Discover Thamugadi: Africa’s Roman Ghost City Buried for a Millennium

Discover Thamugadi: Africa’s Roman Ghost City Buried for a Millennium

While the whole city often does not vanish, the Roman colony of Thamugadi was established in the North African province of Mumidia by Emperor Traian about 100 A.D., the city, also known as Timgad or Tamugas.

Home to Veterans of the Third Augustan Legion, Thamugadi flourished for hundreds of years, becoming prosperous and thus an attractive target for raiders. After a Vandal invasion in 430, repeated attacks weakened the city, which never fully recovered and was abandoned during the 700s.

The desert sands swept in and buried Thamugadi. One thousand years would pᴀss before the city received a visit from a team of explorers led by a maverick Scotsman in the 1700s.

Originally founded by Emperor Trajan in 100 AD and built as a retirement colony for soldiers living nearby, within a few generations of its birth, the outpost had expanded to over 10,000 residents of both Roman, African, as well as Berber descent.

Discover Thamugadi: Africa's Roman Ghost City Buried for a Millennium

Most of them would likely never even have seen Rome before, but Timgad invested heavily in high culture and Roman idenтιтy, despite being thousands of kilometers from the Italian city itself.

The extension of Roman citizenship to non-Romans was a carefully planned strategy of the Empire – it knew it worked better by bringing people in than by keeping them out.

In return for their loyalty, local elites were given a stake in the great and powerful Empire, and benefitted from its protection and legal system, not to mention, its modern urban amenities such as Roman bathhouses, theatres and a fancy public library…

Timgad, also known as Thamugadi in old Berber, is home to a very rare example of a surviving public library from the Roman world.

Discover Thamugadi: Africa's Roman Ghost City Buried for a Millennium

Built in the 2nd century, the library would have housed manuscripts relating to religion, military history, and good governance.

These would have been rolled up and stored in wooden scroll cases, placed on shelves separated by ornate columns. The shelves can still be seen standing amid the town ruins, today a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a monument to culture.

The remains of as many as 14 baths have survived and a mosaic portraying Roman flip-flops was found at the entrance of a house in Timgad dating back to the 1st or 2nd century, with the inscription “BENE LAVA” which translates to ‘wash well’.

This mosaic, along with a collection of more than 200 others found in Timgad, is held inside a museum at the entrance of the site.

Discover Thamugadi: Africa's Roman Ghost City Buried for a Millennium

Other surviving landmarks include a 12 m high triumphal arch made of sandstone, a 3,500-seat theater is in good condition and a basilica where a large, hexagonal, 3-step immersion baptismal font richly decorated with mosaics was uncovered in the 1930s.

You can imagine the excitement of Scottish explorer James Bruce when he reached the city ruins in 1765, the first European to visit the site in centuries. Still largely buried then, he called it “a small town, but full of elegant buildings.” Clearing away the sand with his bare hands, Bruce and his fellow travellers uncovered several sculptures of Emperor Antoninus Pius, Hadrian’s successor.

Unable to take pH๏τographs in 1765, and without the means to take the sculptures with them, they reburied them in the sand and continued on Bruce’s original quest to find the source of the Blue Nile.

Discover Thamugadi: Africa's Roman Ghost City Buried for a Millennium

Upon his return to Great Britain, his claims of what he’d found were met with skepticism. Offended by the suspicion with which his story was received, James Bruce retired soon after and there would be no further investigation of the lost city for another hundred years.

Step forward Sir Robert Playfair, British consul-general in Algeria, who, inspired by James Bruce’s travel journal which detailed his findings in Timgad, went in search of the site. In his book, Travels in the Footsteps of Bruce in Algeria and Tunis, Playfair describes in detail what he found in the desolate and austere surroundings of the treeless desert plain.

Discover Thamugadi: Africa's Roman Ghost City Buried for a Millennium

Related Posts

The Silent Witness: An Iron Age Bog Body

In the peat bogs of Northern Europe, time has a way of preserving secrets. Beneath layers of moss, mud, and acidic water, archaeologists have discovered bodies so…

Echoes of Violence: The Anglo-Saxon Mᴀss Grave at Oxford

In 2009, during routine construction work near Oxford, England, archaeologists made a chilling discovery that would send ripples across the field of medieval archaeology. Beneath a quiet…

Frozen in Ash: The Eternal Victims of Pompeii

On a late summer day in 79 CE, the thriving Roman city of Pompeii was abruptly silenced. Mount Vesuvius, looming quietly to the north of the Bay…

Faces of Eternity: The Royal Mummies of Ancient Egypt

Among the most haunting yet captivating discoveries of Egyptology are the preserved remains of Egypt’s pharaohs and queens. The pH๏τograph of two mummies—remarkably lifelike in their stillness—brings…

Silent Witness of the Sands: The Pre-Dynastic Mummy of Egypt

In the arid expanse of the Libyan Desert, on the western edge of the Nile Valley, archaeologists uncovered a hauntingly preserved human body, dating back nearly 5,000–6,000…

The Buried Secrets of Windover: Unearthing America’s Ancient Cemetery

In the early 1980s, construction workers in тιтusville, Florida, stumbled upon what appeared to be an ordinary peat bog. Little did they know that beneath the layers…