Capsa (Roman colonia)

Set in the open air, around springs rising from the bottom of the pools, they are aligned E-W according to the direction of the outflow of the water and connected by underground channels.

[2] However a number of ancient finds have been made in the "casbah" area of actual Gafsa; for example, a large mosaic (4.7 x 3.4 m) was found 300 m E in an undetermined Roman monument of Capsa.

[3] Capsa is considered, by historians like Camps[4]and Laverde, the place on north Africa were survived until the thirteenth century the last speakers of the African Romance.

Capsa during Roman times has had an importance similar to the nearby Thysdrus in what is now central-southern Tunisia and as a colony of veterans from central Italy it was a center of Romance African language (and, in a minor level, of Christianity).

In other words, the presence of these veterans and their families created a kind of "Romanized stronghold" in the region, that survived for many centuries during the early Middle Ages.

It seems that in the early 4th century, Diocletian personally transferred the headquarters of the Legio III Augusta from Lambaesis to another, unknown base within the region that probably was Capsa.

Successively, when the Arabs arrived in the late seventh century the city was partially destroyed and many of his inhabitants were sent as slaves toward Damascus in a long march through the north African coastal desert that decimated most of them.

The historian Decret François [9] wrote that this massacre was the beginning of the "extermination" of Christian Romanized Africa, one of the first ethnic cleansing in history (the Maghreb region actually is fully muslim and arab/berber).