Bardo National Museum (Tunis)

About

The Bardo National Museum (el-Metḥef el-Waṭanī bi-Bārdū, Musée national du Bardo) or Bardo Palace is an arts and North African history museum in Le Bardo, Tunis, Tunisia. It is one of the most important museums in the Mediterranean region and the second largest museum in Africa after the Egyptian Museum of Cairo. It traces the history of Tunisia over several millennia and across several civilizations through a wide variety of archaeological pieces. First proposed in the 1860s by Muhammad Khaznadar, the son of the Prime Minister of Tunisia, the museum has been housed in an old beylical palace since 1888. Originally called the Alaoui Museum (al-Matḥaf al-ʿAlawī), named after the reigning bey at the time, it was renamed as the Bardo Museum after the independence of the country. The museum houses one of the largest collections of Roman mosaics in the world, thanks to excavations in various archaeological sites in the country including Carthage, Hadrumetum, Dougga and Utica. The mosaics, such as the Virgil Mosaic, represent a major source for research on everyday life in Roman Africa. From the Roman era, the museum also contains a rich collection of marble statues representing the deities and Roman emperors found on different sites including those of Carthage and Thuburbo Majus. The museum also houses

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