Photos

On the streets of Sbeitla

Sbeitla or Sufetula (Arabic: سبيطلة‎) is a small town in north-central Tunisia. Nearby are the Roman ruins of Sufetula, containing the best preserved Forum temples in Tunisia. The ancient town, then held by the Byzantine Prefect Gregory was captured by Rashidun Caliphate's Governor of Egypt, Abdullah ibn Saad and his General Abd-Allah ibn al-Zubayr in 647AD and briefly served as capital of Ifriqiya.

The ancient site of Sufetula is partly incorporated into the town of Sbeitla which, almost a thousand and a half years later, succeeded to it as one of the main towns of the Higher Steppe.
Even if the place name Sufetula indicates a more ancient foundation, the vestiges so far excavated do not date back beyond the lst century AD.
The city seems to have experienced great prosperity under Septimus Severus (IInd-IIIrd century) and into Diocletian’s reign (285-305). Most of the buildings visible today date to that period : houses, forum, temples, baths, triumphal gate, theatre etc.
In the absence of inscriptions to shed light on the different phases of the city’s past, the discovery of later vestiges, from the late Empire or the Vandal and Byzantine periods, reflect the great vitality of the Christian community in the city. It gained even more importance on the eve of the Arab conquest, in 647, which put a stop to Africa’s membership in the Christian world, signalling its adhesion to the Islamic empire, after the defeat of the Patriarch Gregory who ruled the kingdom that had distanced itself from Constantinople and had made Sufetula its capital instead of Carthage.

The three temples (in the background)

Although there is no inscription to indicate to whom they were dedicated, it is generally assumed that this was a Capitol dedicated to the three divinities of the official Roman Pantheon, Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. Instead of building a single temple divided into three chapels or niches [as, for example, one finds at Dougga], the builders at Sbeitla conceived a far more grandiose project for their town and built a temple for each divinity. It was something which, to our knowledge [and given the cost of the project], was only attempted once elsewhere. To give unity to the ensemble the central temple was fronted by a tribune without steps, and one acceded to the central temple through the two lateral temples; one can easily imagine the scared processions moving from each extremity of the forum and symmetrically converging on the central temple, which was more opulently decorated and adorned than the other two.
The southernmost of the three temples was dedicated to Minerva, which was the daughter of the two gods revered in the other two temples. She was considered to be the virgin goddess of warriors, poetry, medicine, wisdom, commerce, crafts and inventor of music.
Her temple appears as the most impressive of the three from the outside, and even the interior is in excellent condition. Still it will probably disappoint anyone with experience from Egyptian temples with its simplicity of the interior. The niche in the middle had a statue of the goddess, of which the head is displayed in the museum. (Source: patrimoinedetunisie.com)