The historiography on Ancient North Africa is massive and still predominantly in French, though scholarship and archaeological research published in Italian, Spanish, English, German, and Arabic has increased notably since the 1970s. The main challenge facing those who wish to work in the field comes from the association of its historiography with European, especially French and Italian colonialism and its legacy. Having conquered and annexed Algeria in the mid-nineteenth century, the French authorities were deeply concerned with the long-term success of their colonial mission, which they saw as continuing in the footsteps of Rome in Africa. One avenue to this end was considerable investment in the discovery and analysis of the process â dubbed âRomanizationâ â by which the Roman state was believed to have imposed its imperial culture and civilization on the polities, peoples, and landscape of the region. North Africa in the Roman period had seemingly much to lend to this program: an imperial history not dissimilar to that of Roman Gaul and the importance of its Christian past through the great African fathers of the Church, Cyprian and Augustine. There was likewise an implicit concern, very much suited to the age of European imperialism and empire in the Middle East and North Africa, in succeeding where the Romans had obviously failed with the Arab conquest of the seventh century CE. This was especially important in Algeria. Napoleon III wanted an âArab Kingdomâ in his empire, but following his defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the advent of the French Republic, Algeria became a French Department.
Henceforward the Arab identity of Algeria was to be denied and the Roman past deployed to justify the negation of Algeriaâs history after the Arab conquest. The impact of this is still evident in the ambivalence felt by contemporary Algerian scholars and archaeologists of antiquity towards the Roman period in North Africa. The establishment of the French protectorates in Tunisia (1881) and Morocco (1912), on the other hand, did not negate the official personality of either country, where the Bey of Tunis and the King of Morocco, a descendent of the prophet, remained in power. Tunisia and Morocco absorbed the Numidian, Carthaginian, and Roman past, into their national heritage. Italyâs entry into Libya (1911) was founded on the same premises and can be traced back to the Congress of Berlin in 1878 when Italy sought imperial possessions in North Africa alongside Britain and France. Italyâs power in Libya remained tenuous until the execution of the rebel Omar Mukhtar in 1931, after which the country was fully integrated into Italy as its âfourth shore.â Libyaâs Roman past became central to the maintenance of Italian colonial power in the process.
Prior to the French conquest, most of what was known of North Africaâs ancient past was derived from the ancient sources and, to a lesser degree, the accounts of occasional travelers such as Jean-AndrĂ© Peyssonnel, and Thomas Shaw, and those interested in acquiring antiquities (Fevrier, 1989 : 23â66). The establishment of French authority in 1830 was followed in 1837 by the foundation of the Commission dâexploration scientifique de lâAlgĂ©rie, comprised of French officials trained in the humanities and other specialists (Brian-Ponsart and Hugoniot, 2005: 8). The Brigades Topographiques of the French army produced reports, drawings, maps, and plans of ancient cities, fortifications, villas, farms, tombs, and other remnants mainly of the Roman period in the context of their responsibility to prepare topographic maps of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco (see Stone, Chapter 2). Various learned societies were also founded: the SociĂ©tĂ© de Constantine (1853), lâAcadĂ©me dâHippone (1860), and la SociĂ©tĂ© historique algĂ©rienne (1856â1857). These journals reported on reconnaissance visits to local ancient sites or newly discovered Latin and other inscriptions. The newly established French School in Rome also sent scholars to North Africa from the time of its foundation in 1873â1874. The surprisingly large number of inscriptions recovered â more than any other region of the Roman Empire, some 60,000 at present â led Theodor Mommsen to dedicate a special volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (Volume 8) to the African provinces. Indeed, the study of Roman Africa has long been defined by this enormous epigraphic legacy, as the admirable LâAfrica Romana series demonstrate.
At the instigation of Cardinal Lavigerie, Archbishop of Algiers, PĂ©re Delattre of the PĂ©res Blancs carried out extensive archaeological work at Carthage under the new protectorate, primarily on the Christian monuments of the Roman city, but also of its Punic predecessor (see FumadĂł Ortega, Chapter 6, and Bockmann, Chapter 8). The French authorities also created the Commission de lâAfrique du Nord antique as part of the ComitĂ© des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, which remained in existence until 2000.
Greater attention was devoted to archaeology, especially in Algeria, with the foundation of LâĂcole supĂ©rieure des Lettres dâAlger in 1880 and the FacultĂ© des Lettres in 1890. StĂ©phane Gsell, a member of the latter, wrote the monumental Histoire ancienne de lâAfrique du Nord (1913â1928; Leveau, 2020). The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were also the period of the great French excavations at Thamugadi (Timgad), Cuicul (Djemila), Lambaesis, Madauros, Thugga (Dougga), among many others. The Italians, in a similar vein, launched the excavation and publication of Lepcis Magna and Sabratha in Tripolitania, work that continued with the support of the Fascist regime under Mussolini.
French scholarship in the colonial period also took an interest in the Berbers, partly with the view â at least on the part of the authorities â of re-Christianizing them, especially in Kabylia in eastern Algeria in hopes of counterbalancing the political and religious reality of a largely Arab and Islamic Algeria. Indeed, the word Berber became attached to French colonialization and was replaced after decolonization by the term âAmazigh.â It is within this ideational framework that the concept of la permanence BerbĂšre and of indigenous resistance to outsiders emerged. This can already be observed in Charles Diehlâs still influential, LâAfrique Byzantine (1912), but its fullest expression was achieved in Christian Courtoisâs Les Vandales et LâAfrique (1955), who advanced the idea of the opposition between the Romanized plains and the un-Romanized and hostile uplands and mountains, which eventually contributed to the collapse of Roman power in a region less fully Romanized than long imagined (a view echoed in W.H.C. Frendâs the Donatist Church, 1952). This thesis reached its culmination in Margeurite Rachetâs Rome et les BerbĂšres. Un problĂšme militaire dâAuguste Ă DioclĂ©tien (1970; Faure, Chapter 10). Berber resistance, as early as the third century, was also deployed as an explanation for the supposed decline of African cities in Late Antiquity, reflected in the decline in both building activity and dedicatory inscriptions found in towns. The work of Claude Lepelley (1979â1981) showed otherwise, but it must not be forgotten that the preferential interest in early Roman urban monuments often led to the partial or complete destruction of the archaeology of the Late Roman, Vandal, and Byzantine periods.
Another concern of historiography in the colonial period was the question of whether the climate and environment of modern North Africa was broadly similar to that of antiquity, and especially the Roman period. This prompted a careful study of Roman investment in hydraulic technology and farming in Africa. Believing that little had changed, StĂ©phane Gsell (1913â1929: 40) concluded that Roman land management was a model that could be adopted for agricultural development by the colonial regime. However, this thesis also promoted the misplaced view that the Arab invasions were responsible for environment change, thus providing yet another exogenous explanation for the empireâs failure in the region (Despois, 1953: 194; Leveau, 2020 and Chapter 3).
The study of Phoenician, Punic, and Libyo-Punic cultures in North Africa can be traced back to the early years of the twentieth century with the work of the PĂšres Blancs and others on Punic Carthage, including the excavations of Francis Kelsey in the Tophet in 1925. However, most scholarship and archaeology, such as it was, was mainly channeled through Near Eastern and Semitic programs in European and North American institutions and was thus divorced, to some degree, from the historiographical tradition of ancient North African studies, which remained solidly oriented toward Roman Africa. While the Punic Wars and Carthageâs relations with the Western Mediterranean long remained a subject of interest for classical historians, it was only in the 1960s with the work of Gabriel Camps and the UNESCO Save Carthage Campaign, with its increased attention on Punic Carthage that the study of the Phoenicians in the Western Mediterranean and Punic and indigenous pre- and protohistoric North Africa began to attract greater attention (Doak and LĂłpez Ruiz, 2019). Camps was interested chiefly in the society and material culture of the Neolithic and the Bronze and Iron Ages, and included Libyan epigraphy, the Berber kingdoms, and their interaction with Punic communities, the great pre-Islamic funerary monuments, and the various ceramic traditions of these periods (Bazile, 2002). One of the challenges to archaeological work on these societies and cultures lay in the fact that pre-Roman archaeological levels at many ancient urban sites in North Africa lay below the Roman layers and thus were more difficult to access and threatened the destruction of the more privileged Roman remains. As SanmartĂ (Chapter 4) demonstrates, interest in the archaeology and history of North Africa prior to the Roman period has expanded significantly in recent years.
The achievement of independence for the states of North Africa, the emergence of academic paradigms framed by decolonization, and new theoretical models in the social sciences and sciences, ushered in a new phase in the historiography of the field in the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps the most groundbreaking and controversial among new studies was Marcel Benabouâs La rĂ©sistance africaine Ă la Romanisation (1976). Benabou advanced the thesis of a distinctly AfricanâRoman civilization alongside a profound cultural and military resistance to Roman power. While his monograph generated criticism as an oversimplified and inverted dualist African versus Roman perspective, it had the catalytic effect of destabilizing Romanization as the dominant paradigm for understanding the world of ancient North Africa. Henceforth, historians and archaeologists would pay greater attention to the more complex and intrinsic forces at work in the region (Conan...
