Simitthus
About
Numidian kings quarried this yellow marble a century before Julius Caesar's ally Lepidus first shipped blocks of it to Rome for his own doorsills. Augustus later paved his forum with giallo antico from these same Tunisian hills. By 117 CE, Simitthus had held colonial status for nearly a century and its quarries remained under direct imperial administration.
What happened here
The rock is worked in benches from the top down, so that gravity does the moving. Channels are cut around a block with a pick, then it is split from the bed with iron wedges driven into a line of holes, sometimes with wooden wedges soaked to swell. Blocks are dressed roughly on the spot — no one hauls waste — and marked with the quarry, the gang, the date and the consular year, which is how the empire keeps track of what it owns. Sledges, rollers and ox teams take them to a river or the sea, because moving stone overland is the expensive part. Fine marbles are imperial monopolies. Abandoned faces still show the last unfinished cut, stopped mid-job and never resumed.
In ancient writing
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 36.49
Pliny records that this Numidian yellow marble was first brought to Rome by the consular Lepidus, who used it for door-sills in his house — the earliest reference to the marble later called giallo antico that modern scholars trace to the Simitthus quarries.
Sources
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →