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Punic & Roman ERA
Tunisia may be the smallest country in North Africa, but its strategic position has ensured it an eventful history. The Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Ottomans and French have all picked at the region at one point. The earliest humans to set foot here were probably a group of Homo erectus who stumbled onto the place a few hundred thousand years ago as they joined north-west across the Sahara from East Africa. It's believed that in those days what is now arid desert was covered in forest, scrub and savanna grasses, much like the plains of Kenya and Tanzania today. The earliest hard evidence of human inhabitation was unearthed near the southern oasis town of Kebili and dates back about 200,000 years.
The Phoenicians first set up shop in Tunisia at Utica in 1100 BC, using it as a staging post along the route from their home port of Tyre (in modern-day Lebanon) to Spain. They went on to establish a chain of ports along the North African coast, the most important of which included Hadrumètum (Sousse) and Hippo Diarrhytus (Bizerte). But the port that looms largest in history books is Carthage, arch enemy of Rome. It became the leader of the western Phoenician world in the 7th century and the main power in the Western Mediterranean in the early 5th century. The city's regional dominance lasted until the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, which began in 263 BC and ended in 146 BC with Carthage utterly razed and its people sold into slavery.
The Tunisian territory became Roman property after the war. The emperor Augustus refounded Carthage as a Roman city in 44 BC, naming it the capital of Africa Proconsularis, Rome's African holdings. Agriculture became all-important, and by the 1st century AD, the wheat-growing plains of Tunisia were supplying over 60% of the empire's requirements. The Romans went on to found cities and colonies across Tunisia's plains and coastline; today, they're Tunisia's principal tourist attractions.
By the beginning of the 5th century, with Rome's power in terminal decline, the Vandals decided the area was ripe for plucking. Within 10 years, they'd taken Carthage as their capital and began to, well, vandalise. Their exploitative policies alienated them from the native Berber population, who in turn formed small kingdoms and began raiding the Vandal settlements. The Byzantines of Constantinople, who pulled the territory from the Vandals in 533 and kept it for the next 150 years, fared no better.