The focus of this book is the approximately 3,000 votive stelae that have been discovered from more than 100 locations in North Africa. Dating from both the pre-Roman and Roman eras, these stelae have underpinned modern understandings of Punic, African and Roman religious practice in the region. However, a problem with this material is that it has hitherto been studied within a colonialist framework (typified in the canonical work of Marcel Leglay Reference Leglay1961; Reference Leglay1966a–Reference Leglayb). McCarty’s new book, developed significantly beyond his Oxford DPhil thesis (McCarty Reference McCarty2010) and expanding on its post-colonial agenda, will henceforth be the definitive reference point on the stelae cult of Baal/Saturn (and related gods) in Africa. He challenges and revises significantly the views of Leglay and provides at long last an English-language book on this fascinating material. The volume also serves as a fundamental contribution to knowledge of religious practices in Africa more generally in the Roman period (see also McCarty Reference McCarty and Hitchner2022 for a further wide-ranging synthesis). The theoretical reflections are impressive, the mastery of the material exceptional and the erudite prose a joy to read. The book is well illustrated with a wide range of images of the stelae and the other archaeological material discussed. Particularly useful are the numerous distribution maps of a wide range of factors. There are a number of really helpful tables and appendices, collating data, for instance, on iconographic variability in the stelae or summarising the features reported and pertinent dating indications at each sanctuary site.
Chapters 1 and 2 provide an insightful overview of the colonial traditions and their long afterlife in modern scholarship, relating to a range of issues such as ethnicity, religion and cultural change (often reduced in academic studies to the troublesome concept of Romanisation). The first chapter presents a clear agenda for a decolonising reading of the evidence and explains clearly some novel approaches adopted in the book. Chapter 2 provides an essential historical and historiographical overview of the chronology, character and relatedness of the African stelae cults with the wider Phoenician world. It outlines the key issues surrounding child sacrifice and establishes the distinctiveness of the African evidence.
The rest of the book follows a series of themes relating to the development of religious practice in Africa under Rome. Chapter 3 focuses on Africa in the long first century BC, a key period of transition from Phoenician (Carthaginian) and Numidian rule to Roman governance. The early significance of the sign of Tanit on stelae is one focus here, but the African context of stelae use is further expanded on, with McCarty asserting that changes in practice created a sort of religious ‘third space’ (between Rome and Numidian/Phoenician peoples). This emphasises that the developments of the cult under Rome were closely linked to the local response to the presence and threat of Rome, but also that the resulting cult cannot simply be read in terms either of a Roman transformation of society or of resistance to Rome.
Chapter 4 challenges the often-assumed translation of Phoenician Baal Hammon into Roman Saturn, as reflected in the stelae and other manifestations of religious practice. McCarty debunks the common idea that Baal/Saturn was a supreme and universal god in Africa and is particularly insightful on the complexities of translating an established cult to a new religious system. The eventual normalisation of the cult in the imperial religious landscape is well explored in iconographic terms, with a focus on stelae from Carthage and Ammaedara and other sites strung out along the main provincial highways.
Attention then shifts in Chapter 5 to the extent to which the stelae allow us to characterise the sanctuary communities. A problem with the evidence here is that a significant number of stelae were anepigraphic and the typicality of the most loquacious Latin texts remains to some degree uncertain, especially when many of these were associated with elements of the military community in and around forts and veteran colonies. While McCarty is certainly correct that the stelae cults were far more than ‘peasant’ based, the traditional approach has also weighted interpretation in relation to the epigraphic evidence. McCarty’s observation of emerging positions of authority in some cult communities does not exclude the possibility of more heterogeneous approaches and practices in different parts of society or across the varied political and cultural landscapes.
Chapters 6 and 7 return to the key questions of the role of children in the cult and the controversial issue of whether the cremated remains of infants at sanctuaries related in part at least to child sacrifice. This seems certain for the pre-Roman era, but there has often been a claim of substitution of animal/bird offerings in place of children in the Roman continuation. An important element here is McCarty’s holistic analysis of children in terms of their depiction and associated iconography on the stelae, the epigraphic testimony and the physical remains of infants and other offerings recovered in the urns buried by the stelae. Chapter 7 provides a focused discussion of the evidence for sacrificial practices more generally at known sanctuary sites. Despite the widespread modern belief that animal sacrifice substituted for human sacrifice in the Roman era (exemplified in the excavations of the Tophet at Hadrumetum, for instance), there are many unequivocal finds elsewhere of infant bones in the urns. McCarty is surely right that the evidence suggests some continuing element of child sacrifice in the cult during Roman times, though he could have reflected further on where such conservative practices were most persistent (geographically and socially). This chapter also considers the wider cult practices at sanctuaries – communications with the god, communal rather than individual offerings and other changes related to Roman norms.
Chapter 8 extends this discussion by turning to changes in the physical structure and spatial organisation of sanctuaries, though the picture is built up from a relatively small sample of extensively excavated sanctuary sites. The synthesis offered is important, not least because the material has in general been poorly published or is in hard-to-find sources.
In the final chapter McCarty returns to the theme of the role of stelae cults in the making of the Roman Empire in Africa. He emphasises the importance of dynamic change over the course of the many centuries in which these stelae (and the sacrifices that underpinned them) were being erected. The cult was very different at the end of its life compared with its earlier manifestations, just as the wider political and social world had been transformed. He re-emphasises the point that the idea of an unchanging African cult of Saturn is a colonialist construct and unhelpful to the understanding of religious transformation in the African provinces of the Empire.
Overall there is much to admire in the book and its critical engagement with a huge body of material. The wide-ranging argument makes many novel and important points that will inform all future work on the cult(s) represented by the stelae. Given the ambitious post- or de-colonial ambition expressed in Chapter 1, I felt it was a pity that the final chapter did not reflect back a little more directly or in detail on that expressed agenda. Occasionally, the interpretation also lapses back into the language of antiquated debates, such as that around Romanisation (though seemingly debunked in the opening chapter, it reappears several times in explanatory discussions later on). While I applaud his dismantling of the old notion of a timeless African religion that endured Roman rule unchanged (one element of a colonial trope of ‘permanence berbère’), there remains a tension between general statements that imply a common approach to the cult and the presented evidence that demonstrates very significant variation.
In this context, it is a pity that my recent book (Mattingly Reference Mattingly2023) appeared at a late stage in McCarty’s preparation of his own work for publication. Apart from a couple of brief references in the notes, he does not engage directly with my arguments specifically relating to the Saturn/stelae cults, though I think they could have allowed him to develop and support his own arguments further. In particular, the peculiar geographical boundedness of the stelae cult – essentially limited to the Numidian heartlands and the Liby-Phoenician communities of Africa Proconsularis – is really striking. The exceptions to this in Mauretania or in the military zone to the south of Numidia are by and large attributable to the action of the military community, rather than the local Mauri or Gaetulian populations. The stelae cult known at Volubilis far to the west was evidently a wide outlier and does not seem to have been linked to the ‘Saturn’ stelae that form the main focus of this book. The idea that different population groups (ethnic, social, rural/urban, military associated) practised religion discrepantly fits with the heterogeneity of practice and transformation that McCarty observes. I look forward to his further development of his discussion in future works.
Despite these slight reservations, this is a very important book. It achieves a new level of analysis not only in terms of the North-African material, but also in its head-on engagement with the problems of the colonialist tradition and a fresh perspective on the religious transformations that Roman imperialism brought about.
A final word is necessary about the quality of the book production, and a minor mystery. The reviewer’s copy appears to be the product of a new Cambridge University Press policy of essentially printing on demand using quite brittle and low-quality paper stock (with several pages having been creased or slightly torn in the binding process). The print quality of many of the illustrations is especially disappointing – maps and photographs are rather ‘bleached out’ and, in the book sent to me, are all in fuzzy greyscale (when I know the quality of McCarty’s photographs to be much better than that). Though there is a reference in the acknowledgements to financial support for some colour illustrations, these were not reproduced in colour in my copy, though on cross-checking with a colleague who also has the physical book it seems that at least some illustrations are in colour in his copy. All a bit mysterious, but (given the cost of the book) I recommend that individuals looking to purchase should try and inspect a physical copy to ensure that they receive the colour version. For the premium cover price charged, the author and reader have a right to expect better from the publisher.
