Dougga is a Numidian and Roman archaeological site in the upland country of northwestern Tunisia, sixty kilometres from the modern town of Téboursouk. The pre-Roman city of Thugga was an important Numidian centre of the kingdom of Massinissa, and remains the largest preserved Numidian-Roman urban site in the Maghreb.
The Libyco-Punic Mausoleum of Ateban, built in the second century BCE, carries one of the longest surviving inscriptions in the Libyan (Old Berber) script, parallel to its Punic translation. The bilingual text, deciphered in the early nineteenth century, was the principal key to the reading of ancient Libyco-Berber, the alphabet ancestral to Tifinagh.
Dougga came under Roman administration after the dismantling of the Numidian kingdom in 46 BCE. The Roman city retained its Numidian street plan rather than imposing the orthogonal grid characteristic of Roman colonies elsewhere in north Africa, producing the distinctive irregular layout still visible at the site today. Major monuments include the Capitoline temple, the theatre, the temple of Saturn, and a complete urban water and sewage system.
The site was inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1997 and remains one of the principal locations for the study of pre-Roman Berber urbanism. Modern Tunisian Tamazight identity cites Dougga as evidence of the continuous indigenous presence on which the Roman, Vandal, Byzantine, Arab, and Ottoman successions were superimposed.