Tunis is the capital and largest city of Tunisia, set on a low plain at the head of the Lake of Tunis some kilometres inland from the Mediterranean coast and the ruins of Carthage. The toponym is pre-Phoenician, attested in Numidian-Punic sources as Tunes; the Latin Thunes and the Arabic Tunis preserve the same form.
The medieval city emerged in the eighth century after the Arab destruction of Carthage. By the late twelfth century Tunis had displaced Mahdia and Kairouan as the principal city of Ifriqiya; the Almohad governor Abu Hafs Umar founded the Hafsid dynasty there in 1229, and the Hafsid sphere ruled the eastern Maghreb from Tunis until the Ottoman conquest of 1574. The Hafsid period — three and a half centuries of substantially autonomous Berber-Andalusi-Mediterranean rule — defines the historical identity of Tunis as a city.
The medina, inscribed by UNESCO in 1979, preserves the Hafsid-and-Andalusi urban fabric in substantially complete form: the Zitouna mosque (founded under the Aghlabids in the ninth century, reworked under successive Hafsid patrons), the souks of perfume, leather, and silk, the Hafsid madrasas (al-Shamma'iyya, al-Mustansiriyya, al-Bashiriyya, al-Asfuriyya), and the long medina walls. The Bardo Museum, in the suburb of the same name, holds one of the principal Roman-and-Numidian mosaic and stele collections in the world, including the Libyan-Punic bilingual inscription from the Mausoleum of Ateban at Dougga.
Modern Tunis was substantially expanded under the French Protectorate (1881–1956) with a colonial-rationalist new city to the east of the medina. The post-independence city is the political, economic, and cultural capital of Tunisia, and the principal point of departure for the 2010–2011 Tunisian Revolution that opened the broader Arab-Spring sequence across north Africa and the wider region.