly built them for his wife. At the time, Carthage had between 300,000 and 500,000 people living there. So the baths are large, and second only to a set in Rome. If you look at the trench, which was how the water flowed from room to room, imagine it is more than 18" deep.

There are a lot of walls and chambers that are still standing on this site. The archways are intact and still holding up tons of rock. The engineering of the structure is astounding. To have lasted so long is just amazing. Throughout the site, there are columns and pillars just laying around. Huge pieces of granite or marble that was once supporting a roof. There are chunks of marble that show the amazing detailed carvings that decorated the columns and pediments.

You can't imagine how clear and perfect those inscriptions still are--and they've been weathering for hundreds of years. Most amazing to me is the cavalier way that this is treated. In the states, this stuff would be behind barriers where visitors could 'look but not touch'. Here, it's all out in the open and the tourists can climb all over it. Pretty amazing. The tourists like to climb up on the column pedestals and pose like they are the columns. All around the site are signs that warn not to climb on the ruins, showing a rock degrading below some slipping man's outline. It does not keep the folks off the rocks.

The next site we visited was called the Magnon (or Magon) Quarter. This is a block in the middle of a settled neighborhood where they've uncovered a block of subterranean dwellings. The signs that we could read indicated that they thought this was housing and shop space for artisans, builders and craftsman. I'm not sure how they determined that, but it was excavated and reinforced to show the actual height of some of the walls.

There was an exquisite model where they showed how they thought the builders managed to create such a strong underground dwelling, so close to the sea. What was really impressive was the additional buildings they have identified underneath the surrounding area (which is filled with large properties and houses that would fall into the 'mansion' label in the states. They've apparently done some scanning to determine the outline of the actual quarter--which exists below the ground. I'm guessing it will never be excavated.

The next place we visited was the Roman theater. Not to be confused with the Roman Amphitheater. One is a half moon, the other a full oval. We didn't make it there yesterday. The Roman theater shows on the maps as the classic half circle built in a hill. I was expecting the traditional ruins. Imagine my surprise when I realized that not only is this not treated as an archeological site (although it is) but it's been reinforced and is in use today for concerts.

Tunisian rappers played here last month, and this month they have an International Music festival planned for this venue. It's a fascinating use of historical sites. You can see the metal support structures over the stage area and the huge light cages. If you look at the seating, one section on the lower right side still has the original marble facing. There are rougher sections that are original stonework, and then the smooth, modern concrete and block sections.

Our final trip for the day was to the Cisterns. Way up on top of a hill overlooking Tunis are the ruins of the cistern system and the aqueduct that carried water to the city in Roman times. All I can say is that my photos do not do it justice. The park ranger, who spoke only French, gave us a little tour and went to great pains to tell us how many cubic meters of water each cistern held. The numbers were huge for today.


I took this picture from the hill above the cistern system. We are looking down at it. It's about 4 football fields across and maybe 6 football fields wide. I'm sure he gave us actual measurements in meters, but I didn't record any of the numbers. DH understood the French and kept translating for me.

Each individual cistern was enormous and some of them were still holding water. They had excavated some, showing the complete structure. Others they left alone.

If you look at the lower right and left sides of this picture, you can see that each cistern is linked to the others by these arched passages. All across the tops, there are open holes that collected the rainwater, and a series of pipes across the top that even collected the runoff that cascaded off the curved roof of each cistern.

After seeing the size of the Roman baths, I guess I understood their need for water was great, but the amount of engineering that went into this whole water collection system was breathtaking. The aqueduct that went from the top of the hill down to the cities that the water was delivered to spanned over 135 kilometers. Since the actual distance to Tunis is about 11 miles, this was somewhat confusing to me.

The parts of the aqueduct that are still standing show the runnel, which is about two feet deep. With the hill so high above the city, I think they used the zigzagging aqueduct to 'step down' the water gradually, using gravity to keep the flow constant without overflowing the actual channel.

This is a picture that DH took standing right inside the actual aqueduct. Yes, right next to a 'don't climb on the ruins' sign, he hopped up on the wall and stepped right into the channel to take the shot. I find it fascinating how much of this structure is still standing. When you consider it stuck up in the landscape and was constantly being eroded by the elements, and it's massive!

In all, our $9 Tunisian Dinar bought us entry into eleven ruins and we got to less than half of them. Ancient Carthage was a city with a population equivalent to Tulsa. It spread out over at least that much area. For some reason, I thought seeing the ruins would be a single place, but it's not. It's archeological digs that have been uncovered all over Tunis and it will take days to fully appreciate them.

--Sandee Wagner