Bardo National Museum (Tunis)

The Bardo National Museum (Arabic: المتحف الوطني بباردو, romanized: el-Metḥef el-Waṭanī bi-Bārdū; French: Musée national du Bardo) or Bardo Palace is an arts and North African history museum in Le Bardo, Tunisia. It is one of the most important museums in the Mediterranean region and the second largest museum in Africa after the Egyptian Museum of Cairo. It traces the history of Tunisia over several millennia and across several civilizations through a wide variety of archaeological pieces.

First proposed in the 1860s by Muhammad Khaznadar, the son of the Prime Minister of Tunisia, the museum has been housed in an old beylical palace since 1888. Originally called the Alaoui Museum (Arabic: المتحف العلوي, romanized: al-Matḥaf al-ʿAlawī), named after the reigning bey at the time, it was renamed as the Bardo Museum after the independence of the country.

The museum houses one of the largest collections of Roman mosaics in the world, thanks to excavations in various archaeological sites in the country including Carthage, Hadrumetum, Dougga and Utica. The mosaics, such as the Virgil Mosaic, represent a major source for research on everyday life in Roman Africa. From the Roman era, the museum also contains a rich collection of marble statues representing the deities and the Roman emperors found on different sites including those of Carthage and Thuburbo Majus.

The museum also houses pieces discovered during the excavations of Libyco-Punic sites including Carthage, although the National Museum of Carthage is the primary museum of the Carthage archaeological site. The essential pieces of this department are grimacing masks, terracotta statues and stelae of major interest for Semitic epigraphy, and the stele of the priest and the child. The museum also houses Greek works discovered especially in the excavations of the shipwreck of Mahdia, whose emblematic piece remains the bust of Aphrodite in marble, gnawed by the sea.

On 18 March 2015, an Islamist terrorist group attacked the museum and took tourists hostage in the building. Responsibility for the attack, which killed 22 people including 21 foreign tourists, was claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.