In a similar sense the internal organisation of the country was regulated. It was based, as in Italy on the Latin and in the East on the Hellenic urban community, so here on the Phoenician. When the Roman rule in Africa began, the Carthaginian territory at that time consisted predominantly of urban communities, for the most part small, of which there were counted three hundred, each administered by its sufetes;[296] and the republic had made no change in this respect. Even in the kingdoms the towns formerly Phoenician had retained their organisation under the native rulers, and at least Calama--an inland town of Numidia hardly of Phoenician foundation--had demonstrably the same Phoenician municipal constitution; the civilisation which Massinissa gave to his kingdom must have consisted essentially in his transforming the villages of the agricultural Berbers into towns after the Phoenician model. The same will hold good of the few older urban communities which existed in Mauretania before Augustus. So far as we see, the two annually changing sufetes of the African communities coincide in the main with the analogous presidents of the community in the Italian municipal constitution; and that in other respects, _e.g._ in the common councils among the Carthaginians formed after a fashion altogether divergent from the Italian (ii. 16) {ii. 15.}, the Phoenician urban constitution of Roman Africa has preserved national peculiarities, does not at least admit of proof.[297] But the fact itself that the contrast, if even but formal, of the Phoenician town to the Italian was retained was, like the permission of the language, a recognition of the Phoenician nationality and a certain security for its continuance even under Roman rule. That it was recognised in the first instance as the regular form of administration of the African territory, is proved by the establishment of Carthage by Caesar primarily as a Phoenician city as well under the old sufetes[298] as in a certain measure with the old inhabitants, seeing that a great, perhaps the greatest part of the new burgesses was taken from the surrounding townships, again also under the protection of the great goddess of the Punic Carthage, the queen of heaven Astarte, who at that time marched in with her votaries anew into her old abode. It is true that in Carthage itself this organisation soon gave place to the Italian colonial constitution, and the protecting patroness Astarte became the--at least in name--Latin Caelestis. But in the rest of Africa and in Numidia the Phoenician urban organisation probably remained throughout the first century the predominant one, in so far as it pertained to all communities of recognised municipal rights and lacking Roman or Latin organisation. Abolished in the proper sense it doubtless was not, as in fact sufetes still occur under Pius; but by degrees they everywhere make way for the duoviri, and the changed principle of government entails in this sphere also its ultimate