Tunisiaتونس

Phoenician settlers from Tyre founded Carthage, according to tradition in 814 BCE, on a peninsula near today's Tunis. It became the capital of a trading empire across the western Mediterranean, with a circular naval harbour whose outline still shows. Three wars with Rome followed; Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants in the second, but Rome won, and in 146 BCE it burned Carthage.

Julius Caesar and Augustus refounded Carthage as a Roman city, and the province of Africa became Rome's granary, exporting grain and olive oil. Wealthy towns filled the countryside: Dougga with its capitol on a hill, Thuburbo Majus, Sbeitla, and Thysdrus, now El Jem, where an amphitheatre for about 35,000 spectators was built in the third century. Villas were floored with mosaics of hunts, harvests and gods, the finest of which are now in the Bardo Museum.

Christian Carthage produced Tertullian, Cyprian and, nearby, Augustine of Hippo. The Vandals took the city in 439 and the Byzantines retook it in 533, but the Roman order was fading when the Arabs arrived.

Arab armies under Uqba ibn Nafi founded Kairouan in 670 as a camp and capital; its Great Mosque, rebuilt by the Aghlabid emirs in the ninth century, became a model for mosques across the Maghreb, and Kairouan is still treated as a holy city. The province was called Ifriqiya, the origin of the word Africa.

The Aghlabids built ribats, fortified monasteries, along the coast at Sousse and Monastir against Byzantine raids. In 909 the Fatimids, a Shia dynasty, rose here and built Mahdia as their capital before moving to Egypt and founding Cairo in 969. The Zirids who stayed broke with them; in revenge the Fatimids sent the Banu Hilal Bedouin westward in the 11th century, a migration that Arabised the countryside.

Under the Hafsids (1229–1574), Tunis became the capital and the Zitouna mosque one of the great centres of learning of the Islamic west; the historian Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis in 1332. Andalusian refugees from Spain later settled in towns such as Testour and Tebourba, bringing their architecture and music.

The Ottomans took Tunis from Spain in 1574. Real power soon passed to local rulers, the deys and then the Husainid beys (from 1705), who ran a largely autonomous state with a corsair fleet and a Mediterranean trade. Ahmad Bey abolished slavery in 1846, before the United States, and a constitution was issued in 1861, the first in the Arab world.

Debts to European banks gave France the opening: in 1881 it declared a protectorate. French settlers took farmland, a European city grew along the Avenue Habib Bourguiba in Tunis, and a large Italian community settled too. Nationalist parties formed, led from the 1930s by the Neo-Destour of Habib Bourguiba.

During the Second World War the Axis and Allies fought the Tunisian campaign of 1942–43; war cemeteries remain at Medjez el Bab and near Enfidha. Tunisia gained independence in 1956.

Habib Bourguiba ruled from 1956 to 1987 as a secular modernizer: the 1956 Code of Personal Status abolished polygamy and gave women the right to divorce, schools expanded, and the state discouraged the veil and fasting. He also ran a one-party state. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali removed him in 1987 and built a police state around a tourism and export economy, with his family's business empire at its core.

On 17 December 2010 Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit seller in Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire after officials confiscated his cart. Protests spread, and on 14 January 2011 Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia. The uprising set off the Arab Spring. Tunisia held free elections, the Islamist party Ennahda and secular parties compromised on a 2014 constitution, and the National Dialogue Quartet won the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize.

Democracy did not fix the economy. Attacks on the Bardo Museum and a Sousse beach in 2015 killed dozens of tourists and emptied hotels. President Kais Saied, elected in 2019, suspended parliament in July 2021, ruled by decree, and passed a new constitution in 2022 giving the presidency sweeping powers. Opposition politicians, journalists and lawyers have been jailed, and Saied was re-elected in 2024 on low turnout.

In the north-west, the Kroumirie hills near Aïn Draham carry cork-oak forests and see snow; the coast at Tabarka has coral reefs. The Medjerda valley is the country's breadbasket, and the Cap Bon peninsula grows citrus and vines. The Sahel, the coastal plain from Sousse to Sfax, is an ocean of olive trees; Tunisia is one of the world's largest olive oil exporters.

The south opens into steppe and then the Sahara. The Chott el-Djerid is a salt lake of about 5,000 km², crossed by a causeway between Tozeur and Kebili, where mirages are common. Beyond Douz lie the dunes of the Grand Erg Oriental. The Dahar hills near Tataouine hold ksour, fortified granaries of stacked vaulted rooms (ghorfas), and Amazigh villages such as Chenini and Douiret built on ridges.

Water is scarce and getting scarcer; drought and aquifer depletion hit farming, and dams in the north were at record lows in 2023–24 (check current levels).

Tunisians are almost all Sunni Muslims of the Maliki school, and the country is more openly secular in daily manners than its neighbours: women hold high shares of university places, cafés and beaches are mixed in cities, and alcohol is produced and sold legally. Djerba's Jewish community, one of the oldest in the world, maintains the El Ghriba synagogue, where an annual pilgrimage takes place in spring; an attack in 2023 killed five people there.

Food centres on couscous, olive oil and harissa. Fish is eaten along the coast, lamb in the interior, and street snacks — brik, fricassé, lablabi — are cheap. Tunisian malouf music descends from Andalusia; stambeli trance music comes from sub-Saharan communities.

The economy is tight: inflation, shortages of subsidised goods, and youth unemployment push many to emigrate, and the coast around Sfax became a main departure point for boats to Lampedusa. Summer brings a reverse flow, as Tunisians abroad return with cars on the ferries.