apr10

About 30 km north of Meknes are the ruins of Volubilis, called "Oualili" in Arabic. It was originally a Carthaginian town, dating from the 3rd century BCE, resettled by Romans in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE during Trajan's reign. After the fall of the Roman empire, the town was not abandoned; Latin was still spoken there until the coming of Islam in the 8th century. Oualili was continuously inhabited until the 18th century, when many of the buildings were dismantled in order to obtain marble for the construction of Moulay Ismail's palace in Meknes.

I had tried several times to arrange a trip to the ruins, but wasn't successful until my last week in Morocco. Ron Sandquist and I spent a grey, rainy day there on Tuesday, 18 December.

Above left is the Roman courthouse, or basilica, built in the 3rd century. Above right is the Triumphal Arch, dating from about the same time, built in honor of Emperor Caracalla. It was reconstructed in the 1930s and again in the 1960s.

Below is a stone pointing the way to the lustrum (look it up in your Latin dictionary).