Carthage

Carthage was an ancient city in northern Africa, on the eastern side of the Lake of Tunis in present day Tunisia. Founded as a Phoenician trading colony that, according to legend, was established by the queen Dido, it grew into a powerful Punic empire dominating the southwestern Mediterranean before being destroyed after the nearly three year siege of the Third Punic War in 146 BC, when about 50,000 inhabitants were enslaved; Julius Caesar rebuilt the city between 49 and 44 BC, and by the first century it had grown into the second largest city in the western Roman Empire, before its eventual destruction by Umayyad forces in 698 CE.