[1] Masties is known from an undated Latin epitaph from his presumed capital Arris in Aurès, found in 1941 by Morizot and published in detail by Carcopino in 1944.

[2] The rise of Masties is linked to the 484 revolt of Aurasium described by Procopius,[3] which pushed the Aurès permanently outside the orbit of Vandal control, and which may have been given energy by the persecutions of the Arian king Huneric against Orthodox Christians (484), memorably recorded by Victor of Vita.

[5] Modéran argues that the villages, churches, and countryside of the Aurès, outside Vandal control, offered a productive rural powerbase from which Masties had drawn the necessary means for an emergent Romano- Berber identity that cemented his authority and provided to the people of the region “a sense of ethnic cohesion and identity” contributing in the process to the weakening of the Vandals and their subsequent defeat by Belisarius.

[7] This evaluation is convincingly backed by the number of African clerics (4,966) arriving at N'gaous escorted by Moorish guards after they were gathered and exiled by the Vandal king Huneric in 483.

In the penultimate line, however, while the text remains in the first-person, the speaker changes, allowing the donor of the inscription, Vartaia, to note his own involvement.

(dis sacrum manibus) has also been interpreted as a strict pagan or Donatist cult reference, thus the man acted out of pure political opportunism.