North African Religion and Local Power

The Maghreb, the region of North Africa west of Egypt and north of the Sahara Desert, had been successively inhabited and colonized for millennia: first inhabited by the Berbers, then colonized by the Phoenicians, and eventually ruled by the Romans. By the Imperial period, the Maghreb was a site where cultural heterogeneity was constantly being negotiated and navigated. The religious landscape was a particularly apt arena for the power politics of the period given Rome’s propensity for welcoming in gods from newly conquered regions and either assimilating them into their own pantheon or aligning their rulers with worship of the foreign deity (Burton 1996, Peters 2018). This dynamic was already at play in the Maghreb where the god Melqart had long been assimilated to the hero Heracles/Hercules even back in the writings of Herodotus (Histories 2.44). Ba’al Hammon was afforded a similar treatment in the works of later authors like Tertullian and Augustine when he and his worshippers were identified with the Roman god Saturn. Such equivalences may seem routine to modern historians evaluating the polytheistic cultures of the Mediterranean, but this approach to religious syncretism ignores the directionality of power and obscures the ways in which North Africans under Roman rule may have thought about and related to their own gods.

It is possible to uncover a nuanced understanding of North African religious sentiment during the Roman period, but it will require that we take seriously the ways in which religious activity is inflected by power and religious syncretism is implicated in that power dynamic. In a political landscape of subjugation and domination, syncretism is not a neutral phenomenon. Indeed, I argue, it is often the case that the empowered group translates the foreign deity into one of their own gods. This is the case when Tacitus (Germania 43.4) originates the phrase interpretatio Romana to explain a Germanic god who corresponds to the twins Castor and Pollux (Ando 2005) and a similar moment happens with Christian authors Tertullian and Augustine.

Often examples of North African religion come to us in Greek or Latin, but the story of power and religious devotion looks different in the Neo-Punic evidence. One inscription from an altar in Bir Tlelsa, less than 200 miles south of Carthage, provides an example of the complicated power relations of the North African religious world. This paper argues, in two parts, that even during the height of the Roman Empire, North Africans maintained a strong sense of local identity that would contradict traditional understandings of provincial culture (Woolf 1998). The first part highlights the conspicuously local and Punic elements of the above inscription, while the second part tackles the concept of syncretism and its impact on the study of local religion. Through this inscription we can see that local religious culture is as impactful on individual displays of status as any real or imagined imperial force. Moreover, this decidedly local account upends the concept of religious syncretism with which we as historians have become so familiar (Moyer 2011)