Thun (Thoune) is a town and a municipality in the administrative district of Thun in the canton of Bern in Switzerland. It is located where the Aare flows out of Lake Thun (Thunersee), southeast of Bern.
the municipality has almost about 45,000 inhabitants and around 80,000 live in the agglomeration.
Besides tourism, machine and precision instrument engineering, the largest garrison in the country, the food industry, armaments and publishing are of economic importance to Thun.
The official language of Thun is (the Swiss variety of Standard) German, but the main spoken language is the local variant of the Alemannic Swiss German dialect.
The area of what is now Thun was inhabited since the Neolithic age (mid-3rd millennium BC). During the early Bronze Age there were a number of settlements along the lake shore and the Aare. A site at Renzenbühl had a local chief or nobleman's grave which contained one of the richest collections of early Bronze Age artifacts in Europe. The Thun-Renzenbühl axe, dating from 1800 BC, is one of the earliest examples of damascening technique in the world. The gold inlay decoration on the axe may also have a numerical, astronomical meaning. Another site at Wiler contained approximately 1,500 maritime snail shells which were harvested from the Mediterranean and traded over the Alps.
The name of the town derives from the Celtic term Dunum, meaning "fortified town". It fell to Rome in 58 BC, when Roman legions conquered almost all of Switzerland, and it soon became one of the main centers of Roman administration in the region.
The Romans were driven out of Thun, and out of the rest of Switzerland, by the Burgundians around 400 AD. The Aare became the frontier between the Christian Burgundians and the Pagan, German-speaking Alemanni, who lived north. The region was mentioned for the first time during the 7th century, in the chronicle of Frankish monk Fredgar. The town is first mentioned in 1133 as Tuno.
The region of Thun became a part of the Holy Roman Empire in 1033, when Conrad II gained the title of King of Burgundy.