The La Ghorfa stelae are a series of stelae dated to the 1st and 2nd centuries and discovered, for the most part, during the 19th century in Tunisia. They are distributed among various museums in Europe and North Africa.

According to specialists, these archaeological artifacts are deposited by private individuals in a place of worship dedicated to the principal deity of Roman Africa, Ba'al Hammon, a sanctuary that has not been found.

They were discovered from the middle of the 19th century onwards, with the last of the series being found in the last third of the 20th century. Their precise provenance, namely Maghrawa, was clarified only in the penultimate decade of the 20th century through the work of the Tunisian historian and archaeologist Ahmed M'Charek. After the discovery of about forty archaeological pieces by a collaborator of the British consul in Tunis under poorly documented circumstances, the collection was quickly dispersed: part of it entered the collection of Muhammad Khaznadar and was then distributed among various locations, while another part remained in Tunisia before being dispersed again. The precise location was finally established through the discovery of a final group of stelae during public works carried out at the end of the 1960s, these last discoveries being deposited at the archaeological site of Makthar.

These archaeological pieces, with their stereotyped form and very rich decorative motifs, are important for understanding the artistic and religious context. They may bear inscriptions in both Latin and Neo-Punic. They thus testify to intercultural links between the Phoenician–Punic substrate and Roman civilization, and to the context of cultural intermixing in Roman Africa.

History

Ancient history The stelae are dated to the end of the 1st century and the beginning of the 2nd century. They were erected in the Upper Tunisian Tell, between Makthar and Dougga, at the archaeological site of Maghrawa, 8 km north-west of Mactar, and in a mountainous region.

The ancient city covered about ten hectares according to Ahmed M'Charek. Two springs supplied the site with water, including Aïn-Maghrawa, approximately 300 m away. The site is very old, with megaliths datable to the 4th century BC, a sanctuary to Ba'al Hammon, and a wall that was probably Numidian. The site yielded Neo-Punic stelae dated to the 1st century. A monumental mausoleum dated to the end of the 2nd century was also present at the site, its inscription having been collected in the 19th century. The peregrine city in the 1st century had an organization and was equipped with dignitaries, including rabs, and an eponymous office. It belonged to the , which surrounded Mactar, and comprised about fifty cities during the first two centuries of the Common Era.

The sanctuary that housed the stelae was unknown at the beginning of the 1990s. The oldest stelae are dated to the second half of the 1st century. They are deposited by private individuals.

Recent history The archaeological site of Macota served for a long time as a quarry and was much visited during the 19th century. Many ancient elements were reused as spolia in the houses of the village.

Recovered stelae The stelae were discovered in part in 1842 by a German architect, Filippo Basiola Honegger. Others were brought to light between 1860 and 1873, these discoveries were published in 1896. This collection was distributed among the principal major museums that contain the known corpus; it comprises about forty archaeological pieces in total.

Filippo Basiola Honegger was a collaborator of Thomas Reade, the British consul in Tunis; in 1842 he collected for him the Punic-Libyan bilinguals from the Libyco-Punic Mausoleum of Dougga, not without seriously damaging the building, which was restored by anastylosis by Louis Poinsot at the beginning of the 20th century, before being sent to the British Museum. In the same year, he carried out research at Maghrawa, a correspondence long ignored by archaeologists, with the archaeological pieces being purchased by the consul. Honegger remained in Tunis and died before 1850, leaving stelae in various places, either at the places of discovery or with Tunisians. The chaplain of the Chapelle Saint-Louis de Carthage, Abbé François Bourgade, mentioned his work in 1852 in his book, The Golden Fleece of the Phoenician Language.

partially recovered the Honegger collection, sold eighteen stelae to Muhammad Khaznadar, and sent twenty-one to London between 1850 and 1860. At the same time, Abbé Bourgade purchased part of the Honegger collection in 1852. Some stelae remained in Tunis for ten to fifteen years, perhaps at Dougga in the case of the largest ones. The stelae were left there because of the poor condition of the tracks. Bourgade's stelae were sold after his death in 1866. Jean-Baptiste Evariste Charles Pricot de Sainte-Marie referred to a sale to a Greek and the loss of stelae, except for two pieces preserved at the Bardo National Museum, while other pieces entered the British Museum. At least three stelae were sent by Muhammad Khaznadar to Vienna for the Exposition Universelle of 1873; these stelae did not return to Tunisia because Khaznadar opposed this after the fall of his father Mustapha Khaznadar, owing to the confiscation of his property. The stelae then present in Vienna were deposited at the imperial museum.

Four of the stelae preserved at the British Museum bear inscriptions. Pricot de Sainte-Marie requested two stelae from La Manouba for the Louvre. In 1882, René Cagnat had twelve monuments placed in the gardens of the general residence, which were moved to the new Alaoui Museum, now the Bardo National Museum, in 1885.

Corpus

The series known to date comprises 44 pieces: 22 stelae are exhibited at the British Museum in London, where they entered between 1850 and 1860. 2 are located in the Louvre, donated by Hayreddin Pasha, successor to Mustapha Khaznadar, and deposited in the museum in January 1876. 3 in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna since 1874. 17 in Tunisia: 12 at the Bardo National Museum since 1884 4 at the Makthar Museum 1 at the Dougga antiquarium 1 reused in a residential wall at Dougga, placed above the entrance door of Dar Lacheb.

The Bardo specimens came from a private collection, assembled in the 1870s at La Manouba by Muhammad Khaznadar, son of the minister Mustapha Khaznadar. Those of the Louvre and the Vienna Museum came from the same collection. The Institut du monde arabe in Paris preserves a stela from the series belonging to the Bardo National Museum.

The table below shows the full corpus, published by Jennifer Moore in 2000, excluding the four Maktar steles: Moore ID Current museum / inventory number Inscription Previous location CIL 8 number 1 Bardo Cb-963 Alaoui C.745 2 Bardo Cb-964 Alaoui C.748 3 Bardo Cb-965 Alaoui C.744 4 Bardo Cb-966 Alaoui C.743 5 Bardo Cb-967 Alaoui C.746 6 Bardo Cb-968 Alaoui C.747 7 Bardo Cb-969 Alaoui C.749 8 Bardo Cb-970 Alaoui C.750 9 Bardo Cb-971 Alaoui C.751 10 Bardo Cb-972 Alaoui C.752 11 Bardo Cb-973 Rogatus V.S.L.A. Alaoui C.741 CIL 8, 1144 and 14273 12 Bardo Cb-974 Bellic. Max. f. V.S.L.A.S. Alaoui C.742 CIL 8, 1143 and 14272 13 British Museum WA 125021 14 British Museum WA 125043 15 British Museum WA 125062 16 British Museum WA 125063 17 British Museum WA 125066 18 British Museum WA 125070 19 British Museum WA 125072 20 British Museum WA 125073 21 British Museum WA 125075 L. Iuli Urba(ni) CIL 8, 1145 22 British Museum WA 125076 23 British Museum WA 125078 24 British Museum WA 125098 25 British Museum WA 125101 26 British Museum WA 125102 27 British Museum WA 125104 28 British Museum WA 125174 29 British Museum WA 125177 L’DN LB’L (neopunic) 30 British Museum WA 125183 [ND]R 'Š N'D'R ŚM' QL' B'RK' (neopunic) 31 British Museum WA 125184 32 British Museum WA 125186 33 British Museum WA 125189 R.V.S.L.H. CIL 8, 1011 34 British Museum WA 125190 35 British Museum WA 125192 36 British Museum WA 125197 37 ? V.S.L.M. Dougga CIL 8, 26513 38 Kunsthistorisches Museum I 350 Kaiserlichen Sammlung, no. 166 39 Kunsthistorisches Museum I 351 V.S.L.A.F. Kaiserlichen Sammlung, no. 168 40 Kunsthistorisches Museum I 354 Kaiserlichen Sammlung, no. 178 41 Louvre MNB 898 42 Louvre MNB 899 43 ? L.L.V.S. Museum Mohammedanum CIL 8, 1142 and p. 1384

Historiography and late identification The (CIL) proposed the archaeological site of Carthage as the place of origin of some stelae. René du Coudray de La Blanchère studied the stelae of the Alaoui Museum in 1897 in a work published posthumously. He attributed them to the archaeological site of Dougga, with the Djebel Gorra being, in his view, the source of the confusion.

Louis Poinsot proposed that the stelae of the Louvre, the Bardo Museum, Vienna and Dar Lacheb belonged to the same corpus, and the hypothesis identifying their place of origin was made in 1905 based on the inventory of entries to the Louvre in 1876, which mentioned a "dubious provenance, La Ghorfa", a place located between Makthar and Dougga.

Louis Poinsot's cautious reservations were forgotten after him, with Gilbert Charles-Picard, Colette Picard, Mohamed Yacoub, Marcel Le Glay and Anna Maria Bisi maintaining the "established name" of La Ghorfa.

The last four stelae were found in 1967 at Aïn Maghrawa by workers from the water service and brought to the Makthar Museum: three were placed in a room, while the last remained not far from the civil basilica of Rutilius. Fragments of reliefs belonging to stelae were also identified in farmers' houses near the site by Ahmed M'Charek.

The stelae preserved at the British Museum were studied relatively little before the work of Anna Maria Bisi. Louis Poinsot studied two stelae from this group, catalogued in the CIL under numbers 1011 and 1145. In 1978, Bisi noted that only four of twenty-two stelae were exhibited, while the others were in storage. She was authorized to study the entire British corpus and to photograph it.

Ahmed M'Charek's research tended to demonstrate at the end of the 1980s that the stelae originated at the site of Maghrawa, in the region of Makthar. The inscriptions on the stelae received less attention than the reliefs and were studied at the end of the 1990s.

Description

General characteristics

The stelae were made with a chisel and in low relief. The reserve technique was used. The stone is grey Senonian limestone, more precisely Upper Senonian, which is widespread in the Makthar and Dougga region.

The stelae are rectangular with a triangular pediment. When complete, they are approximately 1.75 m high and sometimes contain dedications in Latin, or Punic. Some stelae in the corpus reach 2.5m in height.

Eleven stelae bear an inscription, nine of them in Latin, with a similar formulation in all but one. One stela from the Bardo National Museum has a bilingual inscription. An inscription preserved at the British Museum is in boustrophedon. An inscription from the British Museum, WA 125189, bears the Latin inscription R.V.S.L.H, to be corrected to R.V.S.L.A (expanded as ). This inscription preserved in England is recorded under the reference CIL VIII, 1011. An inscription on one of the stelae has been interpreted as having been made by a lapidary more familiar with the Punic language, which is written from right to left, than with Latin. Study of the British Museum corpus enabled Anna Maria Bisi to identify five different workshops, despite the coherence of the group.

Their form, that of a "flattened obelisk", is stereotyped, and they possess "a strong unity of style"; they have a triangular top and are divided into three superimposed registers, a "hierarchized representation of the cosmos".

Upper register