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Carthage is a city founded 814 BC by Elyssa, Phenician princess from Tyr also called Dido (the Wandering). Fleeing her brother Pygmalion who coveted her fortune after having murdered her husband, Elyssa lands in Africa, where the natives grant her a piece of land as large as a beef hide could cover. Cut into thin strips, the hide would trap the Byrsa hill where the "new city" (Qart Hadash) is ever settled. By doing so, Dido gave her name to the first optimization problem, conoisting in maximizing the surface contained within a curve with prescribed perimeter.
Destroyed 146 BC by the Romans at the end of the 3rd Punic war, reconstructed a century later by its winners, Carthage has therefore been successively Roman, Vandal, Byzantin and Arabic. It was fed during these 3000 years by all the civilisations that mixed together, melt up, fough each other, and eventually gave rise to that very specific synthesis called tunisian personality. More information here.
Located down the Byrsa hill, close to the sea and the Antonin bathes, this Beylical Palace belonged to the last Husseinit Sovereign, Lamine Bey (1943-1957). The Tunisian autonomy agreements were signed there by Habib Bourguiba and Pierre Mendès France in 1955.
