← Back to the map Remains of the northern gate of the Roman military camp at Tamuda, Morocco

Northern gate of the Roman military camp at Tamuda, Morocco · Wikimedia Commons

Tamuda

Auxiliary FortMauretania Tingitana · near Tétouan, MoroccoBuilt 42 CE

About

Roman troops built an 80-meter-square castellum at Tamuda in the mid-first century CE, garrisoning a site the Mauretanian Berbers had already held since the third century BCE. Governor Gaius Suetonius Paulinus campaigned through this stretch of the Tingitana coast in 42 CE, the same years the fort's earliest phase took shape. The camp sat on the Martil river six kilometers from where Tétouan stands today, guarding the approach to the coast from the interior. Excavators found the fort's walls overlying the older Mauretanian town, itself built up over centuries before Rome arrived.

What happened here

Five hundred men, sometimes a thousand, recruited from a province rather than from citizens, and often stationed a long way from where they were raised. Cavalry units get a bigger fort and far more stabling; the smell tells you which kind you are in before the plan does. The layout copies a legionary fortress at a quarter of the size — headquarters, commander's house, granaries, barracks, a bath house usually built outside the walls because of the fire risk. Duties are patrolling, escorting, customs, and policing rather than pitched battle. After twenty-five years a man is discharged with citizenship for himself and his children, recorded on a bronze diploma he keeps for life. A village grows outside the gate within a decade.