For centuries, Hippo Regius served Phoenician and then Numidian interests. It sat near the mouth of the river Ubus, with a bay to the east that bore the city's name. When Rome conquered Numidia, the city became a colonia and flourished. Its position on the North African coast, midway between Carthage and the western provinces, made it a natural hub for trade and military administration. By the time of the late Empire, it was one of the major cities of Roman Africa -- prosperous enough to attract ambitious bishops, wealthy enough to build baths and temples, and important enough to host church councils that shaped Christian doctrine for centuries to come.

Augustine arrived in 391 AD, already a renowned rhetorician who had converted to Christianity after years of intellectual wandering through Manicheism and Neoplatonism. He was ordained a priest, then made bishop in 396. For the next thirty-four years, Hippo Regius was the center of his world. He wrote the Confessions here, that unprecedented experiment in autobiography and spiritual self-examination. He wrote The City of God, a philosophical response to the fall of Rome that reframed history itself as a contest between earthly and divine purposes. Under his leadership, at least three monasteries operated in the diocese. Church councils held at Hippo in 393, 394, and 426 helped establish the biblical canon -- the list of books of Holy Scripture drawn up at the Synod of 393 still forms the basis of the Catholic Bible.

In 430 AD, the Vandals swept eastward along the North African coast. They besieged Hippo Regius, and inside the walls, Augustine -- seventy-five years old, watching the civilization he had spent his life interpreting begin to collapse around him -- prayed for deliverance. The wheat fields beyond the walls lay unharvested, and both the city's inhabitants and the besieging Vandals suffered from hunger and disease. Augustine died on 28 August 430, three months into the siege. The Vandals eventually lifted the blockade after fourteen months, but a peace treaty in 435 handed them the city. King Geiseric made Hippo Regius the first capital of his Vandal Kingdom, holding it until the conquest of Carthage in 439 shifted the capital east.

The Eastern Roman Empire reconquered Hippo in 534, and the city remained under Roman rule until 698, when it fell to the Arab conquest. The Arabs rebuilt the town in the eighth century. In the eleventh century, the Berber Zirids established a new settlement, Beled-el-Anab, about three kilometers away -- the nucleus of the modern city. The Spanish occupied it briefly in the sixteenth century. The French took it in 1832, renamed it Bone, and made it an administrative center. By the colonial period, its 37,000 inhabitants included 15,700 French, 10,500 foreigners (many Italian), 9,400 Muslims, and 1,400 naturalized Jews -- a demographic mosaic that reflected the city's endlessly layered past. Today, the ruins of Hippo Regius sit within modern Annaba, the ancient forum and baths and residential quarters open to the sky, a few hundred meters from traffic and apartment blocks. The basilica dedicated to Augustine crowns the hill above.