British Research on the Ancient City of Timgad: The British Traveler James Bruce as a Model

The ancient city of Timgad has attracted notable interest from British scholars since the eighteenth century. Their travels and explorations contributed to uncovering the significance of this Roman city located in eastern Algeria and to documenting its archaeological landmarks. With the increasing academic openness of Algerian universities in recent years, historians and archaeologists have been called upon to align with this trend. One of their main goals is to move beyond the limitations of the French academic tradition that has long shaped the history of ancient North Africa. For researchers in Algeria, detaching from the dominance of French studies remains a challenge, mainly because of France's longstanding and ideologically driven focus on Roman-era North African history. This perspective often served political interests during the colonial period. However, alongside French scholarship, there exist other foreign academic contributions, including British studies, which offer valuable insights into the archaeology and history of the region. In this article, I present the city of Timgad through the writings of the British traveler James Bruce. Although his observations on Timgad were limited, he was the first to identify the upper part of the Arch of Triumph. He also described the Byzantine fortress and sketched several of the monuments he encountered. These early contributions are the focus of the discussion in this paper.