Urban Magistrates, Country Sacralised Spaces, and the Wild. The Case of the Gods Bacax and GD in the Caves of Ancient Numidia

This paper focuses primarily on a large concentration of inscriptions (83 items in total) carved in the Cave of Taya (Ghar Djemaa, Guelma), and, to a lesser extent, on a concentration of a further 65 inscriptions found in the Cave of Zemma (Djebel Chettabah, Constantine). Both epigraphic contexts come from 3rd-century CE Numidia (eastern Algeria) and are characterised by a highly standardised pattern. Each year, the local magistrates of Thibilis and Phua carved into the rock of the cave their attestations to having willingly fulfilled their vow to a god: Bacax, in the first case, and an anonymous deity abbreviated as GD, in the second. This paper questions the traditional interpretation of this habitus, according to which it sought to integrate the local ‘autochthonous" rural groups into the civic imperial ideology in order to embed the social cohesion necessary for the pagus to become a municipium. A detailed epigraphic analysis of the tituli, a reconstruction of the sensescape produced by the cave experience, and a study of the ‘agency" of the grotto itself suggest, rather, that the civic institutions in fact appropriated and sacralised a de-localised extra-urban settlement in order to temporally export urban religion and to reinforce it by ‘othering" its arena and making it temporarily ‘wild".

Urban Magistrates, Country Sacralised Spaces, and the Wild. The Case of the Gods Bacax and GD in the Caves of Ancient Numidia Articles