Dougga

Libyco-Punic Mausoleum and other newer ruins

watercolour and oil pastel

©2018 Charlene Brown

Dougga, located in northwestern Tunisia, is considered to be the best preserved example of an Africo-Roman town in North Africa. 

I have rearranged and condensed the city in this painting in order to fit the Libyco-Punic Mausoleum – the only monument of this type known in the ancient world – into the composition.  It is the tall structure in the upper right hand corner of the painting.  Originally built in the second century BCE when the area was a Phoenician colony, the mausoleum had an important bilingual Numidian and Punic-Libyan inscription that enabled archaeologists to decipher the original alphabet.

Dougga was annexed into the Roman province of Africa in 46 BCE and flourished under Roman rule with many important structures built during the second and third centuries CE.