Punic Town of Kerkuane: Visitor and Heritage Guide

Kerkuane is the most important archaeological site in Tunisia that most visitors have never heard of, and its significance rests on an absence. Everywhere else the Punic world is read through what Rome built on top of it. Here there is nothing on top of it.

What makes it unique

UNESCO states it plainly: contrary to what happened at Carthage, Tyre or Byblos, no Roman city was built over this Phoenician one. The town was abandoned around the middle of the third century BC and was never reinhabited, so its port, ramparts, residential districts, shops, workshops, streets, squares, temples and necropolis remain as they were.

It is the only known Punic city in the Mediterranean in that condition, which makes it a mine of information about how such a city was actually laid out: a pre-established general plan, wide and fairly straight streets in a checkerboard, and insulae filling the squares between them. The earliest evidence at the site goes back to the sixth century BC; what is visible dates from the end of the fourth and the first half of the third.