A pen and ink drawing, showing the Malga cistern, at Carthage. Bruce visited Carthage in 1765, noting 'little remains but the cisterns, the aqueduct and a magnificent flight of steps up to the Temple of Æsculapius' (quoted in Playfair, Travels in the Footsteps of Bruce, 1877, 128).

This drawing is one of a series of the antiquities of Africa contained in two red morocco-bound albums. These were handed by James Bruce of Kinnaird to George III after he visited the King on his return to England in 1774 (Bruce was paid for the drawings in 1780) . Bruce had apparently promised to make drawings for the King's collection before he set out on his journeys to North Africa, Palmyra and Baalbek in the 1760s. Bruce retained a third volume of drawings as this was unfinished. George III is said to have hidden the drawings when Bruce's character was questioned (by commentators such as Samuel Johnson), and they were rediscovered by the Librarian, Frederick Augustus Barnard, who searched for them once Bruce's reputation was restored. It is unclear whether the drawings are by the Italian draughtsman Luigi Balugani, who travelled with Bruce until his death in 1770, or by Bruce himself. Bruce claimed authorship, and suggested that he had used a camera obscura to aid the compositions.