An article in the Daily Telegraph reports on Liverpool University Archaeologist Richard Benjamin's theory, published in British Archaeology, that not only was there a unit of Moors manning Aballava fort near Carlisle in the 3rd century, but that probably today's locals are their descendants. He has evidence.
Mr Benjamin describes a fourth century inscription discovered in Beaumount, two miles from the remains of the Aballava fort at Burgh by Sands. The inscription refers to the "numerus of Aurelian Moors" - a unit of North Africans, probably named after the emperor Marcus Aurelius.
The unit is
also mentioned in the Notitia Dignitatum, a Roman list of officials and
dignitaries. It describes the prefect of the "numeri Maurorum
Aurelianorum, Aballaba". The unit is likely to have been composed of
Berbers from North Africa, but may also have had darker-skinned
soldiers from Nubia.
* In 1989, archaeologists in London discovered a first century wooden sculpture of a black African head .
* The emperor Septimus Severus, who was born in Lepcis Magna, is reported to have been approached by a black African soldier while he crossed Hadrian's Wall on his return from a battle in Scotland. The Historia Augusta tells us:
After giving a Moor his discharge from the army, on the Wall, he was resuming to the nearest halting-place (mansio), not merely as victor but having established etemal peace. He was turning over in his mind what sort of man should meet him, when a certain 'Ethiopian' [black man] from the military unit (numerus), with a famous reputation among the jesters and whose jokes were always much quoted, met him with a wreath made of cypress. Enraged, Severus instructed that the man should be removed from his sight, being nettled by the ominous colour and wreath; and the man is recorded to have said, as a joke: 'You have overthrown all things, you have conquered all things, now be a conquering god!'
* In South Shields, a Roman tombstone refers to a 20-year-old "Moor by race, the freed slave of Numerians".
