Carthage

Founded by Phoenicians, grown into the power that fought Rome three times, and in 146 BC besieged for nearly three years by Scipio Aemilianus, burned, levelled, and about 50,000 of its people sold into slavery. The detail everyone remembers, that the Romans ploughed salt into the ground so nothing would grow, is not in any ancient source; it has only been claimed since about 1863 and there is no evidence for it. What actually happened is stranger: Rome came back and rebuilt on the same spot, Julius Caesar founding the new colony between 49 and 44 BC, and within a century Roman Carthage was the second largest city in the western empire with something like half a million people. UNESCO listed it in 1979. It is now a suburb of Tunis, 15 km out, with the Punic ports still legible from the air.