It was a castrum (with a nearby vicus) on the military road, that connected Theveste with Sitifis and that followed the slopes of the Aures mountains.

Mascula was the most important of these forts from a strategic point of view, because controlled the numidian access to the Sahara.

At a later period, when Christianity had been firmly established in Roman Africa, Mascula had a brief era of prosperity.

It appears to have suffered terribly about the middle of the fourth century from the incursions of barbarian tribes who banded together for its destruction.......During the Byzantine occupation Solomon the general converted Mascula into a garrison town with walls of defence, and finally, when the Arabs swept over the land, its history as a town came to a close.Alexander GrahamMascula in the fourth century was at the center of the Donatism controversy, and there are beautiful mosaics discovered from those years[2] There are even some Roman baths from the late third century, still efficiently working after recent restoration.

It seems that was renamed -after the Moslem conquest- with the name of one of the daughters of Kahina: Khenchela (meaning "angel" in berber).