An ancient maritime city, on a peninsula in the N. of Africa, near the site of Tunis, and founded by Phoenicians in 850 B.C.; originally the centre of a colony, it became the capital of a wide-spread trading community, which even ventured to compete with, and at one time threatened, under Hannibal, to overthrow, the power of Rome, in a series of protracted struggles known as the Punic Wars, in the last of which it was taken and destroyed by Publius Cornelius Scipio in 146 B.C., after a siege of two years, though it rose again as a Roman city under the Caesars, and became a place of great importance till burned in A.D. 698 by Hassan, the Arab; the struggle during the early part of its history was virtually a struggle for the ascendency of the Semitic people over the Aryan race in Europe.