ON THE LOCATION OF URCI, MURGI AND THE BAETICA-TARRACONENSIS FRONTIER IN ROMAN HISPANIA

Abstract

This paper is about the location of the ancient settlements of Urci and Murgi, mentioned in written records attributed to the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela, the historian Pliny the Second and the Greek mathematician Claudius Ptolemy. The investigation, based on these sources, indicates that these Roman towns could not have been located near the existing city of Almería (Portus Magnus), nowhere west of Promontorium Charidemum (Cape Gata) or in any other places suggested by some contemporaneous historians, atlases and encyclopedias. Rather, the records of the three writers indicate that the settlements existed east of Charidemum. It also proposes that, in Pliny’s and Ptolemy’s time, the frontier between the Baetica and Tarraconensis Roman provinces followed a line extending from Cape Gata to Villaricos (Baria) and, from there, northwest to Cazlona (Castulo.) This determination could encourage archaeologists a search for the location of Urci around the existing town of Úrcal where Roman vestiges have been recently discovered.