Geographical Factors in Roman Algeria
Author(s): A. N. Sherwin-White
Source: The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 34, Parts 1 and 2 (1944), pp. 1-10
Published by: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies
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GEOGRAPHICAL FACTORS IN ROMAN ALGERIA
By A. N. SHERWIN-WHITE
This paper is concerned with the geographical setting.of Roman Algeria and the relation
between human settlement and geographical factors, and will contain some comments on
the writing of Roman provincial history.' The present may be a suitable moment for those
who are no longer occupied directly with scholarship to review the first principles and
method of provincial history writing, which were perhaps not altogether sound in the
published works, and particularly in the general histories, of the pre-war decade. There
were two main types of study. The first were monuments of learning and minute scholarship, but tended to convey no general impression at all. The second type were so broad in
outline as to be mainly false, a fault particularly marked in the various economic histories
and general surveys of the Roman Empire. It is extraordinary that for Roman Africa, with
its tens of thousands of inscriptions and superficial ruins and its dozens of town sites, there
still exists no coherent or detailed study of part or whole except Toutain's old and excellent
Instead, scholars have concentrated either on
account of Tunisia published in I896.
particular town sites or on the military frontiers and military stations. The military studies
are all linked to Cagnat's monumental work about the Roman Army in Africa. The result
is that there exists a coherent body of knowledge about this great topic. But the study of
town sites has proceeded pretty well in vacuo. Algeria is a vast country and the conjunction
of this vastness with the external uniformity of town life has a bewildering effect. We have
acquired a pin-point knowledge about specific places, but the life of the towns has not been
related to the life and nature of the country. There has also been a tendency to write not
about the life of the towns but about their constitutional history. It is not an adequate
summary of a province's life to establish that at a certain date it contained a certain number
of Roman colonies, municipia and municipalities with Latin rights. These are but the forms
clothing a certain development of social, economic, and political activity. The weakness
of such methods is that they neglect human geography. This has two parts, the reciprocal
effect of man and his environment on one another, and the internal nature of human groups
and settlements.
First, then, for the environment, the physical geography of Algeria. The country is
formed by the eastern extension of the Atlas mountains of Morocco, and is a plateau land
high above sea level, broken up by a series of somewhat ill-defined mountain masses.
The river system is not sufficiently well developed to mark the pattern of the
country. Some rivers cut through from the interior of the country north to the
Mediterranean, some drain south to the Sahara, others never escape from the interior
plains but are swallowed up by great inland lakes or shotts. Hence Algeria is a country of
which it is singularly hard to comprehend the topography.
Roman Algeria was all north of the Sahara. A great mass of high land runs N.E.
from the Moroccan Atlas and then splits into two main mountain systems, following the
1 The substance of this paper was written for, and
delivered as, a lecture before the Society after the
'The
Annual General Meeting on 8th June, 1943.
main facts about the geography of Algeria are to
be found in the Geographie Universelle, vol. xi, I
(Paris, I937), A. Bernard, Algerie, ed. 7 (Paris, 1929),
or more briefly in E. F. Gautier, L'Afrique blanche
Gautier discusses the relation between
(Paris, I939).
climate and human settlement in ancient times in his
stimulating L'islarnisationz de l'Afriqiue dii Nord. Les
T'he only
Siedclesobsciuresdti Maghreb. (Paris, I927).
regional account of human settlement in Algeria is contained, often by implication, in R. Cagnat, L'Artnie
Numidia is
Romaine d'Afriqie, ed. 2 (Paris, 1913).
studied with some topographic relevance but less
systematically by T. R. S. Broughton, Romanzisation
Accounts
of Africa Procoisularis (B3altimore, 1929).
of the social and economic development are to be
found in V. Chapot, Le Monde Romnain (Paris, I927),
M. Rostovzeff, Social and Economic History of the
Roman Empire (Oxford, 1926), and the Economic Su(rvey
T'he
of Ancient Rome, vol. 4 (Baltimore, I938).
distribution of the remains of antiquity are plotted in
the Atlas archeologique de l'Algerie (Paris, i9I i), in
: 200,000.
S. Gsell,
a series of sheets on scale
Histoire aincienne de l'Afriqtue diu Nord (Paris, I913only reaches to the death of Julius Caesar.
1928)
Particular sites are studied with reference to their
topography in S. Gsell and C. A. Joly, Khamissa,
and Y.
Mdaourouch, Annozuna (Paris, I913-1922),
Allais, Djemila (Paris, 1938). 'rhese works and personal
observation are the main basis of this paper, and contain most of the facts and some of the theories disPermission to reproduce the maps and
cussed.
diagrams, some of -which are re-drawings of published
work, was kindly given by the Admiralty.
A. N.
2
SHERWIN-WHITE
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GENERAL PHYSICAL FEATURES OF NORTHI-WEST AFRICA
same direction as the coastline and separated by a great belt of high plains or plateaux (fig. I).
These three major divisions are from north to south the Tell Atlas, the High Plateaux,
and the Saharan Atlas. On fig. i the formations are clearest in the east. The small blocks
of mountains in the north between the meridian of Algiers and that of Constantine form the
Tell Atlas. In the south-east the great block of mountains, the Aures, are the most easterly
section in Algeria of the Saharan Atlas. In western Algeria the Tell Atlas is shown
extending in discontinuous blocks eastwards from the Moroccan frontier, beyond which
they continue westwards as the Riff mountains; but the hatching does not distinguish
clearly between High Plateaux and Saharan Atlas.
Such is the general threefold pattern of Algeria; but for human geography these are
not the effective units. For these, more detail is necessary. The whole area north of the
Sahara breaks up into a number of small compartments, which together form a series of
longitudinal east-west belts within the three major divisions already outlined. These smaller
compartments are the real units of the country. They are difficult to illustrate except
schematically, as in fig. 2, but fig. 3 gives the general structure and trend-lines. Running
across the country from west to east there is a series of belts, alternately mountain chains
and plains or valleys. In western Algeria (I), west of Shott el Hodna, there are seven such
belts between the Sahara and the sea:I.
The great block of coastal mountains east from Oran: Dahra, Miliana, Blida,
Grande Kabylie including the high Jurjura (Djurdjura) mountains.
(2) The Oran-Bougie depression, a series of valleys and plateaux: plain of Mleta,
Cheliff river-valley rising to the Medea plateau, then the Soummam valley to
Bougie.
(3) The Middle Mountains: the 'Western' Chains, the Ouarsenis, the Titteri,
the Biban which swings north-east to reach the coast as the Kabylie des Babors,
on the east side of the Soummam section of (z).
(4) A long belt of plains and plateaux without a common name: the interior plains
of western Algeria, the Mascara plain, the Sersou plateau.
(i)
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The remaining belts are larger and clearer.
(5) The Interior Mountains of the West.
(6) The High Plateaux, along which are scattered the salt lakes or shotts.
('i) The Saharan Atlas: IKsour, Amour, Ouled Nail mountains.
In eastern Algeria (II), where Roman settlement was heaviest, the belts are reduced
to five.
II. (I) The coastal mountains: Kabylie des Babors and Kabylie de Collo. This is the
continuation of the Biban section of I (3) above.
(2) The plains of Setif and Constantine.
(3) The Hodna mountains, a continuation or bifurcation of the Titteri section of I (3)
above. South of the hills lies the Hodna basin.
4
A. N.
SHERWIN-WHITE
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GEOGRAPHICAI,
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5
plateaux both in the major and the minor physical features. In the extreme east, however, the SaharanAtlas, i.e. the easternextension of the Aures massif, turns mbre and more
to the north and forms the Algerian-Tunisianchains which cut off Algeria from Tunisia.
These chains continue through Tunisia in a north-easterlydirection, graduallybreaking
down till their farthest extension reaches the sea in the Cape Bon peninsula. These
Algerian-Tunisian chains in ancient times cut off likewise the Roman province of Africa
Proconsularis(except for a small coastal sector which transgressedinto modern Algeria)
from Numidia.
In the Roman period this physical pattern conditioned settlement and control.
But the effect of the geographyon Roman penetrationhas not been clearlystated in modern
works. The stock picture of Roman Algeria in the second and third centuries is shown by
fig. 4. ProconsularAfricaextends into Algeriaonly in the extremenorth-east. Then comes
Numidia, the areaof the legionarylegate based on Lambaesis,which, in practice,tended to
become a separateprovince in the Julio-Claudianperiod, but was such formallyonly in the
reign of Septimius Severus. The centre of the region was Cirta, modern Constantine.
Other major route-centreswere Sitifis (mod. Setif), Lambaesis, Theveste (mod.Tebessa).
To the west of Numidia is MauretaniaCaesariensis,including all Algeria west of the Wadi
Kebir (class. Ampsaga) and the Kabylie de Collo mountains, natural limits (cf. above,
I (3) and II (i) in the summaries). Numidia was obviously well developed, with many
towns and a network of roads, while Mauretaniawas far less developed except in the east,
where there was eventuallyformed the sub-provinceof MauretaniaSitifensis.
It is usually said that except for a thin line of military posts in the extreme south,
which formed the limes of Africa, the Romans in Mauretaniadeveloped only two lines or
zones: the prosperouscoastalsettlements and the line of the great inland road which runs
along the southern flank of the Tell Atlas (sub-sections I (2) and II (2) above), from Sitifis
to the Oran-Bougie depression at Auzia (mod. Aumale), and thence westwards through
the Western Chains (I (3) ). The great blank between this road and the southern limes
route by Frenda and Columnataalong the line of the shotts in the south is most marked.
This is the region of the Middle Mountains and the High Plateaux south of them
(I, nn. 3-6). But the surprisingthing is that Roman influence did not die out southward;
ratherit increased,to judge by the scattered materialremains. It is not simply a question
of a military zone, but of agriculturalsettlement. The region that is relatively empty of
Romantracesis e.g. the Ouarsenisblock of the Middle Mountains,whereas their southern
fringe and the northern edge of the 1-igh Plateaux were regions of Roman control and
penetration. The same holds further east between the Shott el Hodna and the coast
(II, nn. I-3). Between the coast road and the Sitifis-Auziaroad there is a relative blank:
this containsthe Grande Kabylie and Jurjuramountains,an area of high mountains with a
troublesomeBerberpopulation,never properlysubdued by the Romans, though controlled
by military posts and generally kept in hand. Yet south of this area the plains of Sitifis
and the Shott-el-Hodna depression east of Zabi were full of Romanisedsettlements.
Again, in Numidia proper the whole of the central plateau region around Cirta,
Lambaesis,Theveste, and Tipasa was full of Romanisedsettlements. But in the mountains
that intervene between the plateau and the coast the traces become thinner as one
approachesthe isolated coastal plains. The last region to call for mention is the Aures
mountains,the most easterlyblock of the SaharanAtlas (II, n. 5). The Romantreatmentof
this is characteristicalso for the Jurjuraand for the Ouarsenismountains. They encircled
the massif with roads and military posts and civilian settlements, and also penetratedand
controlled the main valleys. In the Aures these were the north-south valleys which lead
through the block to the road from Ad Maiores to Bescera. But as a whole the Berber
populationof the Aures remainedundisturbedand hostile.
Now Strabo and Pliny regardedthe coast-lands as the essential region of north-west
Africa, and it was to the coastthat the earlycoloniesof the Empirewere sent. But in fact the
isolated coastal plains have only a local importance in Algerian history, because though
rich they communicatewith extreme difficultywith the interior. Algeria turns its back on
the sea; the master of Algiers is by no means the master of Algeria, as the French found
6
A. N. SHERWIN-WHITE
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ment of RomanAlgeria. Forest is the most impenetrableof barriers,especially when there
is no economic incentive to fell it. The development of the Cirta-Thamugadiregion was
made easy by the absence of heavy woodlands, and by the fact that the natural lines of
communicationrun through this area. Yet though the country was open its climate and
rainfallwere indifferent. Fig. 6 shows that the zone of the CentralPlateaux has below
8
A. N.
SHERWIN-WHITE
24 inches a year, and even less towards the south, an amount not very evenly distributed
as in the drier parts of England, to which it approximates, but concentrated into at best
the six months of winter (October-March), and then falling in torrential downpours.
Except around Bone (class. Hippo Regius) and the other coastal settlements, the areas
of heavy rainfall are the areas of unpenetrated mountain blocks, notably the Grande
Kabylie and the Aures. The lack of forest cover in the central plains compensated for the
lack of rainfall. Men did not need to cut down whole forests before they could plant their
drought-resistant olives or sow their winter wheat. Conversely the great semi-pacified
mountain blocks were all in the forest zones. Even to-day in the Ouarsenis the natives are
only locally numerous and live in forest clearings remote from the main communications of
the country. Similar conditions prevail in the Aures.
Even in the region of northern Numidia between Hippo and Cirta, where the Coastal
Mountains, the Kabylie de Collo, were effectively penetrated, there was a noticeable
thinning out, as remarked above, between the plateau and the sea. In the coastal area proper,
between Igilgili (mod. Djidjelli) and Chullu (mod. Collo), which both became Roman
colonies, three-fifths of the country is still forested with oaks and cork-oaks, the undergrowth is tangled, often impenetrable, and settlement has been hindered. The population
lives in huts scattered about the hillsides wherever an area has been cleared for cultivation.
The Romans faced a new situation in Algeria. It was an almost undeveloped country
with a population quite inadequate to its area. The problems of settlement were more akin
to those of tropical Africa in the nineteenth century than to any other area of the
Mediterranean world with which the Romans had to do. Hence they followed the line of
least resistance, which lay through the steppe-lands and plains of the Central Plateaux.
In the region around Cirta a certain amount of pioneer settlement had been achieved
by the Numidian kings, Massinissa and his successors. But all the rest was empty and new
country. Such is the background to which the whole story of land development, urban
settlement, and road building must be related. Tacitus (Ann. ii, 52, 3) speaks of the High
Plains north of the Aures as having no towns ' nullo etiam tum urbium cultu '. That
region was turned in the following two centuries, beginning in Tacitus' own day (etiam
tum), into a heavily populated area of great agricultural prosperity and urban splendour.
The process can be analysed into topics, such as the size of municipal territories, the
distances between towns and villages, the growth of urban agglomerations, etc. But such
topics must be related to the special conditions of an open and empty country. For example,
the fact that Roman military posts were often thinly strung out does not mean that control
was weak, but that the posts were as close as was necessary for security.
So much may be said about the first factor of human geography, environment pure
and simple. The second concerns the nature of human settlements. The question that has
not been satisfactorily answered for North Africa is, what is the function of the towns ?
The only detailed theory is that of Rostovzeff in his Social and Economic History of the
Roman Empire. For him the town is the centre of the leisured and wealthy landowning
class and the government officials, and all their various hangers-on and dependants: as
such the towns are regarded as parasitic. Against this, all those who have studied individual
sites regard the towns simply as ' agricultural towns ' or ' agricultural centres', without
further explanation. The town of Rostovzeff is in truth a thing hardly known in Europe,
ancient or modern, outside Russia. It is fair to say that Rostovzeff has never understood
the town-function in Mediterranean conditions. But the second set of terms are also misleading. In England and in Northern Europe generally, the ' agricultural town' is
essentially a market town and commercial centre. That is not so in the Mediterranean
world, either in ancient or modern times. The characteristic small Mediterranean town is
a peasant settlement, though in certain circumstances it may become a market town. The
peasants go out to work daily in the fields, often surprising distances. Or they may live
in the fields in huts during the short working season of the one-crop farmer and spend the
rest of the year in their town. This organisation may be seen to-day in Syria, in South
Italy, and in Majorca, at least, and other travellers can doubtless extend the list. The
alternative is the system of smaller groups more closely scattered. But it is not easy in
GEOGRAPHICAL
FACTORS
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ALGERIA
9
Mediterranean countries to distinguish between the large village and the small town.
The small hamlet, it may be added, is rare, except in very easily defended and inaccessible
regions.
The significant thing in Roman Africa is the continuous development of the large village
into the small town : the castellum becomes a civitas or municipium. But the constitutional
change is unimportant in itself: its significance is as an index of an increase of wealth and
population. It is not exact to say without qualification that Roman Algeria turned from a
land of villages into a land of towns. The settlements of pre-Roman Numidia were gathered
round strong points, and these castella were in themselves urban nuclei. But there was
certainly a great increase in the number of urban units in the Roman period.
Why, then, was there this tendency towards the urban form of life ? It is not enough to
say that the Romans liked towns. In Algeria the town was not the only or the obvious form
of settlement. One would have expected more scattered types of settlement in the solitudes
of the central plains. The clue is insecurity. The steppe lands which the Romans developed
were very close to the strongholds of the indigenous populations which they never subdued
fully, particularly the Aures and the Jurjura. Insecurity explains the quite extraordinary
growth of Thamugadi (Timgad). Under the French rule with its absolute guarantee of
security no great towns have sprung up in the interior, though there are some small towns.
But Thamugadi became a very large place for the ancient world. Its final extent is not to
be explained as due to commercial expansion or the building of rich men's palaces.2 In
excavated sites it is the palaces that attract attention. Published accounts concentrate
attention upon them. At Thamugadi the core of the original square town, built by Trajan's
army for the first colonists, contained many large establishments. The blocks were devoted
mostly to houses with a fair number of rooms built round a central courtyard. But beyond
the town centre stretched extensive irregular suburbs with many buildings of a different
quality. The same sort of thing occurs at Cuicul (mod. Djemila). In the original town it is
difficult to tell where anyone lived. Most of the buildings were public offices. But in the
late, Christian, quarter there was an amorphous mass of tenement-like erections. Thus the
towns certainly had several classes of population and may have become more and more
like peasant-communities rather than landlord-towns as time passed. But whatever the
category of the landholders, the most general function of the towns was, as French scholars
take for granted, that they were agricultural settlements.
There is a curious statement in T. R. S. Broughton's chapter on North Africa in the
Economic Survey of Ancient Rome, vol. iv, pp. i i i f. : ' The municipal life of the
interior of Africa is remarkable not for the presence of a few large and brilliant cities but
for the presence literally of scores of cities of perhaps three to ten thousand population
which were solidly prosperous and furnished with a surprising number of the amenities
of municipal life. In the northern part [of Tunisia], where the rainfall was heavier, we are
astonished with the number of cities and their proximity to one another....
In the drier
regions of the southern part it is equally astonishing to see the remains of several large and
rich cities, whose economic life was based on olive culture, in regions which nowadays have
no important towns.' The italics are my own. Professor Broughton is perhaps too easily
astonished. He is the victim of the misleading English word ' city' ; civitas is not nearly
so grand. Also he is perhaps assuming that these ' scores of cities ' were but the crown of
a system of villages and hamlets and scattered farms. But if the normal unit of African
husbandry was the ' city' or as the French would say, the ' gros bourg', the mystery
ceases to exist.
There is a group of small towns, Madauros, Thibilis, and Thubursicu, in the hills and
plateaux of the Tunisian frontier region of Algeria, that have been studied by Gsell and
cast much light on this question of the town function. Madauros (Mdaourouch), the birthplace of Apuleius, was IO, I3, and I5 miles distant respectively from its neighbours. It
had a territory of about 6o,ooo acres of good land and bad,'and was away from the main
roads, though linked to them by local routes. Hence it was no great commercial centre.
2 The military
camp at Lambaesis, some twenty
miles away, contributed to the development of
Thamugadi, no doubt, but had its own local municipality developed from canabae.
IO
GEOGRAPHICAL
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IN
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ALGERIA
There was a theatre with room for i,2o0 persons, perhaps a half or a quarter of the total
population. Madauros was a very small place, but still a town.
Thibilis (mod. Announa) was close to the Cirta-Hippo main road, near ancient Calama
(mod. Guelma), at the head of a rich agricultural valley. It was, and for centuries remained,
a castellum in the territory of Cirta, but it was a small town as its ruins show, and became a
municipality about A.D. 300. The boundary of its nearest neighbour was 3 to io miles away.
The houses even of the richest, a senator's mansion, were mean and unpretentious. There
are also the ruins of scattered farms throughout its territory. The town area of Thibilis
was about 50 acres. That of Thubursicu (mod. Khamissa) was about I 5o acres. Thubursicu
is interesting because it existed as a castellum in a nomadic area in the time of Tiberius and
Tacfarinas and grew up into a biggish place, though off the main lines of communication
(Tac. Ann. iv, 24, i, accepting Nipperdey's emendation).
These towns pose problems to which there may be many answers. The local form of
agriculture may give the clue. It is perfectly possible that many towns of Roman Africa
were seasonally emptied of their inhabitants for the sowing or the harvest in cereal areas.
Maybe the inhabitants were far fewer than is normally supposed. Certainly the common
assumption that the size of the theatres is a guide to population statistics needs careful use.
The towns probably overbuilt, like those of Asia Minor. The function of towns may be
quite different in pacified areas and under the shadow of the Aures or Jurjura. But it is
certain that the towns cannot be profitably studied in isolation either from their agricultural
and topographical setting or from the history of the province as a whole. Assumptions
based on the industrial society of modern Europe, or even the agricultural world of Russia
or the Middle West of America, must be discarded. The town-centre of a municipiummight
have few or no permanent inhabitants and consist solely of the official buildings and market
place, while a vicus might be a great urban agglomeration from which the coloni issued forth
daily to their work in near-by or distant fields. Between these two possible extremes lie
many variations. Roman Africa will be better understood when the excavated sites have
been assigned to their due category, not lumped in a single formula.