More than 200 Roman cities—not villages, but cities—have been identified in Tunisia. So you will have no difficulty touring Roman cities on a visit to that north African country squeezed between Algeria and Libya. What will be rare are wall coverings, which were often made of precious marble. Instead of the marble, you will see holes in the walls and sometimes parts of iron keys that held the marble slabs in place as the plaster dried. If you look closely at the floor line, you may notice a fragment of the marble in situ. The rest of the marble was stolen by ancient looters who wanted the beautiful warm, smooth, shiny stone for their own purposes.
The rarity of marble in situ makes it especially exciting to go to the place where much of it was quarried—near the Roman city now called Chimtou (pronounced Shemtou, ancient Simitthus).
Chimtou has a special romance. The marble quarries with their exotic shapes are a natural wonder. Yet they also have a dark aspect: Rome had no prisons; convicted criminals were either fed to wild animals (or made to participate in games with the animals) in Roman amphitheaters or sent to the mines and quarries where they were worked to death. How many workers met their death to bring the marble of Chimtou to the temples of the gracious gods?
The Romans first began importing marble from Chimtou in the first century B.C. After his conquest of eastern Numidia in 46 B.C., the Roman emperor Julius Caesar had a column of Chimtou marble nearly 20 feet tall erected in his honor in the center of Rome. Chimtou also provided the marble for Augustus’ Forum in Rome and for Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli. Marble was quarried at Chimtou as late as the 19th century.
Another aspect of Chimtou’s romance is its pristine isolation. Located on the edge of Tunisia’s Mejerda Valley, at least 10 miles from the nearest modern town, it is away from the crowds, alone in the countryside. And it remains almost untouched by the archaeologist’s 063spade. There, over the river which flows only intermittently, mostly in winter, is the Roman bridge. Built by the Emperor Trajan in the second century A.D., this bridge once supported a Roman road from Tabarka on the Mediterranean Sea to El Kef in central Tunisia. Nearly 1,900 years later, two of its vaults are still standing, and the rest, destroyed by flash floods, lie nearby.
And there in a green field, standing all alone, looking like a Piranesi engraving, are the remains of the theater, badly plundered but all the more moving for it. It is a “built” theater—that is, it was not dug into a hill that would provide its base, but sits there on a plain, built from the ground up.
The jewel of Chimtou is quite different and surprisingly modern—a spanking new museum, built not so much to display artifacts as to teach. Here you will learn about marble and press buttons that highlight the sources of various kinds of marble found throughout the Mediterranean. You will also learn about daily life in the marble quarries and about the early history of Chimtou before it became a Roman colony.
One highlight of the museum is its spectacular reproduction of a pre-Roman, Numidian funeral monument. The ruins of the original monument—erected in 130 B.C. in honor of the Numidian king Massinissa and later converted into a Roman altar and a Byzantine church—have been partially restored on a hilltop just outside Chimtou. But the museum’s archaeologists have used some pieces of the original monument to help construct a full-scale replica of its eastern facade within the museum. An impressive 15-foot-high edifice with Doric columns, Macedonian armor and Egyptian detail, the model facade sits smack dab in the center of the museum’s magnificent “skylight courtyard”—a vivid demonstration of what can be accomplished through state-of-the-art archaeological research.
The museum is a joint project of the Tunisian Institute of National Heritage and the German Archaeological Institute. The Tunisians supplied one million Tunisian dinars (about $880,000) to pay for the building itself, while the site’s German excavators provided 400,000 Tunisian dinars (about $330,000) for the state-of-the-art exhibits.
More than 200 Roman cities—not villages, but cities—have been identified in Tunisia. So you will have no difficulty touring Roman cities on a visit to that north African country squeezed between Algeria and Libya. What will be rare are wall coverings, which were often made of precious marble. Instead of the marble, you will see holes in the walls and sometimes parts of iron keys that held the marble slabs in place as the plaster dried. If you look closely at the floor line, you may notice a fragment of the marble in situ. The rest of the marble […]
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