Bulla Regia

Bulla Regia is the name by which we know an ancient town in northern Tunisia. 

Finds of Greek pottery show that it existed in the 300s BC; inscriptions record that in the 200s it became part of the empire of Carthage.

Street

Bulla Regia was part of the territory won for Rome by Scipio Africanus in 203 BC during the Second Punic War. The Romans seem to have put the Numidian king Masinissa in charge, since an inscription records that he "recovered the lands of his ancestors." In 156 BC he made Bulla his capital.

Baths

In 46 BC it became part of the new Roman province of Africa, and pretty much everything you can see there today dates to the Roman period.

Site plan, a big file if you want to click and read

The town declined in the Byzantine period and was destroyed by an earthquake in the late 400s.

The glory of the site today is a group of villas built with their main floors underground. Here and at the top of the post we look down into one of the two famous villas, the House of Amphitrite

Each of these villas was built around an atrium in the normal Mediterranean way, except that the atrium was 20 or so feet below the surface. This is the other famous villa, the House of the Hunt. Presumably this was done to escape from the desert heat.

Staircase entrance

Statue of Aesculapius

These villas were lavishly decorated with mosaics, which are quite well preserved. Some of them are still on the site, while others have been moved to Tunis.

Priestess of the Imperial Cult

More views of the House of Amphitrite

I was stunned by these images because we love to imagine that archaeologists might dig down into the ground and find whole buildings with their walls still standing, somehow buried nearly intact. Usually archaeology is nothing like that, but here it is. The lower floors of these houses were filled with rubble or sand and left alone until archaeologists came along to disturb them.

Amazing.

And I just couldn't resist one more image, this monument from a later Byzantine fortress on the site.