Cilpes/Cilpis/Xilb/Silves? To an ancient question a new contribution: the Roman inscription from Silves about the Neptune’s temple

Abstract

Even in scientific circles, some defend the idea that the city of Silves originated from a Roman urban settlement that prevailed during the High Middle Ages and resulted in the great Islamic Xilb. To this assumption contributed, at first, a certain romantic historiography and, in the last decades of the 20th century, some inferences based on archaeological findings that we would like to study, adding new data obtained from recent archaeological works. We will go through the various currents of opinion, usually approached only in the context of study of the origins of the Islamic city, focusing on some data that led to the thesis of the Roman occupation of the site of the actual city, namely a Roman inscription which mentions the existence of a temple dedicated to Neptune in Silves.