The Mauretanians

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West of the river the ancients called the Mulucha, the modern Moulouya that runs down to the Mediterranean from the eastern Atlas, the land stretched away toward the ocean — past the strait the Greeks named for the labors of their hero, out to the Atlantic shore where the sun went down. This was the country of the Mauri. They were a Berber people, the indigenous Amazigh of the far-western Maghreb, their cantons spread across what is now northern Morocco and the western reaches of Algeria, and their kings held both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coasts of the African northwest. They were the last of the kingdoms that stood between Carthage, Numidia, and Rome — the westernmost, the least documented, and, at its close, the one whose court was the most surprising.

Genealogy: the Mauri west of the Mulucha

The name comes down through Latin as Mauri, the people from whom Europe would later draw the word Moor and apply it, loosely and across centuries, to peoples it scarcely knew. In the strict ancient sense the Mauri were the Berbers of the lands beyond the Mulucha, and that river was the line that mattered. From the end of the fourth century into the third, the Mulucha formed the boundary between the kingdom of the Mauri to the west and the kingdom of the Masaesyli to the east — the Masaesyli being one of the two great Numidian confederations, so that the river divided the western Berbers from their eastern kin who became the Numidians. The distinction held for centuries; it survived into Roman administration, when the Mulucha would again mark a provincial frontier. To say “Mauretanian” rather than “Numidian” was to say west of the Mulucha, toward the ocean and the strait.

The land was vast and its interior was held by pastoral and tribal society, but its coasts had long been drawn into the trading world of the western Mediterranean. The Phoenician and Carthaginian ships that worked the western sea-road toward the Atlantic touched these shores; the Mediterranean coast had commercial harbors trafficking with Carthage from before the fourth century BCE, and Phoenician hands had planted coastal stations along the way. The trading town the Romans would later know as Caesarea began as a Punic foundation named Iol; the inland city of Volubilis and the Atlantic ports carried the same Punic stamp. So the Mauri lived along the outermost arc of the Punic west — the far end of the network whose hub was Carthage, whose mother-cities were Tyre and Sidon, and whose gods and crafts had spread the length of the western sea. Their material and religious world bore the long impress of that Carthaginian neighborhood: Punic was a language of their towns, and the cults of the western Phoenician world — the great mother Tanit, the elder lord Baal Hammon, the city-god Melqart whom the Greeks matched to Hercules — were present along their coasts, layered over and braided into older Libyan worship.

It is worth saying plainly what the sources do not let us say. The Mauri left no literature of their own that survives, and almost everything written about them was written by others — by Greeks and Romans for whom the western Berbers were a frontier, a supplier of cavalry, and, when convenient, a foil. The kingdom’s internal structure, its own names for its gods, the texture of its religion before and beneath the Punic overlay — these are reconstructed at a distance, from the archaeology of the royal centers and the tomb-monuments, from the scattered notices of outside historians, and from the Libyco-Punic inscriptions that the region shared with Numidia. The Mauri were a people with kings, cities, and a long coast; they were not the “savage tribes” of the hostile shorthand, and the thinness of the record is a fact about our sources, not about them.

The kings of the western shore

The Mauretanian throne enters continuous history in the late second century BCE, in the long, grinding war that Rome fought against Jugurtha of Numidia. The king of the Mauri in those years was Bocchus the First, and he was bound to the Numidian by marriage — Jugurtha had taken his daughter to wife, making the two kings father-in-law and son-in-law. For a time Bocchus wavered, treating now with Rome and now with his kinsman. The war turned on his choice. In 105 BCE, in negotiations conducted through the young Roman officer Lucius Cornelius Sulla, Bocchus resolved the matter by treachery: he lured Jugurtha into his hands and surrendered him in chains to the Romans, and with that capture the Jugurthine War was ended. Rome rewarded the betrayal with territory, extending Bocchus’s domain eastward at Numidia’s expense.

We owe the fullest account of this to the Roman historian Sallust, whose monograph on the Jugurthine War — written within two generations of the events — is the central narrative source for the western kingdom in this period. It is a Roman source, written by a Roman with Roman purposes, and the figure of Bocchus is drawn for a Roman moral: the unreliable barbarian king whose self-interest happens to serve Rome. The portrait must be read as such. But the bare facts of the betrayal, the role of Sulla, and the date are well anchored, and they fix the moment when Mauretania became, in Rome’s eyes, a client to be managed. The capture became a set-piece of Roman memory — Sulla is said to have worn a signet ring engraved with the scene of Jugurtha’s surrender, a private boast that the affair had been his own. From the Mauretanian side the betrayal looks different: a king on the margin, courted by both sides, choosing the patron who could not be defeated and pricing his loyalty in land. That the deed reads as treachery in the surviving telling is itself a measure of whose telling survived.

After Bocchus the First the dynastic record runs thin and tangled, with kings whose reigns overlap the convulsions of the late Republic. By the middle of the first century BCE the kingdom was divided between two rulers — Bocchus the Second in the east and Bogud in the west — and both were drawn into the Roman civil wars on opposing sides. Bogud cast his lot with Mark Antony; Bocchus the Second took the side that prevailed, and when Bogud fell he absorbed the western half and reunited the kingdom. At his death Bocchus the Second left no heir of his own line and bequeathed Mauretania to Rome, which administered it directly for a span before deciding its fate. That decision, when it came, gave the kingdom its strangest and most luminous chapter.

Teaching and significance: the scholar-king at Caesarea

In 25 BCE the emperor Augustus took a young man he had raised in his own household and set him on the Mauretanian throne. The man was Juba the Second, and he was not a Maurus at all but a Numidian — born around 48 BCE, the son of Juba the First, the Numidian king who had taken the losing side against Julius Caesar in the Roman civil war and died in the ruin of his cause. The boy was carried to Rome as a child, walked or shown in a triumph, and then brought up in the capital, where he became thoroughly Romanized, took Roman citizenship, and acquired an education of the most ambitious kind. Augustus first restored him briefly over a portion of Numidia and then, in 25 BCE, transferred him west to rule Mauretania as a client-king. (That a Numidian prince should rule the Mauri is the knot that ties this western kingdom to its eastern neighbor; the thread to follow here is the western throne and the court he made on it.)

He made his capital at the old Punic town of Iol, on the coast roughly a hundred kilometers west of modern Algiers, and renamed it Caesarea in honor of his patron — the city that survives today as Cherchell in Algeria. There, with his queen, he built a Hellenistic capital on the African shore. The queen was no ordinary consort: she was Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Cleopatra of Egypt and Mark Antony, last living child of that famous and ruined house, given by Augustus in marriage to his client-king. The court the two of them gathered at Caesarea drew on Alexandria as much as on Rome — Greek-speaking, learned, stocked with statuary and books — and it raised the western Berber capital, for one generation, into a seat of Mediterranean culture.

What sets Juba the Second apart from every other figure in this history is that he wrote, and wrote prolifically, in Greek. He is among the most productive royal authors of the ancient world, and though his books are lost their titles and fragments are preserved because later scholars kept quoting him. He composed a Roman Archaeology, a history of Rome from its mythical origins; a Libyka, a great geographical and historical treatise on North Africa and the wider continent, which ranged from the western Atlantic coast toward the Red Sea and the lands beyond Egypt; a work On Euphorbia, a treatise of botany and medicine on a plant he is said to have named for his physician; a rendering of the Carthaginian explorer Hanno’s coastal voyage; and studies on painting, on the history of theater, and on comparative Greek and Roman institutions. Pliny the Elder drew on him for natural history and geography; Plutarch praised him; Galen and Athenaeus and others cite him. A king who governed the far-western edge of the Roman world became, through these books, a source consulted at the center of it — and a genus of palm still carries his name.

This is the distinctive thing the Mauretanians hold in the long memory: not a body of teaching of their own — their own religion survives only in fragments and in the Punic and Libyan layers — but the improbable figure of the scholar-king on the African shore. Juba’s reign also pressed the urbanization of a still largely pastoral country, expanding Caesarea and Volubilis with temples, palaces, and theaters in the Greco-Roman manner, and his court’s afterlife is written in the marbles that filled it. The archaeological museum at Cherchell holds, from the soil of his capital, some of the finest classical sculpture recovered anywhere in Africa — among it portrait heads of the king himself.

Portrait bust of Juba II, the scholar-king of Mauretania, held in the Archaeological Museum of Cherchell — ancient Caesarea, formerly the Punic Iol. Photograph by Hichem algerino, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Reception and afterlife: the province, the tombs, and the recovered west

Juba the Second died around 23 CE and was succeeded by his son Ptolemy, the grandson of Cleopatra of Egypt — the last king of Mauretania. Ptolemy ruled until 40 CE, when the emperor Caligula summoned him to Rome and had him put to death; the ancient explanations are characteristically lurid and self-interested, and the true motive is past recovery. With the king dead, Rome moved to annex the kingdom outright. The settlement was carried through under the emperor Claudius in the mid-40s CE, and Mauretania was divided into two provinces along, once again, the line of the Mulucha: Mauretania Tingitana in the west, named for its capital Tingis, the modern Tangier; and Mauretania Caesariensis in the center and east, named for Caesarea, Juba’s old capital. The western Berber kingdom had become Roman ground.

It did not become Roman quietly, and it never became wholly Roman. The annexation was met with revolt, and through the centuries that followed, direct imperial control tended to contract toward the coastal cities while Berber society held the interior — a pattern that outlasted Rome itself. When the western empire failed, the African northwest passed to the Vandals and then to a Byzantine reconquest, and the deep Berber substratum endured beneath each successive overlay down to the Arab conquest of the seventh century and beyond. The Mauri did not vanish into Rome; they outlived it.

What we know of them now is recovered along three lines, and they sit at different distances from the truth. The first is the testimony of the Greek and Roman writers — Sallust above all on Bocchus and the Jugurthine War, and the chain of authors who preserve Juba’s lost books — a record that is external, interested, and to be read against its grain, since the western Berbers appear in it as Rome’s clients, foils, and frontier. The second is the archaeology: the Punic and royal levels of Caesarea and Volubilis, the marbles of Cherchell, and above all the great circular royal mausoleums of the western Maghreb — the monument near Tipasa long called the Tomb of the Christian Woman, traditionally associated with Juba and Cleopatra Selene, and its eastern Numidian cousin the Medracen, drum-shaped tombs that show a Berber royal architecture working in dialogue with Punic, Egyptian, and Hellenistic forms. The third is the comparative study of the Libyco-Punic inscriptions and the wider Berber and Punic world, through which the cults and the language of the coast can be read. Where these three converge they give a kingdom with cities, kings, and a learned court; where they fall silent — on the Mauri’s own gods, their own account of themselves, the inner life of the kingdom before Rome — the silence belongs to the sources.

The Roman-era northwest: Mauretania Tingitana and Mauretania Caesariensis to the west, Numidia to the east. Heinrich Kiepert, Atlas antiquus, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

There is a particular irony in how the Mauretanians are best remembered. The most famous Mauretanian was a Numidian by birth and a Roman by upbringing who wrote in Greek; the kingdom’s brightest hour was the work of an outsider set over it by an emperor; and its richest surviving artifacts are classical marbles dug from the soil of a city with a Punic name and a Latin one. The Mauri themselves — the Berbers of the coast and the interior, the people who were there before Carthage and remained after Rome — are the constant beneath all of it, the indigenous west over which Phoenician, Roman, and Hellenistic worlds passed in turn. Their kingdom was the far margin of the ancient Mediterranean, and for a single generation, under a bookish king and an Egyptian queen, that margin held a court that the center could not ignore.

→ Related: The Numidians · The Carthaginians · Carthage · Phoenicia · Phoenician Religion · The Phoenicians · Tyre · Sidon · Byblos · Tanit · Baal Hammon · Melqart · Eshmun · Reshef · Motya · Kerkouane · Tharros · The Temple Of Eshmun · Astarte · Baal · Hercules