THE LIMITANEI

With the slaves offered to them, these farmers-military soldiers of the limès, called limitanei, cultivated date, olive fields, fig-fig, vine, barley, wheat and legumes. As the beautiful tombs of the tombs tell us, they labouraient their land with camels, horses or oxen, possessed herds and hunted hares, ostriches, gazelles, antelopes and fauves like lions and leopards then resold for the arena games in the Roman cities. Some scenes of the frescoes at the tombs of Ghirza also tell the warlike activities of the farmer-soldiers.

Often, these farmers were not Romans but natives recruited by the Romans, as was the case with Romanisés Romanisés De. These sédentarisées populations therefore lived at the confluence of two cultures, which appeared brilliantly in the decorative frescoes at the Mausoleums tombs, which were financed by children upon the death of their parents. On some mausoleums, a Latin inscription gave their names, all of which are of Libyan and non-Roman origin, except the name of the Marchius family. While these limestone mausoleums borrow from the Greco-Roman architectural canons, their decorative motifs, on the other hand, bear witness to a highly local inspiration in the naive figurative drawing as in inspiration, using a Roman symbolism but also carthaginian.

The three mausoleums-temples of the northern necropolis (south of the fortified farms), of which a particularly large one, are raised on the podium with the corinthians and ionic capitals surrounding a murée (chamber) murée. The funeral rooms are under the stars. In the south necropolis (1,5 km south of the other side of the Wadi River) was one of the largest Obélisque obelisk in Libya and was a two-column mausoleum by side that was transported to the Tripoli Museum.

The fauna and flora of the tombs of the tombs are in these funerary monuments, a symbolic meaning devoid of phoenicio-punic references. The palm tree, for example, is linked to the cult of the god Baal Hammon, god of Fertility and Harvest and the main carthaginian deity. The lion is a sacred animal in the cult of the goddess Tanit and protects the burials. The goddess of Fertility Tanit, Parèdre of Baal Hammon, was attached to the Roman goddess Junon. As for the vine, it is major in the cult of Dionysus-Bacchus, which grafted into the cult of the cult God Shadrapa, God of Wine, but also God Healer and Fertility.

The first European who lives at the Mausoleums of Ghirza, English Lieutenant W.H. Smyth, in 1817, was far from having archaeological concerns: he came to take from any statues. The description he did then cast no criticism of the Libyco-Roman style of the tombs, which he found ugly!