The Bardo National Museum of Tunis is the principal Tunisian national museum and the institution that holds the most extensive collection of Roman-period mosaics in the world, alongside substantial Punic, Numidian, early-Christian, and Islamic-period holdings drawn from sites across Tunisia and the broader Maghreb. The museum is installed in the former Hafsid-and-Ottoman palace of the Tunisian beys at Le Bardo, on the western edge of the modern Tunis metropolitan area.
The institution was founded in 1888 under the French Protectorate as the Musée Alaoui, named after the reigning bey, and has been continuously operated since with substantial reorganisations across the post-independence period and the 2009–2012 expansion that doubled the museum's gallery footprint. The mosaic collection — drawn principally from the Roman-period sites at Carthage, Dougga, Sousse, El Djem, Bulla Regia, and Utica — covers the second to seventh centuries CE and constitutes the principal documentary record of late-antique Mediterranean mosaic art.
The Numidian-Punic section holds material directly relevant to the Berber dimension of north African antiquity. The Mausoleum of Ateban funerary stele from Dougga — the bilingual Libyan-Punic inscription that became, through Jean-Jacques Barthélemy's nineteenth-century work, the principal key to the decipherment of the Libyco-Berber alphabet — is held in the Bardo's pre-Roman gallery. The Punic and Numidian votive stelae, sculpture, and household material reconstruct the long pre-Roman history of the region across which the Massyles and Massaesyli kingdoms had operated.
The museum was the site of the 18 March 2015 attack in which gunmen killed twenty-two people, principally European tourists, in the museum galleries. The institution reopened nine days after the attack and has since recovered its position as the principal cultural-tourism destination of Tunis. The Bardo is read alongside the Cherchell, Algiers, Rabat, and Cairo national museums as one of the principal regional repositories of pre-Islamic and Berber-period Mediterranean material.