Ramparts of the Cirta Citadel
About
Numidian kings fortified Cirta's rock plateau with an embossed ashlar rampart long before Rome arrived, exploiting cliffs that drop over 200 meters into the Rhumel gorge on three sides. Roman Cirta inherited these defenses after Caesar's veteran Publius Sittius settled his men here in 46 BCE, founding the Colonia Sittianorum. Stretches of the ancient walling still stand inside the old citadel today. In 117 CE these walls still guarded one of Numidia's most naturally defensible cities.
What happened here
A town wall is a claim as much as a defence. It is faced in stone, cored with rubble and concrete, and pierced by gates that are more decorated than the rest of it put together. Towers project so that anyone at the base can be shot from the side. In most of the empire in this century the walls are old, unmanned, and half built over — shops lean against them and houses are cut into them — because the frontier is a long way off and the danger is not here. On the frontier itself a wall is something else entirely: a continuous barrier with ditches, gates at intervals, patrol tracks and manned turrets, built to control movement rather than to stop an army.
Sources
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