Carpet making is fascinating.  The design of a Tunisian carpet is so complex that it takes 3 months for a woman (and he did say woman, every time labor was mentioned) to make even the simplest one.  The simplest was the woven Berber rug, known here as kilim.  The second was called milgum, a soft rug made of camel hair.  Then, of course, cashmere, which unlike the first two rugs is knotted, not woven.  The last kind was the silk rug, the prettiest, most ornate, and most wonderful-to-the-touch of them all.  The shop’s piece de resistance was so amazing that it won a prize in Canada.

Tunisia used to be a French colony, for around a hundred years.  As a result, all the signs are both in Berber (their national language) and French.  They learn Arabic in school.  Religion is mixed as well—Catholics, Muslims, and Jews.  There are 10 million people in Tunisia, and 7 million tourists come each year.

     The first rooms were a hodgepodge of sculptures from prehistory to Byzantine.  There was a Roman mausoleum from the 2nd century, a sculpture of Venus given to the leader of Germany's air force in 1985, a huge wall mosaic depicting Roman gladiators, a map of Assaray Al-Hamray (or Tripoli castle), and statues of Apollo and Hadrian.
    The next room had a light blue Volkswagen Beatle.  It was the property of 2nd lieutenant Moammar Ghedaffi, and was on many a secret mission.  Lookie, a funky revolutionary car!
    Most of their prehistoric finds came from Haua Fteah, the largest cave in the Mediterranean basin.  We saw the usual artifacts: hunting tools, pottery shards, cave drawings, yada yada.  There was a child's skull's skeleton dating back 6,000 years.
    Damn.  I'm getting lazy about writing down every single detail.  The Honta Temple exhibit had a sacrificial altar (found in Sri Lanka) and a grave for the Garamantian people, an ancient Libyan tribe.  Of the Phoenician Period, I only copied a symbol of Tani—their great god.
    The majority of Roman finds were in Leptis Magna, one of the three famous historical cities (Hence, 'tri-polis').  The other two were Sabratha and Oea, which is modern Tripoli.  Again, huge mosaics covered the walls—Pegasus, hunters, the god of the Nile, and snakes and fishes.  There was also a really cool relief of Medusa.  The Byzantine period was pretty much the same.  After it came the arrival of Islam, the early Fatimid mosques up to vernacular architecture.  They had elaborate displays of modern Arabic life, nomadic Bedouin or otherwise.

Fun facts:  the Republic of Malta, formerly part of Sicily, is an independent nation with a population of about 400,000.  Since they've just recently joined the EU, they still use the Maltese pound or lira, which is equivalent to 3 US dollars or 2.5 Euros.  Malta has a very cool history—full of prehistoric Venuses, Arabic influences, French or Italian knights, British colonizers, and the fight towards independence.  But more on that later.

    Maltese is a very different language from Italian.  80% of it is actually Arabic-based, but written in the Latin script.  Marisa said that Arabs say that Maltese is quite archaic; the equivalent of Chaucer's English.