Cirta

Stand near the edge of the rock and listen. Far below, water runs through a narrow gorge, and the sound rises up the cliffs in a low, steady hush. Wind moves across the plateau. Swifts cut through the air above the drop. Under your feet is a limestone platform that people have chosen to live on for well over two thousand years. Before this city was called Constantine, it had an older name. That name was Cirta.

The name itself is simple. Most scholars connect it to a Punic word meaning city, from the language of Carthage, the great trading power on the coast to the east. So the first name of this place was, in a sense, just The City. That fits. When you look at the site, you see why no one needed a grander title. The rock is a natural fortress. Deep ravines surround much of it on several sides.

That gorge has a name too. It is the Rhumel, the river that cut this deep channel through the stone over a very long span of time. The river curves around the plateau like a moat. In the ancient world, that mattered more than anything. A city on this rock could be approached only from limited directions. Armies understood this. Kings understood it even better.

And kings did rule here. Cirta became a royal seat of the Numidians, the Berber peoples who held much of the land west of Carthage. Numidian horsemen were famous across the Mediterranean. They rode without saddles, fast and light, and both Rome and Carthage wanted them on their side. Two rival kings shaped the story of this city in the late third century before Christ. Their names were Syphax and Massinissa.

Syphax sided with Carthage during the long war against Rome. Massinissa sided with Rome. When the fighting ended, Massinissa won, and Cirta became the heart of a larger Numidian kingdom. He ruled for decades and built a strong state. Ancient writers describe him as tireless, still active and riding well into old age. Around here, his memory remains a point of pride. He is often remembered as a founder of North African independence.

There is a famous tale from those years, and it comes to us through Roman historians such as Livy, so treat it as an ancient story rather than a checked record. It concerns Sophonisba, a Carthaginian noblewoman married first to Syphax. When Syphax fell, the story says, Massinissa married her himself. Rome feared her influence and demanded her surrender. Rather than be paraded in Rome, she drank poison. Painters and playwrights in Europe retold the scene for centuries.

Now a darker chapter, and this one is well attested. After Massinissa's death, his kingdom passed to his heirs, and conflict followed. His grandson Jugurtha besieged his cousin Adherbal inside Cirta. When the city finally gave in, Adherbal was killed. So were many Italian traders living here. That massacre helped pull Rome into a war with Jugurtha. The Roman writer Sallust told the whole story in a short book that students of Latin still read today.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. Just outside the old city, at a place called El Hofra, excavators found a large number of carved stone stelae. These are upright slabs from an ancient sanctuary. Many carry Punic inscriptions and simple symbols, such as a crescent, a raised hand, or a stylised human figure. Some of these stones are now held in the museum here, which carries the name Cirta. Others travelled to museums in Europe.

Under Rome, Cirta changed again. It became a Roman colony, and it led a group of linked towns in the region, including the port that later became Skikda. The city grew wealthy. It produced educated men who rose high in the empire. One of them was Fronto, a celebrated speaker who became a teacher of the future emperor Marcus Aurelius. Letters between the two men survive. They show real warmth between a teacher from this rock and his imperial student.

Then came a fall. In the early fourth century, during a struggle between rival claimants to Roman power, the city was badly damaged. Soon afterwards it was rebuilt under the emperor Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome. The city took his name. Cirta became Constantina. That is the name that has stayed, through Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman and French rule, down to the Constantine you stand in today.

So where is Cirta now? Mostly, it is underneath. Later builders reused the ancient stones and built new streets over old ones. Fragments surface in excavations, in reused blocks in walls, and in collections in the museum. On the highest part of the rock, the area long called the Kasbah, older layers lie close below later buildings. The ancient city is less a ruin you walk through, and more a foundation you stand on.

This is the surprise of the place. Constantine is famous for its bridges, which cross the gorge at dizzying heights and link the rock to the land around it. Those bridges are modern. But they solve the same old problem. For Numidian kings, the ravine was a wall. For later engineers, it was an obstacle to cross. The geography that made Cirta a fortress still shapes every journey into the city.

Before you move on, look once more at the rock and the gorge. Notice the colour of the stone where the sun falls on it, and the shadow deep down by the water. Kings, merchants, soldiers and scholars all looked across this same drop. The names changed. The empires changed. The river kept running. As you walk away through the streets, remember that the ground under them still holds the old city called, quite simply, The City.