East Gate
About
A plain arched gateway pierced Timgad's eastern wall where the decumanus maximus left the city for Lambaesis, home fortress of the Third Augustan Legion six kilometers south. Built with the rest of the colony's grid in 100 CE, it served as the settlement's main approach for its first decades. Roman builders rebuilt it in more monumental form only in 146 CE, three decades after this map's snapshot. In 117 CE it still stood as the modest opening its first colonists had raised. The original founding-era gate is the structure extant in 117 CE; a more monumental rebuilding of the east gate followed in 146 CE, after this snapshot.
What happened here
The gate is where a town shows itself and where it counts what comes in. Traffic is funnelled between towers into arched passages — the wide ones for carts, the narrow ones for people — and closed at night with timber leaves shod in iron. A customs post takes duty on goods; a clerk records what passes. The outward face is the decorated one, with an inscription naming the emperor and the town, because this is the first thing a visitor reads. Guards are usually the town's own watchmen rather than soldiers. Just outside, the tombs begin; just inside, the shops. In a town whose walls have long stopped mattering militarily, the gate is kept up anyway, for the look of the thing.
Sources
Nearby
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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 →