Note 303 — Chapter XIII · THE AFRICAN PROVINCES.

When the designation princeps (C. I. L. viii. p. 1102) is not merely enunciative but an official title, it appears throughout in communities which are neither themselves urban communities nor parts of such, and with special frequency in the case of the gentes. We may compare the “eleven first” (comp. Eph. epigr. v. n. 302, 521, 533) with the seniores to be met with here and there. An evidence in support of both positions is given in the inscription C. I. L. viii. 7041: Florus Labaeonis f. princeps et undecimprimus gentis Saboidum. Recently at Bu Jelîda, a little westward of the great road between Carthage and Theveste, in a valley of the Jebel Rihan, and so in a quite civilised region, there have been found the remains of a Berber village, which calls itself on a monument of the time of Pius (still unprinted) gens Bacchuiana, and is under “eleven elders”; the names of gods (Saturno Achaiaei [?] Aug[usio]), like the names of men (Candidus Braisamonis fil.), are half local, half Latin. In Calama the dating after the two sufetes and the princeps (C. I. L. viii. 5306, comp. 5369) is remarkable; it appears that this probably Libyan community was first under a chief, and then obtained sufetes without the chief being dropped. It may readily be understood that our monuments do not give much information upon the gentes and their organisation; in this field doubtless little was written on stone. Even the Libyan inscriptions belong, at least as regards the majority, to towns in part or wholly inhabited by Berbers; the bilingual inscriptions found at Tenelium (C. I. L. viii. p. 514), in Numidia westward from Bona in the Sheffia plain, the same place that has furnished till now most of the Berber stone inscriptions, show indeed in their Latin part Libyan names, e.g. Chinidial Misicir f. and Naddhsen Cotuzanis f., both from the clan (tribu) of the Misiciri or Misictri; but one of these people, who has served in the Roman army and has acquired the Roman franchise, names himself in the Latin text in civitate sua Tenelio flamen perpetuus, according to which this place seems to have been organised like a town. If, therefore, success should ever attend the attempt to read and decipher the Berber inscriptions with certainty, they would hardly give us sufficient information as to the internal organisation of the Berber tribes.