At the end of the Third Punic War...
At the end of the Third Punic War, with Carthage defeated, Rome razed the city, such that no stone was said to be left on top of another and the earth salted. About a century later Rome rebuilt the city as its own. To read the destruction in Revelation, one might think of the creation of a new heaven and a new earth in these terms, a wiping clean and starting fresh. Yet this is not the intent of the New Jerusalem. While it comes through trial and tribulation, the new earth is very much the same earth -- only renewed, made to be the earth of creation in a new and fuller way.
