A note on the wet paint. The interactive grid is live but still in an experimental stage. The viewer and its underlying database are being updated together, which means some blocks are incomplete, numbers may shift as corrections come in, and errors are expected. The goal of publishing this now is to show what is possible with the corpus, not to provide a stable reference. Please avoid citing the grid in its current form; a stable, citable release will be announced once the data has settled.
Timgad was laid out on a strict rectilinear grid, two main streets crossing at right angles with regular rectangular blocks between them. Each block, called an insula in Latin, is identified here by its coordinates on that grid. Individual houses are keyed to the insula they sit inside, so that a house identifier like TIMGAD-C3D5-H01 can be traced directly to its place in the city.
The viewer below is the current working version. It shows the city grid and the identifiers assigned to each block, based on the standardized system described in the numbering rationale below. As individual house records are added to the database, they will be linked from their insula.
How to read the grid
The two main streets are the cardo maximus, which runs north to south, and the decumanus maximus, which runs east to west. Secondary cardines and decumani divide the rest of the city into insulae. A house’s position is recorded as its cardine and decumanus coordinates, followed by a house number within that insula, so a house can be placed unambiguously on the street grid even when the block itself has no surviving street label.
This is a working tool, not a finished publication. Identifiers will continue to be checked against the published excavation reports and archival plans through 2026. If you spot an error or have a correction, please email km2133@student.ubc.ca.
Numbering rationale
The identifier system is designed to be stable, location-based, and independent of excavation-era labels, which are inconsistent across a century of French reports. Each insula gets coordinates. Each house gets a two-digit suffix assigned in a consistent order within its insula. Full documentation of the system, including edge cases and how it reconciles with earlier labels, will live on the Methods page as the site grows. For now, the short version is that the identifier tells you where the house is, not when it was excavated or by whom.
Downloading the data
The underlying data for the grid will be published as GeoJSON and CSV under a Creative Commons license once the current audit is complete. For now, the data is in active flux and not distributed externally.