Qualla: Sousse Archaeological Museum

Sousse Archaeological Museum: Introduction

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yamen, CC BY-SA 4.0. The face of Medusa stares from the floor, her head wreathed in serpents, wings sprouting from her brows. She has been staring since the second century AD, when Roman artisans set her image in tiny colored stones on the floor of a villa in what was then called Hadrumetum. Now she stares from the wall of the Sousse Archaeological Museum, surrounded by Neptune on his sea chariot, the face of Oceanus, and Nilotic landscapes of the distant Nile valley. This museum holds the second largest collection of mosaics in the world.

Image: Yamen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sousse Archaeological Museum: A Fortress Turned Gallery

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mohamed Taoufik Tekaya Sousse, CC BY-SA 4.0. The museum occupies the kasbah of Sousse's medina, a fortified hilltop position that was established in the eleventh century AD. It became a museum in 1951, and after a renovation that rearranged the collections and restored the building, it reopened to the public in 2012. The se...

Image: Mohamed Taoufik Tekaya Sousse | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sousse Archaeological Museum: Before Rome, Before Carthage

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sousse_museum_Smirat.jpg: Pascal Radigue derivative work: Pethrus (talk), CC BY 3.0. The museum's oldest objects predate the Roman mosaics by centuries. Punic votive stelae and funerary urns date from as early as the seventh century BC, when Hadrumetum was a Phoenician colony trading across the Mediterranean. French archaeologist Pierre Cintas discovered addition...

Image: Sousse_museum_Smirat.jpg: Pascal Radigue derivative work: Pethrus (talk) | CC BY 3.0

Sousse Archaeological Museum: The Good Shepherd Underground

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ad Meskens, CC BY-SA 3.0. Among the museum's most striking objects is a marble tablet from Sousse's Roman-era catacombs, the Catacomb of the Good Shepherd. The tablet is engraved with the figure of a shepherd carrying a sheep on his shoulders, a Christian image illustrating Jesus's words from the Gospel o...

Image: Ad Meskens | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sousse Archaeological Museum: Emperors and Gladiators in Stone

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Habib M'henni, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Roman collection includes a marble bust of Emperor Hadrian and a statue of Priapus, the god of fertility, displayed with characteristically Roman frankness. The Magerius Mosaic, discovered in the nearby village of Smirat, depicts a wild beast hunt in an amphitheatre complete ...

Image: Habib M'henni | CC BY-SA 3.0