Reason Southern Spain tax exempt by Romans: Tsunami

[guy]

On the left, fragments of paintings and marble; in the center, a votive plaque dedicated to the goddess Isis; on the right, a close-up of a piece of marble.

New evidence points to an overwhelming tsunami during the third century AD that destroyed the Roman city of Seville that was 25 miles (40 km) inland at the time.

 

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Among the objects excavated at the site was an inscription reading “IIAVRHERACLAE / PATETFILFBAR AVR HERACLAE/ PAT ET FIL / F BAR.” The artifact was originally fabricated in a ceramics workshop owned by Roman emperors Septimius Severus, Antonino Caracalla, and Geta, which once stood on the banks of the Guadalquivir River. The inscription references Aurelii Heraclae, the family of freedmen who managed the workshop between 197 and 207 AD — the same period from which the other artifacts found on the site date.

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What was especially striking about the site, the team discovered, was that “the materials [did] not belong to the building excavated at the Patio de Banderas, since it was constructed with different materials (mainly limestone and brick) and different techniques.” Rather, these exogenous architectural elements had been chemically transformed by a “highly energetic event,” which transported them to the Patio de Banderas, where they were trapped inside the building due to flooding from the tsunami. The report calculates that the flooding occurred between the years 197 and 225.

 

The impact and destruction of the tsunami could explain the region’s being made tax exempt soon after:
 

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In the 1970s, two Roman inscriptions — dated from 245 to 253 AD — were discovered in Écija (known in ancient Roman times as Astigi), a city in Spain’s southern province of Seville. The writings on the tablets suggest that the emperor at the time had exempted the Roman province of Baetica (roughly the equivalent of modern-day Andalusia, a region of southern Spain) from taxes. But the inscriptions failed to explain why, and the reason has remained a mystery for decades.

The inscriptions found in Écija that indicate Baetica’s status as prouincia immunis — a province exempt from taxes. As the authors of the Patio de Banderas study note, this status was most commonly granted in the aftermath of natural disasters. Like, for example, a tsunami.

 

 

 

 

https://english.elpais.com/culture/2022-07-22/a-massive-tsunami-destroyed-the-spanish-city-of-seville-in-the-3rd-century-new-study-finds.html

 

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-19-1979-4_12

Edited July 22, 2022 by guy