#uthina

Our first Roman city this morning, Uthina. It's south of Tunis and an easy day trip.

We drove along the ancient aqueduct for several miles. I noted that it was built from a mixture of cut stone and concrete.

There's a nice visitor center with a bridge over a wadi to the amphitheater ruins.

One of the exhibits in the visitor's center was the location of the sources of all the marble used in the city. They have identified marble from Spain, Sardinia, Egypt, Algeria, and mainly from Greece and Asia Minor. It's really remarkable to me that they were shipping marble from all over the Roman Empire to a small city in North Africa.

The amphitheater has bee partially restored.

The next large feature was the baths. Roman baths are different than what we might think. It's better to think of them as a modern health club with facilities for working out and socializing in addition to bathing. It's also important to understand that soap was not used in the Roman world. You rubbed yourself with olive oil and then scraped it off.

So there were large municipal baths, private baths, and small neighborhood baths. The largest baths, particularly in Rome would have bars, libraries, meeting rooms, etc.

The largest one in Uthina was not that big but was still quite massive.

This was the caldarium, the heated room. The floor was on the top of the pedestals and hot air circulated under the floor and behind the wall.

Here you can see the toilet in the foreground, an 8-holer it appears. It also appears to only be one.

The walls of the major rooms would have been lined with marble. here you can see the remains of the thin marble slabs on the walls.

How did they cut marble slabs that thin? With saws. I have seen an ancient water-powered marble saw in a site in Jordan.

The vaulted roof had collapsed. These huge masses of masonry give an idea of the size and weight of the vault over the main room.

Amazingly the spaces below the floor survived.

These spaces would have been utility areas and not for the public. Above one doorway was a bit of ancient graffiti, a sign of protection,

One of the women sardonically commented, "Because nothing protects like a penis."

Up at the top of the hill was the capitol with three temples. Today there are only the bases and parts of the columns of the ain temple.

Before the site excavations it had been a farm with the owner's house on the temple platform.

After the government took over the site they took down the house.

The spaces under the temples do appear to have been public gauging from their marble floors, in excellent condition.

The lowest level was more store/work rooms and later held an olive press, etc.

I am really curious about that oddly shaped door, although it would make a great door for a wine cellar.

After leaving Uthina we drove to Old Tunis where we walked through the Souk and had lunch.

One person found an interesting piece of pottery at the site that our professor identified as African Red pottery, a famous export from the area in Roman times.

We learned it was identifiable as the lid of a cookpot and that the shapes and particularly the edges of this red pottery have been cataloged and matched to particular potteries and periods. This makes pottery shards a particularly valuable resource for identifying the era of a site.

With that, we headed back to our hotel for a more relaxed afternoon.

As a note overfeeding is a real issue on this tour. Breakfast has been a buffet, but lunch and dinner have been in hotels, with the meals preordered. Typically after the salad or appetizers, I am some others are full. Then they bring out main courses of huge proportions. I have had limited success turning these away, with the restaurant being insulted that I didn't want their food. But I can't imagine that they are more pleased when I leave almost all of it on my plate.