[Sidenote: Continuance of the Phoenician language.] The language which prevailed in North Africa, when it became Roman, was that of the foreign rule which preceded the Roman. Leptis, probably not the Tripolitan, but that near Hadrumetum, was the only African town which marked its coins with a Greek legend, and thus conceded to this language an at least secondary position in public intercourse. The Phoenician language prevailed at that time so far as there was a civilisation in North Africa, from Great Leptis to Tingi, most thoroughly in and around Carthage, but not less in Numidia and Mauretania.[291] To this language of a highly developed although foreign culture certain concessions were made on the change in the system of administration. Perhaps already under Caesar, certainly under Augustus and Tiberius, as well the towns of the Roman province, such as Great Leptis and Oea, as those of the Mauretanian kingdom, like Tingi and Lix, employed in official use the Phoenician language, even those which like Tingi had become Roman burgess-communities. Nevertheless they did not go so far in Africa as in the Greek half of the empire. In the Greek provinces of the empire the Greek language prevailed, as in business intercourse generally, so particularly in direct intercourse with the imperial government and its officials; the coin of the city organised after the Greek fashion names also the emperor in Greek. But in the African the coin, even if it speaks in another language, names the emperor or the imperial official always in Latin. Even on the coins of the kings of Mauretania the name of the Greek queen stands possibly in Greek, but that of the king--also an imperial official--uniformly in Latin, even where the queen is named beside him. That is to say, even the government did not admit the Phoenician in its intercourse with the communities and individuals in Africa, but it allowed it for internal intercourse; it was not a third imperial language, but a language of culture recognised in its own sphere.