Musée d’Archéologie Méditerranéenne
Punic sacrificial price-list stone, quarried in Carthage yet unearthed in a Marseille house wall in eighteen forty-five.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Musée d'Archéologie Méditerranéenne follows two grey limestone slabs a stonemason pulled from a demolished house near Marseille's old cathedral in 1845, sold to a museum director for ten francs. It traces how scholars deciphered the Punic script carved into them and the surprisingly mundane document it turned out to be, a temple's price list for animal sacrifice, down to the exact cost of an ox or a goat. Chemists later tested the stone itself, raising a question about where it had really come from.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations
Lace-concrete museum joined by footbridge to a seventeenth-century harbor fortress.
Marseille History Museum
Sunken garden of excavated Greek and Roman port ruins, saved from bulldozers by a nineteen sixty-seven standoff.
Port Antique
Excavated Greek and Roman port ruins with fortification towers, a gateway, and the ancient harbor's traced outline.
Le Panier
Ancient hillside quarter of narrow Greek-era lanes, rebuilt from wartime ruins into a multicultural artists' district.
Fort Saint-Jean
Seventeenth-century harbor fortress whose quarantine checkpoint once inspected every incoming ship's papers.
Natural History Museum of Marseille
Taxidermy safari hall of three hundred mounted animals inside a nineteenth-century water palace.