Carthage

city · earth

Rome's principal Mediterranean rival, destroyed at the end of the Third Punic War in 146 BCE and refounded as a Roman colony under Caesar and Augustus. Roman Carthage became one of the largest cities of the western empire and the administrative centre of Africa Proconsularis, the province that supplied much of Rome's grain and olive oil. Its trajectory - annihilated, then rebuilt as Roman, then a source of Roman elites - is the empire's assimilation logic in a single site. Archaeological Site of Carthage, UNESCO World Heritage ref. 37.