Thamusida


Thamusida was a Berber, Carthaginian, and Roman river port that was near the present-day towns of Kénitra and Mehdia in Morocco. Under the Roman Empire, it formed a part of the province of Mauretania Tingitana.

Name

The Punic form of the name was . Because the original name intended a hard, breathy /tʰ/ sound instead of the usual English /θ/, the same name is also sometimes written Tamusida or Tamusia. It is probably identical with the Thymiateria mentioned by Pseudo-Scylax.

History

The city originally was a Berber settlement. It was used as a Carthaginian trading post and was about from Shalat. It issued its own bronze coins.
It was occupied by Romans in the first years of Augustus rule. There were a military camp and a nearby little city, until Claudius enlarged Thamusida. According to historian Stefano Camporeale, the auxiliary unit that built the Roman camp in Thamusida was probably the Cohors secunda Syrorum civium Romanorum in the second half of the first century : this camp was one of the largest camps of the whole province of Mauretania Tingitana and measured about. Under the Antonines, a temple was built to worship Venus. Later the settlement grew progressively, and by the end of the second century or the early third century, it was surrounded by a wall that included a total area of about 15 hectares.
In the third century, Thamusida become a mostly Christian city with a population of nearly 7,000 inhabitants. The site was abandoned around AD285, when Diocletian moved the Roman limes of Mauretania Tingitana to the north, near Lixus. There were some inhabitantsaccording to recent archeological discoveriesin Thamusida for another century after the Roman abandonment. But with the Vandal invasion, the city disappeared around AD425.

Modern archaeological site

The site was excavated from 1913 by the French, then 1959 to 1962 and since 1998. Many items found in Thamusida are today on display at the Rabat Archaeological Museum. It occupies an area of. Excavations have unearthed the walls of the docks and baths.

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