Geographical Factors in Roman AlgeriaAuthor(s): A. N. Sherwin-WhiteSource: The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 34, Parts 1 and 2 (1944), pp. 1-10Published by: Society for the Promotion of Roman StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/296776 .Accessed: 06/05/2011 13:42

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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 scholar- ship, 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 account of Tunisia published in I896. Instead, scholars have concentrated either on 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 Annual General Meeting on 8th June, 1943. 'The 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 (Paris, I939). Gautier discusses the relation between climate and human settlement in ancient times in his stimulating L'islarnisationz de l'Afriqiue dii Nord. Les Siedcles obsciures dti Maghreb. (Paris, I927). T'he only regional account of human settlement in Algeria is con- tained, often by implication, in R. Cagnat, L'Artnie Romaine d'Afriqie, ed. 2 (Paris, 1913). Numidia is studied with some topographic relevance but less systematically by T. R. S. Broughton, Romanzisation of Africa Procoisularis (B3altimore, 1929). Accounts 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 of Ancient Rome, vol. 4 (Baltimore, I938). T'he distribution of the remains of antiquity are plotted in the Atlas archeologique de l'Algerie (Paris, i9I i), in a series of sheets on scale : 200,000. S. Gsell, Histoire aincienne de l'Afriqtue diu Nord (Paris, I913-

1928) only reaches to the death of Julius Caesar. Particular sites are studied with reference to their topography in S. Gsell and C. A. Joly, Khamissa, Mdaourouch, Annozuna (Paris, I913-1922), and Y. Allais, Djemila (Paris, 1938). 'rhese works and personal observation are the main basis of this paper, and con- tain most of the facts and some of the theories dis- cussed. Permission to reproduce the maps and diagrams, some of -which are re-drawings of published work, was kindly given by the Admiralty.

2 A. N. SHERWIN-WHITE

Casablanca

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FIG. I. 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. (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.

GEOGRAPHICAL FACTORS IN ROMAN ALGERIA 3

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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, FACTORS IN ROMAN ALGERIA 5

plateaux both in the major and the minor physical features. In the extreme east, how- ever, the Saharan Atlas, i.e. the eastern extension of the Aures massif, turns mbre and more to the north and forms the Algerian-Tunisian chains which cut off Algeria from Tunisia. These chains continue through Tunisia in a north-easterly direction, gradually breaking 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 transgressed into modern Algeria) from Numidia.

In the Roman period this physical pattern conditioned settlement and control. But the effect of the geography on Roman penetration has not been clearly stated in modern works. The stock picture of Roman Algeria in the second and third centuries is shown by fig. 4. Proconsular Africa extends into Algeria only in the extreme north-east. Then comes Numidia, the area of the legionary legate based on Lambaesis, which, in practice, tended to become a separate province in the Julio-Claudian period, but was such formally only in the reign of Septimius Severus. The centre of the region was Cirta, modern Constantine. Other major route-centres were Sitifis (mod. Setif), Lambaesis, Theveste (mod. Tebessa). To the west of Numidia is Mauretania Caesariensis, 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 Mauretania was far less developed except in the east, where there was eventually formed the sub-province of Mauretania Sitifensis.

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 Mauretania developed only two lines or zones: the prosperous coastal settlements 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 Columnata along 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 surprising thing is that Roman influence did not die out southward; rather it increased, to judge by the scattered material remains. It is not simply a question of a military zone, but of agricultural settlement. The region that is relatively empty of Roman traces is e.g. the Ouarsenis block 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-Auzia road there is a relative blank: this contains the Grande Kabylie and Jurjura mountains, an area of high mountains with a troublesome Berber population, never properly subdued 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 Romanised settlements.

Again, in Numidia proper the whole of the central plateau region around Cirta, Lambaesis, Theveste, and Tipasa was full of Romanised settlements. But in the mountains that intervene between the plateau and the coast the traces become thinner as one approaches the isolated coastal plains. The last region to call for mention is the Aures mountains, the most easterly block of the Saharan Atlas (II, n. 5). The Roman treatment of this is characteristic also for the Jurjura and for the Ouarsenis mountains. They encircled the massif with roads and military posts and civilian settlements, and also penetrated and 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 population of the Aures remained undisturbed and hostile.

Now Strabo and Pliny regarded the coast-lands as the essential region of north-west Africa, and it was to the coast that the early colonies of the Empire were sent. But in fact the isolated coastal plains have only a local importance in Algerian history, because though rich they communicate with extreme difficulty with 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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GEOGRAPHICAL FACTORS IN ROMAN ALGERIA 7

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ment of Roman Algeria. Forest is the most impenetrable of barriers, especially when there is no economic incentive to fell it. The development of the Cirta-Thamugadi region was made easy by the absence of heavy woodlands, and by the fact that the natural lines of communication run through this area. Yet though the country was open its climate and rainfall were indifferent. Fig. 6 shows that the zone of the Central Plateaux 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 under- growth 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 mis- leading. 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 IN ROMAN 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 birth- place 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 muni- cipality developed from canabae.

IO GEOGRAPHICAL FACTORS IN ROMAN 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 municipium might 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.