The Louvre, by Way of Carthage

The Louvre, by Way of Carthage

It required a trip to Tunis for me to stop at last in a room of the Louvre I had often walked through without paying attention. It should be said the room is at once a corridor and a dead-end. I’ll explain. In Tunis, I went to see again the archaeological site of Carthage, which I hadn’t visited since I was a child: the Punic quarter, the Roman villas, the Baths of Antoninus, and finally the Salammbo tophet, where stelae commemorate the children said to have been sacrificed to the goddess Tanit, a legend now contested. Back in Paris, I hurried to the Louvre and spent a long while studying the vast collection of Punic stelae, currently the subject of an exhibition in the Salle d’Actualité of the Near Eastern Antiquities department (Richelieu, room 233). In Carthage, my guide had exaggerated by leading me to believe that nearly all the stelae had been lost when the ship bringing them back to France sank in Toulon harbor. The room is tremendously interesting. It retraces the history of the nineteenth-century archeological excavations in Carthage, provides a careful commentary on the motifs and votive offerings engraved on the stelae, and explains the restoration process they have just been through. Hurry, as I don’t know when the exhibition ends.