Calama (Numidia)
ancient city and former bishopric in the Roman province of Numidia, now a Latin Catholic titular see
Calama was a colonia in the Roman province of Numidia situated where Guelma in Algeria now stands.
G. Mokhtar places it just within the Roman province of Africa Proconsularis, to the east of Numidia, but it is generally believed to have been in Numidia, a province created probably in 198–199.
History
Calama was founded by the Phoenicians and called Malaka, similar to their colony Malake (Punic: 𐤌𐤋𐤊𐤀, mlkʾ) at Málaga, Spain. Malaka was situated in the Berber kingdom of Numidia. When this area later came under Roman rule, the city was renamed Calama. Between the late republic and early empire, it was governed by a Punic-inspired twin magistracy of sufetes.
Whether Calama is identical with the town of Suthul which the Roman general Aulus Postumius Albinus unsuccessfully tried to take in 110 BC, (cf. Battle of Suthul) is disputed, with some denying it and others cautiously affirming it.
In the 1st century AD, Calama, then part of the Roman province of Numidia, became a major urban centre. It was given the rank of a Roman municipium as early as Hadrian, and of a colonia later.
The public source identifies “Calama (Numidia)” as ancient city and former bishopric in the Roman province of Numidia, now a Latin Catholic titular see. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Calama, Numidia and ancient.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17513228. Authority coordinates are 36.467, 7.430. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Calama (Numidia)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.