Rome in Africa

Susan Raven

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415082617
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134892396
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire antique

Nearly three thousand years ago the Phoenicians set up trading colonies on the coast of North Africa, and ever since successive civilizations have been imposed on the local inhabitants, largely from outside. Carthaginians, Romans, vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, TUrks, French and Italians have all occupied the region in their time. The Romans governed this part of Africa for six hundred cities, twelve thousand miles of roads and hundreds of aquaducts, some fifty miles long. The remains of many of these structures can be seen today. At the height of its prosperity, during the second and third centuries AD, the area was the granary of Rome, and produced more olive oil than Italy itself. The broadening horizons of the Roman Empire provided scope for the particular talents of a number of Africa's sons: the writers Terence and Apuleius; the first African Roman Emperor Septimius Severus, famous Christian theologians like Tertulllian and Saint Augustine - these are just some who rose to meet the challenges of their age.

1

BETWEEN THE DESERT
AND THE SEA

Much of the history of north-west Africa is the history of foreigners. Its civilizations have been imposed on its indigenous people largely from outside, and it was usually conquered from outside. Yet they have endured with considerable vigour. The Arabs, for instance, have dominated North Africa and its people since the seventh century AD; their religion and language survive to this day. The Phoenicians arrived at the beginning of the first millennium BC and remained its most powerful inhabitants—although a tiny minority—until the second century BC. Their maritime empire under the Carthaginians lasted nearly four centuries—longer than the land empire of Alexander the Great. Their influence, like that of the Arabs after them, survived for centuries afterwards, even when their power had been completely destroyed, and Carthage itself had been obliterated by the Romans.

The achievement of the Romans, too, was remarkable. They ruled north-west Africa for more than five hundred years, and the country which they had almost inadvertently conquered became, by the time of the Antonine Emperors of the second century AD, their most profitable acquisition and the one which demonstrated most strikingly their gift for government. Though its natural resources were greatly inferior to those of Gaul, for instance, and though the Romans controlled less than one hundred and forty thousand square miles, the territory they exploited in north-west Africa contributed far more to the agricultural wealth of the Roman Empire. Its cities numbered nearly six hundred to Gaul's sixty, and one of them, Leptis Magna, provided an imperial dynasty, that of the Severi. It was the birthplace of Terence and Apuleius, of Tertullian and St Augustine—native Africans all. Its volatile inhabitants adopted Christianity with an exuberance equalled only by the enthusiasm with which they adopted its heresies and, later, welcomed Islam. It was in some ways the most romanized of all Rome's subject territories, and in its turn it influenced the destiny of the Empire.

The social and political forms of Rome outlasted the extraordinary interregnum of the Vandals, who set sail with wives and children from their base in Spain and seized north-west Africa in AD 429; those forms lingered on, weakened but still recognizable, when the Byzantines reconquered Africa a century later for the Eastern Empire. The first Arab invasions swept through north-west Africa in the seventh century, though it was only with the second wave, in the eleventh century, that the last vestige of Roman influence finally vanished. But by then North Africa had become once more part of Africa and the East. Her brilliant Mediterranean past had been forgotten. The lessons of Punic and Roman agriculture were ignored, harbours silted up, most of the twelve thousand miles of Roman road sank under either a tide of sand blown in from the desert or soil washed down from the mountains. Cities fell under the hammer of the quarrier or were engulfed by the dunes. The all-devouring goat supplanted the ox, the camel supplanted the horse; and in the towns of the coast the merchant made way for the pirate, whose predatory activities warded off the European until the nineteenth century.

Gorgon's head from the forum at Leptis Magna

In the eighteenth century, less generally was known about the northern half of Africa than had been known in the days of the Romans.¹ Maps were non-existent or worthless. The most accurate was still that of Ptolemy, who lived in the second century and whose map of the world, in a twelfth-century Byzantine copy, was the only one known to have survived from antiquity. European knowledge of the interior still depended on classical writers. There were one or two European explorers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it was only in the nineteenth that the northern Mediterranean seriously rediscovered the southern. Napoleon's campaign in Egypt in 1798 led directly to the discovery of the temples of the Nile and the beginnings of Egyptology, and the French annexation of Algeria in 1830 (an interregnum which fared hardly better than that of the Vandals) at last revealed to the modern world the wealth of Roman remains in North Africa. Of all Rome's provinces those in Africa are richest, at least in quantity, in the monuments of her might. She built to last, and neither the Arabs nor the encroaching desert were able to extinguish entirely the marks of her rule.

A LAND OF DROUGHT

Most of the continent of Africa north of the 15° parallel is desert. The Sahara forms the western end of the vast belt of virtually rainless land which stretches diagonally across Arabia, Syria and Jordan, Turkestan and north of the Himalayas to the Gobi desert in northern China. On either side of the Tropic of Cancer, crossing from Rio de Oro on the Atlantic to the Red Sea, three thousand miles to the east, lie the Saharan, Libyan and Nubian deserts—nearly four million square miles of sand, gravel, bare rock and mountain ranges. They cut off the equatorial forest of the Congo and the Niger from the Mediterranean coast as effectively as an ocean. Rain is not unknown; without it there would be no oases. But it is nowhere more than five inches a year, and only its irregularity can be relied on. One oasis has recorded a drought lasting twelve years and, although torrential rain occasionally falls for as much as two or three days together in mountainous regions of the central Sahara, causing flash floods, there are huge tracts where rain never falls at all.

Such rainfall as there is mostly evaporates under the Saharan sun; but enough finds its way underground to supply a certain number of oases—some large, like Ghadames, Germa, Kufra or Tamanrasset, which all support palm groves and other crops; others hardly more than wells. Oases may be close together or as many as one hundred and fifty or two hundred miles apart. The water is often brackish, but its existence has meant that the North African desert belt has never been entirely uninhabited. In historic times there have always been nomadic tribes moving from oasis to oasis and feeding their animals on such long-rooted scrub as somehow survives years of drought, or on the plant life that springs up on the most barren land after a sudden shower of rain. Even in its driest period there have been caravan routes between the Mediterranean and the Niger.

Quite distinct, however, from the deserts of North Africa are four areas which can support a settled population because they have a regular supply of water: Egypt, to which the Nile brings the rainfall of the highlands of Ethiopia and Uganda; Cyrenaica, six hundred miles across the desert from the Nile delta, on the Libyan coast; the tiny coastal belt of Tripolitania, a further eight hundred miles to the west; and finally, separated from Tripolitania by a comparatively brief stretch of desert, the whole much larger region of north-west Africa which the Arabs call the Maghreb and which corresponds roughly to the Atlas mountains and their coastal plain. This is a region some two or three hundred miles deep from the Mediterranean to the northern edge of the Sahara, stretching 1,400 miles from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Gabès opposite Sicily. It comprises Morocco (Mauretania to the ancient world), northern Algeria (east Mauretania and Numidia) and Tunisia (Africa Proconsularis).

The Maghreb's source of water is not, as in Egypt, a river, but rain, brought in on the west winds of winter from the Atlantic and falling on the flanks of its many mountain ranges. Further east, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica have ranges of hills which attract rainfall, though the highest, only some two or three thousand feet high, do not compare with the 13,500 of Mount Atlas in Morocco, and both regions are in fact a good deal drier. But they are all part of the general geological structure of the Mediterranean basin. They have the same steep-sided mountains of porous limestone that ring the north Mediterranean coast from the Pyrenees through the Alpes Maritimes and the Dolomites to Greece and Asia Minor; they share the same tendency to earthquakes; and they enjoy the same general climatic conditions—rain in winter, drought in summer. Indeed the Maghreb, which has some rain in spring and autumn as well, is wetter than parts of Spain.

FLORA AND FAUNA

As well as sharing the typical climate, north-west Africa has had for thousands of years a plant life which is also more Mediterranean than African. The mountains are still partly, and were once wholly, covered in forests of conifers and evergreens such as holm oak and wild olive. Like other Mediterranean lands the country took readily to the vine, the olive and the fig and, in the most fertile regions, to cereals when they were introduced long before the Romans. But the fauna is nearly all of African origin. The poisonous snakes of Tripolitania and Tunisia are not found in Europe; the scorpions are tropical varieties. The so-called Barbary sheep, which is neither sheep nor goat, is an African species. Ostrich, gnu, several varieties of antelope and gazelle were once, or still are, found in north-west Africa, and one Roman mosaic in the Bardo museum in Tunis shows a hartebeest.

As late as the first century AD, and probably later, elephant inhabited the Maghreb, and the wild beasts—panthers and leopards, lions and bears—which Africa shipped to Rome for the games and circuses were captured north of the Sahara.

These animals reached the Mediterranean coast at a period when the interior of the continent was much wetter than it has been for the last three thousand years. Our own era is possibly the driest phase, in an alternation of wet and dry, that it has ever known. There was once greater rainfall, more rivers, and even vast lakes. There is still an enormous water-table under the eastern desert, laid down hundreds of thousands of years ago, which supplies the oases in low-level depressions like Siwa and Kufra. In the western desert, it seems likely that the Niger, which runs north-east from the mountains of French Guinea to Timbuctoo, where it turns sharply to the southeast and flows out into the Bight of Benin, as recently as five thousand years ago continued north from Timbuctoo into the vast flats of the El Juf depression. There it evaporated from a shifting series of marshes and shallow lakes some 60,000 square miles in extent. A watercourse from Timbuctoo has been traced far to the north of the present Niger bend, and fossil remains of fish, hippopotamus, reed-rat and a variety of mollusc have been found. There are also signs of past habitation of giraffe and elephant, which suggests that what is now desert was once open steppe. The whole western Sahara is seamed with dried-up watercourses, too long and too well-defined to be accounted for by the run-off from rainfall as intermittent as it is today; the most famous runs from the Hoggar massif in the central Sahara to the Touggourt Depression, and possibly as far as the Chott Melrhir just south of the Aurès mountains in northern Algeria—a distance of some seven hundred miles. As far north as Biskra a central African mud-fish has been found, and in the Hoggar there have been reports of central African crocodiles whose ancestors can have established themselves there only in a much wetter period. All these species must have crossed what is now desert tens of thousands rather than thousands of years ago; elephants, for instance, probably arrived early rather than late, for the North African variety is known to have shown distinct signs of dwarfing in Roman times, a change which must have evolved over a long period. But a wetter climate made possible not only the spread of animals but also large-scale migrations of peoples.

Evidence that giraffes once lived in the heart of the Sahara desert: prehistoric rock painting in the Tassili n'Ajjer

THE FIRST NORTH AFRICANS

By the end of the Ice Ages, c. 10,000 BC, most of the Mediterranean region was occupied by bands of hunter-gatherers, of broadly Mediterranean stock. As the climate gradually became warmer, sea levels rose and the land became more forested. The inhabitants adapted to the new environment, and fishing became more important.

Between about 6000 and 3000 BC farming—the growing of cereals and pulses, the herding of animals—spread gradually across the Mediterranean basin. Its arrival used to be regarded as the result of the westward spread of a new people, but it now seems more likely to be primarily the result of the adoption of the new resources, and the methods of exploiting them, by the indigenous populations of hunter-fisher-gatherers.

These early North Africans have left records of themselves and their environment in countless rock engravings. The southern foothills of the Atlas range are rich in engravings of the extinct giant buffalo, elephant and panther; the sides of desiccated watercourses in the Libyan Fezzan show giraffe, elephant, rhinoceros and hippopotamus, as well as sheep and domestic cattle. The engravings cannot be dated with any certainty, but they reveal a past age when large mammals, which are today seen only south of the Sahara, were a commonplace sight in areas which now scarcely support the occasional hyena or wild boar, and bear witness to the survival of many of them in the Africa known to the ancient world.

With the eventual drying up of the desert around 2000 BC the people who occupied the plains and mountains of north-west Africa were, like the animals, virtually isolated. They remained at a Stone Age level of development, hunting wild animals, raising cattle and horses, or settling to a simple form of agriculture in the more fertile parts. It was with them and their descendants that the Phoenicians and the Romans came in contact, the people whom the Greeks called Libyans (adopting the name from the Lebu tribe on the border of Egypt), the Romans called Africans, Numidians and Moors, and the Arabs were to call Berbers (probably from the Latin barbari, barbarians). This is the stock from which many of today's North Africans—Berber tribesmen and town dwellers alike—and tribes of the desert like the Tuareg are descended, for neither Carthaginians nor Romans, Vandals nor even Arabs invaded in sufficient numbers to alter greatly this ancient ethnic inheritance.

COLONISTS FROM THE SEA

Meanwhile the Minoans, the Greeks and the Phoenicians, at the other end of the Mediterranean, were taking to the sea, to commerce and to conquest. All three peoples had penetrated the western Mediterranean by the early first millennium BC. The Minoans, who were trading by sea with Egypt at least two thousand years before Christ, must have obtained the block of liparite found by Sir Arthur Evans in the palace of King Minos at Knossos on Crete from the Aeolian islands north of Sicily; they may even have sailed beyond the straits of Gibraltar (the pillars of Hercules of Greek legend) in the second millennium BC. The Old Testament ‘ships of Tarshish’ were probably Phoenician ships sailing to Tartessus, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, around 1000 BC. And although it is not possible to chart any coherent route for the voyages of Odysseus, the Odyssey shows that by 800 BC, when Homer lived, the Greeks also had accurate knowledge of the countries of the west: the lotus plant, for instance, which features in the story of Odysseus's travels, does grow on the coast of Tripoli, and the land of the Lotophagi has been confidently identified with the island of Djerba, in the Gulf of Gabès.

Seventh-century BC Assyrian bas-relief from Nineveh of a ship thought to be Phoenician, now in the British Museum

From the eighth century BC onwards the North African coast was colonized first by the Phoenicians and then by the Greeks. That is fact, though the details are largely lost in legend, for the western Phoenicians left no written records. However, a third-century BC Greek historian in Sicily, Timaeus, who very probably derived his information direct from Carthaginian sources, recorded that Carthage was founded thirty-eight years before the first Olympiad (i.e. 814 BC) by the Phoenician Princess Elissa, or Dido, who fled from Tyre when her husband was murdered by her brother, King Pygmalion. The date is plausible, give or take a hundred years;¹ the princess's great-aunt Jezebel had married King Ahab of Israel some forty or fifty years earlier. But Dido, if she existed at all, was simply following the example of others of her countrymen: Utica, a few miles along the coast to the north-west, and Gades (Cadiz) in Spain were already Phoenician settlements.

As for the Greeks, they were reputed, according to Herodotus, to have founded fishing colonies in Cyrenaica at the prompting of the Delphic oracle. But it was at a time, a century or so after the Phoenicians, when the Greeks too were colonizing all round the western Mediterranean—part of a general movement dictated by the desire for trade, and later by pressure of population at home. Delphic oracle notwithstanding, the founding of Cyrene in 640 BC fitted naturally into this pattern.

The Phoenicians, however, were the people who first opened up a regular trade route to the far west and monopolized the coast of northwest Africa. It was not the land itself which drew them. Apart from the beds of murex, the shellfish from which the Phoenicians extracted their celebrated purple dye and which was to be found in quantity both at Mogador (Essaouira) on the Atlantic and in the Gulf of Gabès, Africa held few attractions—rather the reverse, in the shape of dangerous wild animals and potentially hostile tribes. Its metals—iron, zinc and lead—were unsuspected by the new settlers. In any case, access to the interior was always difficult: what rivers there are run off the mountains in torrents after the winter rains, down steep ravines, and, except in Morocco, nearly all dry up or run very low in summer, like many other Mediterranean rivers. None are navigable for any appreciable distance inland. The mountain ranges lie parallel to the coast, with few valleys reaching back into the interior, and although they afforded some protection against sudden raids by the indigenous tribes, they also cut off the coastal settlements, not only ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Other Title
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• A Note On Certain Words
• Introduction
• 1 Between the Desert and the Sea
• 2 The Rise of Carthage
• 3 The Wars Between Rome and Carthage
• 4 New Masters for Africa
• 5 The Conquest of a Country
• 6 Granary of the Empire
• 7 The Six Hundred Cities
• 8 Careers Open to Talent
• 9 The First African Emperor
• 10 The New Religion
• 11 A Church Divided
• 12 The Greatest African
• 13 The Vandal Interregnum
• 14 Africa Returns to the East
• Appendix of Site Plans
• Bibliography
• Index