Aulisua

Aulisua is among the best-attested indigenous gods of Roman Mauretania, named in about five Latin dedications that qualify him as sanctus ('holy'). Three of these were set up at Pomaria and Ain Khial by an officer of the ala of Pomarienses explorers, troops recruited among the local Moors, which once suggested a warrior god; but a further text from Volubilis, dedicated by a freedman shoemaker, shows him rather as a broad protective and tutelary deity of the Mauri. His unusually wide geographic spread, from Caesariensis to Tingitana, makes him the most territorially significant of the native Berber gods known from epigraphy.

Domains

• protection

Powers

• to protect worshippers and communities from harm

Epithets

• SanctusMarcel Benabou, La resistance africaine a la romanisation (Paris: Francois Maspero, 1976). (secondary)

Sources

• Aulisua is a major Mauretanian god attested as deus sanctus by inscriptions across both Caesariensis and Tingitana, the indigenous Berber deity with the widest attested territory outside the official Roman pantheon.: Marcel Benabou, La resistance africaine a la romanisation (Paris: Francois Maspero, 1976). (secondary); Gabriel Camps, s.v. 'Aulisua,' Encyclopedie berbere (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud). (secondary)