We have formerly remarked (p. 306) that the Berbers formed a considerable portion of the population of Numidia and Mauretania through the whole time of the Roman rule. But as to their internal organisation hardly more can be ascertained than the emergence of the clan (_gens_)[302] instead of the urban organisation under duoviri or sufetes. The societies of the natives were not, like those of North Italy, assigned as subjects to individual urban communities, but were placed like the towns immediately under the governors, doubtless also, where it seemed necessary, under a Roman officer specially placed over them (_praefectus gentis_), and further under authorities of their own[303]--the “headman” (_princeps_), who in later times bore possibly the title of king, and the “eleven first.” Presumably this arrangement was monarchical in contrast to the collegiate one of the Phoenician as of the Latin community, and there stood alongside of the tribal chief a limited number of elders instead of the numerous senate of decuriones of the towns. The communities of natives in Roman Africa seem to have attained afterwards to Italian organisation only by way of exception; the African towns with Italian rights, which did not originate from immigration, had doubtless for the most part Phoenician civic rights previously. Exceptions occur chiefly in the case of transplanted tribes, as indeed the considerable town Thubursicum originated from such a forced settlement of Numidians. The Berber communities possessed especially the mountains and the steppes; they obeyed the foreigners, without either the masters or the subjects feeling any desire to come to terms with one another; and, when other foreigners invaded the land, their position in presence of the Vandals, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the French, remained almost on the old footing. [Sidenote: Husbandry.]