The archaeological site of Dougga
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A UNESCO World Heritage cultural site
I- Presentation
The archaeological site of Dougga (ancient Thugga) covers an area of about 70 ha. Its remains bear witness to more than seventeen centuries of the life of a city founded at the latest at the end of the 6th century BC. They form an exceptional complex which illustrates the successful synthesis of different cultures: Numidian, Punic, Hellenistic and Roman. The site of Dougga preserves, in fact, the remains of an ancient city with all its components and offers the best-known example of the organization of an indigenously founded city of and the adaptation of its urban planning to the Roman model.
a)- First capital of the Numidian kingdom?
Described by Greek author Diodorus of Sicily, as a city of "a fair size" at the beginning of the 4th century BC, the city of Thugga was, as some modern scholars maintain, the first capital of the Numidian kingdom before being replaced by the city of Cirta, now Constantine, in Algeria. The history of its early days has yet to be written; the oldest layers of the site have been little explored. In addition to the burials from the late prehistoric period (1800-1600 BC), a Dolmenic necropolis, of which many remains are still visible, seems to date back to this distant period. For the following period, archeological records are relatively more extensive and varied: the remains of a temple built in 139 BC and dedicated to the late Numidian king Massinissa, levels of housing found under Roman remains, and a large collection of Libyan, Punic and bilingual inscriptions in Libyan and Punic, bear witness to the level of development achieved by the city during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. But it is the famous Libyan-Punic mausoleum, proudly standing 21 meters high, remains the most stunning symbol and the shining witness of a great cultural wealth and a real economic prosperity.
b)- The Roman period: the time of coexistence
With the Roman conquest in 46 B.C., the city was not destroyed, nor were its inhabitants driven out. However, a community of Roman settlers, depending on the Roman colony of Carthage, settled on its territory. Thus, for about two and a half centuries, two legally distinct communities, one made up of the indigenous people who had become perigrinus ( a term denoting a free provincial subject of the Empire who was not a Roman citizen) and the other made up of settlers who were Roman citizens, would coexist in the same town and on the same territory. They would both participate equally in the development and flourishing of the city. Two civilizations, the Punic-Numid civilization of the natives and the Greco-Latin civilization of the Roman settlers, interpenetrated and thus gave birth to a culture that could be described as "Roman-African". Little by little, the urban landscape will begin to be reshaped. New types of monuments that were not known in Punic or Numidian architecture were introduced, such as monuments of spectacle (theatre, circus, ....), public baths, Greco-Roman temples or triumphal arches, not to mention aqueducts, public cisterns or nymphæa and public fountains. For more than two centuries, the city would live at the incessant pace of construction sites financed by wealthy families of both communities in their vain pursuit of honours. Thugga's town-planning, while retaining a fundamentally Numid urbanism, was thus endowed with a monumental Roman-style finery. In this respect, it is a representative example of a Maghreb city under the Numidian kings and during the first centuries of the Roman Empire.
c)- From a city (polis) to atown
From the 4th century onwards, Thugga, like the whole north-western region fo nowday Tunisia, experienced what can be called the «wreck of the urban process ". This was a phenomenon that lasted over a long period of time and resulted in the almost total disappearance of the town and a slow but inescapable return to a rudimentary form of life marked by the birth of a small rural settlement in and on the ruins. It began with the Vandal period (5th c.), accelerated under the Byzantines (6th c.), culminated in the first centuries of the Arab-Islamic period and continued until the time of the French Protectorate (1881-1956). This last period witnessed the gradual demise of the hamlet and the birth of the archaeological site.
II- A UNESCO World Heritage cultural site
Thanks to its 70 ha of surface area and the remains of more than 17 centuries of history, the Dougga site is a cultural landmark. It is considered to be one of the best surviving examples of the adaptation to the Roman town-planning model of a city founded by the Numidians, which was heavily punicized. The excellent state of conservation of most of its monuments and its rich epigraphic collection, one of the most important in the Roman world, led to its inclusion in the UNESCO World Cultural and Natural Heritage List in 1997.
