The ancient city

The ancient city of Chellah featured typical Roman architecture, including paved streets, public squares, temples dedicated to Roman gods, baths, and other public buildings. One of its most remarkable monuments was a three-bayed triumphal arch.

It includes three recognizable presses with their millstones and settling basins, elements of a bakery, shops, and spaces that seem to have served for the private use of artisans or merchants.

Uncovered between 1961 and 1969 by Jean Boube, the Capitol was built at the expense of C. Hosidius Severus, a notable of the city from the equestrian order.
The Capitol is constructed on two terraces, forming a rectangle 46 meters long and 26 meters wide. The south portico is supported by the vaults of nine shops opening onto the Decumanus maximus.

The temple on the upper terrace is an irregular rectangle, with the western part constructed as an apse clad in white marble plaques. It is subdivided into several spaces, including a peribolos, a covered Corinthian portico along the northeast and south sides, a paved courtyard with an altar, a pronaos with an adjoining staircase, and a chamber reserved for the temple’s treasury.

Three Mauritanian temples, the most significant overlooking the forum, sit on a terrace reinforced by a thick wall 0.80 to 1 meter high and 1.90 meters tall. The monument, dating from the mid-1st century BC, is organized into five rooms, deeper than they are wide, served by a rectangular gallery almost 4.10 meters wide. The pronaos measures 23.10 m by 5.00 m.

Each room, with the exception of Room IV, is divided transversely by an interior partition, pierced by two small entrances, which provides, on the north side, a recess measuring 3.60m by 1.80m in Rooms I and V and 4.17m by 1.80m in rooms II and III. At the back of room IV, a niche was dug, on a concave plane, established a little above the ground, 2.56m wide, 1.00m deep, and preceded by two bases molded with rectangular pilasters. In this niche must have undoubtedly taken place one or the other of the two large Greek marble statues, found in the temple, one of which is a portrait of King Ptolemy, son of Juba II, currently exhibited at the museum of history and civilizations of Rabat.

It is where bases of honorary inscriptions dedicated to emperors and great magistrates of the city are placed.

Trapezoidal in shape, it is covered with large blue limestone slabs preserved “up to 20.60 meters from the podium”. Constructed during the reign of Trajan, this public space, accessible only to Roman citizens, was “closed by two monumental doors, with the powerful foundations still remaining”.

This complex, reused in the Middle Ages, reproduces the classic layout of Roman baths, including the frigidarium (cold room), tepidarium (warm room), and caldarium with a basin (hot room), and a hot room without a basin preceded by a large changing room with benches.

These small baths also have the peculiarity of featuring a palestra or a gymnasium (exercise room). Some rooms were adorned with bicolored (black and white) mosaic combinations, along with several carved and sculpted blocks scattered on the north side, testifying to the splendor and magnificence of the building.

It is a monument with three bays which must have been more imposing than that of Volubilis. However, only three large carved blocks remain, witnesses of the four pillars which supported arches whose opening varies between 4.30 m in the central arch and 2.08 m in the side arches. Those of the fourth pillar were probably, like several other structures, reused in the manufacture of lime or in the construction of medieval buildings.

A large regular octagon with niches in its sides that probably housed nymph statues, including a smaller octagon, in turn, enveloping a circular basin. This basin receives water brought by the underground aqueduct supplying the city.