Bardo National Museum (Tunis) in the context of "Muhammad Khaznadar"

A Roman mosaic is a mosaic made during the Roman period, throughout the Roman Republic and later Empire. Mosaics were used in a variety of private and public buildings, on both floors and walls, though they competed with cheaper frescos for the latter. They were highly influenced by earlier and contemporary Hellenistic Greek mosaics, and often included famous figures from history and mythology, such as Alexander the Great in the Alexander Mosaic.

A large proportion of the surviving examples of wall mosaics come from Italian sites such as Pompeii and Herculaneum. Otherwise, floor mosaics are far more likely to have survived, with many coming from the fringes of the Roman Empire. The Bardo National Museum in Tunis has an especially large collection from large villas in modern Tunisia.

Zeugma Mosaic Museum, in the city of Gaziantep, Turkey, is the biggest mosaic museum in the world, containing 1700 m of mosaics. It opened to the public on 9 September 2011. The 30,000 m (320,000 sq ft) museum features 2,448 m (26,350 sq ft) of mosaic and replaces the Bardo National Museum in Tunis as the world's largest mosaic museum.

The museum's Hellenistic Greek and Roman mosaics are focused on Zeugma, which is said to have been founded as Seleucia by Seleucus I Nicator, founder of the Seleucid Kingdom after serving as a hetairoi military officer in the army of Alexander the Great. The treasures, including the mosaics, remained relatively unknown until 2000 when artifacts appeared in museums and when plans for new dams on the Euphrates meant that much of Zeugma would be flooded. In 2011, many of the mosaics remain covered, and teams of researchers continue to work on the project.

Le Bardo (Arabic: باردو Bardow) is a Tunisian city west of Tunis. As of 2004, the population is 73,953.

Built by the Hafsid dynasty in the 14th century, the name Bardo comes from the Spanish word "prado" meaning "meadow". Bardo became a residence of the Tunis court in the 18th century. With the arrival of Husseinite beys, Bardo became a political, intellectual and religious center. The ancient beys' residence was the site of the Tunisian National Assembly headquarters, and the National Museum opened there in 1888.

Ali III ibn al-Husayn (Arabic: علي الثالث بن الحسين ; 14 August 1817 – 11 June 1902) commonly known as Ali III Bey (Arabic: علي باي الثالث) was the Husainid Bey of Tunis from 1882 until his death. He was the first ruler under the French protectorate.

He was named Bey al-Mahalla (Heir Apparent) on 23 August 1863 by his brother Muhammad III as-Sadiq and was made a divisional General and placed at the head of an army column operating in the interior of the country (known in Tunisian Arabic as the mhalla) to assert beylical authority in remote regions, rendering justice in the name of the sovereign and collecting taxes from local tribes. A keen horseman, Ali Bey took personal charge of this work and undertook it thoroughly, twice a year - in the north of the country during the summer in Béja and El Kef, and in the south during the winter, in Kairouan and the towns further south. During the Mejba Revolt in 1864, while his ineffective brother remained in the Bardo palace, Ali put down the rebellion with Generals Ahmed Zarrouk, Rustum and Uthman.

Guilloché (French: [ɡijɔʃe]), or guilloche (/ɡɪˈloʊʃ/), is a decorative technique in which a very precise, intricate, and repetitive pattern is mechanically engraved into an underlying material via engine turning, which uses a machine of the same name. Engine turning machines may include the rose engine lathe and also the straight-line engine. This mechanical technique improved on more time-consuming designs achieved by hand and allowed for greater delicacy, precision, and closeness of line, as well as greater speed.

The term guilloche is also used more generally for repetitive architectural patterns of intersecting or overlapping spirals or other shapes, as used in the Ancient Near East, classical Greece and Rome and neo-classical architecture, and Early Medieval interlace decoration in Anglo-Saxon art and elsewhere. Medieval Cosmatesque stone inlay designs with two ribbons winding around a series of regular central points are very often called guilloche. These central points are often blank, but may contain a figure, such as a rose. These senses are a back-formation from the engraving guilloché, so called because the architectural motifs resemble the designs produced by later guilloché techniques.