In Tunisia, an exceptional archaeological site dominates the Mediterranean - Carthage - but these ruins tell another story of a city founded seven centuries earlier by the Phoenicians. The prestige of Troy is based on a mythical legend; it is said to have been the scene of a legendary conflict in the Trojan War, but did it really happen? Dreamt of as a veritable Garden of Eden in the middle of the Middle East, Persepolis is the city of all excesses and one of the Achaemenid Empire's nerve centres.