Bardo National Museum — museum
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Bardo National Museum

  • 2 min read
  • 36.809° N 10.134° E

Interesting facts

  • The Mahdia ship was probably driven ashore by a storm while carrying Greek artworks from Piraeus, the port of Athens, to buyers in Italy.
  • Besides statues, the Mahdia wreck held several dozen heavy marble columns, often linked to Sulla’s sack of Athens in 86 BC.
  • One bronze from the wreck, a herm of Dionysus, is signed by its maker, the sculptor Boethos of Chalcedon.
  • Other Mahdia bronzes include a winged, olive-crowned boy identified as Eros as lord of contests and two small figures of dancing dwarfs.
  • Isotope analysis of lead ingots aboard the Mahdia ship traced the metal to the Sierra de Cartagena in Spain.
  • Most of the Mahdia sculptures were raised between 1907 and 1913 under the French archaeologist Alfred Merlin.
  • In the Virgil Mosaic, about 1.22 metres square, Clio reads beside the poet while Melpomene holds a tragic mask.
  • The scroll on Virgil’s knee shows the eighth line of the Aeneid, the line in which the poet asks the Muse to tell him the causes of the story.
  • The famous Punic stele of a priest holding a child was discovered at Carthage in 1921 and dates from about the third century BC.
  • An extension completed in 2012 added some 9,000 square metres to the museum, with much of the funding coming from the World Bank.

Why it is worth it

Floors, walls and courtyards of a former royal palace are covered with ancient pictures in stone: hunters chasing boar and hares, sea gods riding through waves teeming with fish, Ulysses tied to the mast as the sirens sing, a wine jug from El Jem and builders at work on a basilica. The Bardo National Museum holds one of the largest collections of Roman mosaics in the world, and it shows them in rooms of carved stucco, tiled walls and painted ceilings that were built for the beys of Tunis. It is regarded as the second largest museum in Africa after the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

The idea of a national museum was first raised in the 1860s by Muhammad Khaznadar, son of the Tunisian prime minister, and the museum opened on 7 May 1888 in an old palace of the beylical court at Le Bardo, on the western edge of Tunis. It was first named the Alaoui Museum after the reigning bey, Ali III, and took its present name after Tunisian independence. Its mosaics come from excavations begun in the early twentieth century at Carthage, Hadrumetum (Sousse), Dougga, Utica, Thuburbo Majus and other sites, and together they form one of the richest records of daily life in Roman Africa. The most celebrated is the Virgil Mosaic, found in a Sousse garden in 1896, in which the poet sits between two muses holding a scroll with a line from the Aeneid; it is the oldest known portrait of him.

The collection reaches well beyond Rome. The Punic galleries hold grimacing terracotta masks, statues of the goddesses and gods of Carthage, and the stelae of the Salammbô tophet, among them the famous stele of a priest holding a child. Greek bronzes and marbles recovered from the Mahdia shipwreck, a cargo ship that sank off the Tunisian coast between about 80 and 60 BC and was found by sponge divers in 1907, include a marble bust of Aphrodite worn by the sea. The Islamic department displays leaves of the Blue Qur'an of Kairouan, with gold letters on indigo parchment, together with ceramics from North Africa and the Near East, and further rooms trace the country's history from prehistory to the Ottoman era.

Getting there

The museum is in Le Bardo, a municipality of Greater Tunis about 4 km west of the city centre, and is served by the Tunis light rail. The nearest airport is Tunis–Carthage International (TUN), about 9.5 km away.

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Nearby places

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From the encyclopaedia

The Bardo National Museum 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.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

36.80944, 10.13444per Wikidata