Carthage’s shore lit the first spark of the Arab Spring
Tunisia, a Maghreb republic between Algeria, Libya, and a long Mediterranean coast, also faces Italy across Sicilian waters. Berbers were early inhabitants; Phoenicians from the twelfth century BC built coastal towns, and Carthage dominated by the seventh. The 2011 revolution against Ben Ali’s 24-year rule ignited the wider Arab Spring.
About 12.1 million people live across 163,610 square kilometres, from the tail of the Atlas range to the edge of the Sahara, with 1,300 kilometres of coast where the western and eastern Mediterranean meet. The name comes from the capital, Tunis, possibly from a Berber root meaning encampment, and English speakers called the whole country Tunis into the 1940s. Farming reached the area around 4000 BC, and those coastal villagers were ancestors of today's Berber tribes.
Phoenicians settled Utica and Bizerte as early as the twelfth century BC, and legend credits Dido of Tyre with founding Carthage in 814 BC. Worshipping Baal and Tanit, whose outstretched-arm symbol still turns up at ancient sites, Carthage came to dominate the western Mediterranean, and Hannibal's invasion of Italy nearly stopped Rome's rise. Rome destroyed the city in 146 BC and made it the province of Africa, later building the amphitheatre at El Jem. Vandals ruled from 430 until Belisarius retook the region in 533.
Arab conquerors founded Kairouan, where the Great Mosque of 670 has the oldest standing minaret in the world. The shift from Latin-speaking Christian society to a mostly Arabic-speaking Muslim one took more than four centuries. The Aghlabids, ruling from 800 to 909, built waterworks that boosted olive farming, while Banu Hilal raids in the eleventh century devastated the countryside, which Ibn Khaldun described as turned to desert. Normans from Sicily briefly held the coast until the Almohads expelled them in 1160.
In 2011 anger at Ben Ali's rule toppled him and set off revolts across the region. From 2014 to 2020 The Economist rated Tunisia the Arab world's only democracy, but after backsliding under Kais Saied it was classed a hybrid regime in 2022.
Source: Tunisia
