Volubilis — Walīlī in Arabic — is a partly excavated Berber and Roman city near Meknes in northern Morocco, on a ridge above a fertile plain about 3 km from the town of Moulay Idriss Zerhoun. Founded as a Berber and Punic settlement by the 3rd century BC, it became a capital of the kingdom of Mauretania, grew to about 42 hectares and perhaps 20,000 people under Roman rule after 44 CE, and made its wealth from olive oil. Rome withdrew around 285, but people stayed: in 788 Idris I, founder of the Idrisid dynasty and regarded as the founding father of the Moroccan state, was proclaimed imam here. Badly damaged by an earthquake in 1755 and excavated mainly by the French in the 20th century, it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997. Visitors come for its basilica, its triumphal arch of 217 CE and its mosaic floors still in place in the houses where they were laid.
Walilt: A Berber and Punic Town Below the Zerhoun
Volubilis stands on a ridge on the lower slopes of the Zerhoun mountain, above the valley of the Wadi Khoumane where the small Fertassa stream joins it, looking out over a fertile plain north of Meknes. People lived here at least 5,000 years ago; Neolithic pottery from the site resembles pieces found in Iberia. By the 3rd century BC there was a Carthaginian presence, shown by a temple to the Punic god Baal and inscriptions in Phoenician.
The origin of the name is uncertain. It may be a Latin form of the Amazigh (Berber) word walilt, meaning oleander, a shrub that grows along the valley sides. The pre-Roman town covered only about 12 hectares on a V-shaped ridge between the two streams, laid out on the regular plan typical of Phoenician and Carthaginian towns. Punic habits lasted: the city’s magistrates kept the Carthaginian title of suffete long after Carthage itself fell in 146 BC.
Juba II and Claudius: From Client Kingdom to Roman Province in 44 CE
After Carthage fell, Mauretania became a client kingdom of Rome. In 25 BC Augustus placed Juba II, a Berber prince educated in Rome, on its throne, and Juba began building a second capital at Volubilis. His wife was Cleopatra Selene II, daughter of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, and both Juba and their son Ptolemy favoured Roman art and architecture.
When Ptolemy was executed on the orders of the emperor Caligula in 40 CE, one of his freedmen, Aedemon, led a revolt from 40 to 44 CE. Volubilis stayed loyal to Rome, and when Claudius annexed Mauretania in 44 CE the city was rewarded with Roman citizenship, ten years free of taxes and the status of a municipium. Volubilis now sat in the new province of Mauretania Tingitana, linked by road to Lixus and to the provincial capital at Tingis (modern Tangier).
It also sat on the edge of the empire. The city lay on the province’s south-eastern frontier, with no road east to neighbouring Mauretania Caesariensis because the territory of the Baquates tribe lay between them. A ring of five forts guarded it, garrisoned by auxiliary units raised in Gaul, Hispania, Syria and Parthia. Late in the 2nd century, as tensions rose, Marcus Aurelius ordered new walls, and the Roman circuit — 2.6 km long and about 1.6 metres thick — still largely survives. Its north-eastern Tingis Gate is dated to 168/169 CE by a coin its builders set into the masonry.
Olive Oil, 58 Presses and 121 Shops
Volubilis grew rich from the land around it. The province exported grain, olive oil and wild animals for the arenas, and at its peak in the late 2nd century the city had about 20,000 inhabitants, with more than 50 villas found in the surrounding countryside.
Olive oil was the foundation. It was food, lamp fuel, a bathing oil and a medicine, and the pressed olives were fed to animals or dried and burned to heat the bathhouses. Archaeologists have found 58 oil-pressing complexes inside the walls, and even some of the grandest houses had their own. Each had a mill, a press worked by a counterweight and a wooden beam called the prelum, and a settling basin from which the oil was skimmed into amphorae. One workshop at the southern end of the city has been rebuilt with a full-size replica Roman press. At least 121 shops have also been identified, many of them bakeries.
Water came from a spring in the hills along an aqueduct probably built around 60–80 CE, which fed private houses, public fountains and at least three sets of baths. The North Baths, possibly from Hadrian’s reign, were the largest, and the Baths of Gallienus were redecorated by that emperor in the 260s.
Basilica, Capitoline Temple and the Arch of Caracalla
The civic centre lies in the older part of the city. The basilica, where justice was administered and the city governed, was completed under the emperor Macrinus in the early 3rd century. It measures 42.2 by 22.3 metres, originally rose two storeys, and is thought to be modelled on the basilica at Leptis Magna in Libya; rows of columns frame the apses at each end where magistrates sat. Its colonnaded outer wall faces the forum, a 1,300 m² square once lined with statues of emperors and local notables, of which only the pedestals remain.
Behind the basilica stands the Capitoline Temple, dedicated to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, the three chief gods of the Roman state. An altar stands in its courtyard in front of 13 steps leading to a Corinthian portico. An inscription found in 1924 records that it was rebuilt in 218; restorers in 1962 reconstructed ten of the steps, the walls of the cella and the columns.
Where the old and new quarters meet, at the end of the main street, the Decumanus Maximus, rises the Arch of Caracalla. The provincial governor Marcus Aurelius Sebastenus built it in 217 to honour the emperor Caracalla — himself of North African descent, who had recently extended Roman citizenship to free people across the provinces — and his mother Julia Domna. It was crowned by a bronze chariot pulled by six horses, and statues of nymphs poured water into marble basins at its foot. By the time it was finished, both Caracalla and Julia Domna were dead. French restorers rebuilt the arch between 1930 and 1934, reconstructing its inscription from fragments that the English traveller John Windus had seen on the ground in 1722.
House of Orpheus and the Labours of Hercules
Behind the shops along the Decumanus Maximus lay the houses of the city’s elite, many of them named by archaeologists after the mosaic floors still in place. In the southern part of the city, the House of Orpheus takes its name from a large mosaic in its dining room showing Orpheus playing his harp to trees, birds and animals; the atrium floor shows the sea goddess Amphitrite in a chariot drawn by a seahorse, and a room off the main courtyard has a dolphin, an animal Romans considered lucky. The House of the Labours of Hercules, a mansion of 41 rooms covering about 2,000 m², shows the hero’s twelve tasks, probably laid during the reign of Commodus, who identified himself with Hercules.
Other houses show the same mix of luxury and business. The House of the Ephebe and the House of the Knight are named after bronze statues found in them; the Knight’s house covered about 1,700 m² and included eight or nine shops and an olive-pressing complex. The House of Venus had private baths and a mosaic of chariots in a hippodrome drawn by peacocks, geese and ducks. The largest building of all, the 74-room Gordian Palace, was probably the governor’s residence. Inscribed altars found there record treaties with local Berber chiefs, the last two from 277 and 280, which promised a “federated and lasting peace”.
After Rome: The Awraba and Idris I in 788
The peace did not last. Around 280 Roman rule collapsed across much of Mauretania, and in 285 the emperor Diocletian kept only the coastal strip between Lixus, Tingis and Septa (Ceuta). Volubilis was never retaken, but it was not abandoned. Fourth-century mosaics show that wealthy households stayed, inscriptions show Latin names in use in the 6th and 7th centuries, and much of the old centre became a cemetery as people moved to the south-west, where a new wall enclosed a smaller town.
When Arab forces arrived in 708, the town, now called Walīlī, was held by the Awraba, a Berber tribe. In 788 Idris ibn Abdallah, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad who had fled the Abbasids after the Battle of Fakhkh, was proclaimed imam here under the protection of the Awraba leader Ishaq ibn Mohammad. He married Kanza of the Awraba, conquered much of northern Morocco and founded Fes, but was assassinated at Volubilis in 791 on the orders of the caliph Harun al-Rashid. Since 2000, excavations by University College London and Morocco’s national archaeology institute have uncovered what is probably his headquarters below the western walls. His son Idris II moved the capital to Fes, and Volubilis lost its political role. Idris I’s remains were later moved to the hill town of Moulay Idriss Zerhoun, a few kilometres away, where a great mausoleum was built for him.
The 1755 Earthquake, French Excavation and UNESCO in 1997
People went on living there for centuries — Muslim exiles from Córdoba resettled it in 818 — but by the 14th century it was probably almost deserted, and local people came to call it Ksar Faraoun, “Pharaoh’s Castle”. In the late 17th century Sultan Moulay Ismail took stone from the ruins for his new capital at Meknes, and the Meknes earthquake of 27 November 1755, a local quake that struck less than a month after the great Lisbon earthquake and killed thousands in Fes and Meknes, brought down much of what was still standing. The site was identified as Volubilis only in the late 19th century. Henri de la Martinière excavated from 1887 to 1892, and after 1915 work under Louis Chatelain, commissioned by Hubert Lyautey, the military governor of French Morocco, used thousands of German prisoners of war; it continued until 1941. About half of the city has been excavated. Restorations followed at the arch, the Capitoline Temple, the basilica in 1965–67 and the Tingis Gate in 1967, though a 1997 review for UNESCO judged some reconstructions to be “radical”.
UNESCO inscribed Volubilis in 1997 as an exceptionally well preserved Roman colonial town on the fringes of the empire. For Rome’s other great North African cities, see Leptis Magna in Libya and Carthage in Tunisia, and for the ranges that rise south of Meknes, read our guide to the Atlas Mountains.