Sunday, 14 June 2009
Leptis Magna
Leptis Magna
| Archaeological Site of Leptis Magna* | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Cultural |
| Criteria | i, ii, iii |
| Reference | 183 |
| Region** | Arab States |
| Inscription history | |
| Inscription | 1982 (6th Session) |
Leptis Magna,(Arabic: لبده) also known as Lectis Magna (or Lepcis Magna as it is sometimes spelled), also called Lpqy or Neapolis, was a prominent city of the Roman Empire. Its ruins are located in Al Khums, Libya, 130 km east of Tripoli, on the coast where the Wadi Lebda meets the sea. The site is one of the most spectacular and unspoiled Roman ruins in the Mediterranean.
History
The city appears to have been founded by Phoenician colonists sometime around 1100 BC, although it did not achieve prominence until Carthage became a major power in the Mediterranean Sea in the 4th century BC. It nominally remained part of Carthage's dominions until the end of the Third Punic War in 146 BC and then became part of the Roman Republic, although from about 200 BC onward, it was for all intents and purposes an independent city.
Leptis Magna remained as such until the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, when the city and the surrounding area were formally incorporated into the empire as part of the province of Africa. It soon became one of the leading cities of Roman Africa and a major trading post.
Leptis achieved its greatest prominence beginning in 193, when a native son, Lucius Septimius Severus, became emperor. He favored his hometown above all other provincial cities, and the buildings and wealth he lavished on it made Leptis Magna the third-most important city in Africa, rivaling Carthage and Alexandria. In 205, he and the imperial family visited the city and received great honors.
Among the changes that Severus introduced were to create a magnificent new forum and to rebuild the docks. The natural harbour had a tendency to silt up, but the Severan changes made this worse, and the eastern wharves are extremely well preserved, since they were hardly used.
Leptis over-extended itself at this period. During the Crisis of the Third Century, when trade declined precipitously, Leptis Magna's importance also fell into a decline, and by the middle of the fourth century, large parts of the city had been abandoned. Ammianus Marcellinus recounts that the crisis was worsened by a corrupt Roman governor named Romanus during a major tribal raid who demanded bribes to protect the city. The ruined city could not pay these and complained to the emperor Valentianian. Romanus then bribed people at court and arranged for the Leptan envoys to be punished "for bringing false accusations". It enjoyed a minor renaissance beginning in the reign of the emperor Theodosius I.
In 439, Leptis Magna and the rest of the cities of Tripolitania fell under the control of the Vandals when their king, Gaiseric, captured Carthage from the Romans and made it his capital. Unfortunately for the future of Leptis Magna, Gaiseric ordered the city's walls demolished so as to dissuade its people from rebelling against Vandal rule. The people of Leptis and the Vandals both paid a heavy price for this in 523 when a group of Berber raiders sacked the city.
Belisarius recaptured Leptis Magna in the name of Rome ten years later, and in 534, he destroyed the kingdom of the Vandals. Leptis became a provincial capital of the Eastern Roman Empire (see Byzantine Empire ) but never recovered from the destruction wreaked upon it by the Berbers. It was the site of a massacre of Berber chiefs by the Roman authorities in 543. By the time of the Arab conquest of Tripolitania in the 650s, the city was abandoned except for a Byzantine garrison force.
Today, the site of Leptis Magna is the site of some of the most impressive ruins of the Roman period.
New discoveries
In June 2005, it was revealed that archaeologists from the University of Hamburg had been working along the coast of Libya when they uncovered a 30 ft length of five colorful mosaics created during the 1st or 2nd century. The mosaics show with exceptional clarity depictions of a warrior in combat with a deer, four young men wrestling a wild bull to the ground, and a gladiator resting in a state of fatigue and staring at his slain opponent. The mosaics decorated the walls of a cold plunge pool in a bath house within a Roman villa at Wadi Lebda in Leptis Magna. The gladiator mosaic is noted by scholars as one of the finest examples of representational mosaic art ever seen—a "masterpiece comparable in quality with the Alexander Mosaic in Pompeii." The mosaics were originally discovered in the year 2000 but were kept secret in order to avoid looting. They are currently on display in the Leptis Magna Museum.
Jebel Akhdar (Libya)
Al'Jabel Al'Akhdar (Arabic: الجبل الأخضر meaning The Green Mountain) is a heavily forested, fertile upland area in eastern Libya. It is located in the modern municipality of Al Jabal al Akhdar. The region is one of the very few forested areas of Libya, one of the least forested countries on Earth.
Jebel Akhdar consists of a mountainous plateaue (rising in some places to an altitude of 500 m/1,600 ft) cut by several valleys. It lies north of Benghazi and south of Derna. It is the wettest part of Libya, receiving some 600 mm/24 inches of precipitation annually. This rainfall means that the area has large forests, and enjoys rich fruit, potato, and cereal agriculture, something of a rarity in the arid country.
The ancient Greek colony of Cyrene was located in a lush valley in the Jebel Akhdar.
The Libyan leader Omar Mukhtar used this heavily forested mountainous region to resist the Italian military occupation of Libya for more than twenty years, where he organized and devised strategies for the Libyan resistance against the Italian colonization.
Libya in details
Libya is a country located in North Africa. Bordering the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Libya lies between Egypt to the east, Sudan to the southeast, Chad and Niger to the south, and Algeria and Tunisia to the west.
With an area of almost 1.8 million square kilometres (700,000 sq mi), 90% of which is desert, Libya is the fourth largest country in Africa by area, and the 17th largest in the world. The capital, Tripoli, is home to 1.7 million of Libya's 5.7 million people. The three traditional parts of the country are Tripolitania, the Fezzan, and Cyrenica. Libya has the second highest Gross domestic product per capita of Africa, behind Equatorial Guinea. This is largely due to its large petroleum reserves and low population.
The flg of Libya consists of a green field with no other characteristics. It is the only national flag in the world with just one color and no design, insignia, or other details.
Name
The name "Libya" is an indigenous (i.e. Berber) one, which is attested in ancient Egyptian texts as citation needed
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, R'bw (= Libu). The latter refers to one of the tribes of Berber peoples living west of the Nile . In Greek , the tribesmen were called Libues, Latinised to Libyes (with Greek u transcribed as y in Latin). Their country became Libuā (or in Classical Attic Libuē with the standard Attic sound change ā > ē), Latinised Libya. But in ancient Greece the term had a broader meaning, encompassing all of North Africa west of Egypt .
Later on, at the time of Ibn Khaldun, the same big tribe was known as Lawata.
History
Ancient Libya
Archaeological evidence indicates that from as early as the 8,000 BC, the coastal plain of Ancient Libya was inhabited by a Neolithic people, the Berbers, who were skilled in the domestication of cattle and the cultivation of crops.
Later, the area known in modern times as Libya also was occupied by a series of other peoples, with the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Persian empire, Romans, Vandals, Arabs, Turks and Byzantines ruling all or part of the area.
Although the Greeks and Romans left ruins at Cyrene, Leptis Magna, and Sabratha, little other evidence remains of these ancient cultures. Some cultural and religious exchanges occurred with the Ancient Egyptians, especially in the northern portion containing the delta of the Nile, that is called Lower Egypt. The prehistoric evidence is fragmentary, but historical records later document continued influences.
Pockets of Berber population remain in modern Libya, but dispersal of Berbers north as far as Ireland and Scandinavia is documented in genetic markers studied by physical anthropologists and dispersal in Africa from the Atlantic coast to the Siwa oasis in Egypt, seems to have followed climatic changes causing increasing desertification. Now the greatest number of Berbers in Africa is in Morocco (about 42% of the population) and in Algeria (about 27% of the population), as well as Tunisia and Libya, but exact statistics are not available.
Phoenicians
The Phoenicians were the first to establish trading posts in Libya, when the merchants of Tyre (in present-day Lebanon) developed commercial relations with the Berber tribes and made treaties with them to ensure their cooperation in the exploitation of raw materials. By the fifth century BC the greatest of the Phoenician colonies, Carthage, had extended its across much of North Africa, where a distinctive civilization, known as Punic, came into being. Punic settlements on the Libyan coast included Oea (Tripoli), Libdah (Leptis Magna) and Sabratha . All these were in an area that later was called,Tripolis , or "Three Cities". Libya's current-day capital Tripoli takes its name from this.
Greeks
The Greeks conquered Eastern Libya when, according to tradition, emigrants from the crowded island of Thera were commanded by the oracle at Delphi to seek a new home in North Africa. In 630 BC, they founded the city of Cyrene. Within 200 years, four more important Greek cities were established in the area: Barce (Al Marj); Euhesperides (later Berenice, present-day Benghazi); Teuchira (later Arsinoe, present-day Tukrah); and Apollonia (Susah), the port of Cyrene. Together with Cyrene, they were known as the Pentapolis (Five Cities).
Romans
The Romans unified all three regions of Libya. Tripolitania and Cyrenaica became prosperous Roman provinces and remained so for more than six hundred years. Roman ruins, such as those of Leptis Magna, which is seen in the photograph displayed to the right, attest to the vitality of the region during the Roman occupation.
At the time, populous cities and even small towns enjoyed the amenities of urban life consistent with those in Rome. Merchants and artisans from many parts of the Roman world established themselves in North Africa, but the character of the cities of Tripolitania remained decidedly Punic and, in Cyrenaica, Greek.
Under Islam
Libya was conquered by Uqba ibn Nafi in 644 and fully conquered in 655, forming part of the Ummayad Caliphate. This was superseded by the Abbasids in 750, but in practice Libya enjoyed considerable local autonomy under the Aghlabid dynasty. Arab soldiers, spreading their new religion of Islam, entered Cyrenaica in 642 and occupied Tripoli in 643. A succession of Arab and Berber dynasties then controlled what is now Libya. The culture of northwestern Libya developed along with the political units just west of it, while development in the east was strongly influenced by neighboring Egypt.
Ottoman Turks
The Ottoman Turks conquered the country in the mid-16th century, and the three States or "Wilayat" of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan (which make up Libya) remained part of their empire with the exception of the virtual autonomy of the Karamanlis. The Karamanlis ruled from 1711 until 1835 mainly in Tripolitania, but had influence in Cyrenaica and Fezzan as well by the mid 18th century. This constituted a first glimpse in recent history of the united and independent Libya that was to re-emerge two centuries later. Ironically, reunification came about through the unlikely route of an invasion (Italo-Turkish War, 1911-1912) and occupation starting from 1911 when Italy simultaneously turned the three regions into colonies.
Italian Colony
From 1912 to 1927, the territory of Libya was known as Italian North Africa. From 1927 to 1934, the territory was split into two colonies run by Italian governors, Italian Cyrenaica and Italian Tripolitania. During this Italian colony period, between 20% and 50% of the Libyan population died in the struggle for independence, and mainly in prison camps. Some 150,000 Italians settled in Libya, constituting roughly one-fifth of the total population.
In 1934, Italy adopted the name "Libya" (used by the Greeks for all of North Africa, except Egypt) as the official name of the colony (made up of the three Provinces of Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fezzan). King Idris I, Emir of Cyrenaica, led Libyan resistance to Italian occupation between the two World Wars. Between 1928 and 1932 the Italian military "killed half the Bedouin population (directly or through starvation in camps)." From 1943 to 1951, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were under British administration, while the French controlled Fezzan. In 1944, Idris returned from exile in Cairo but declined to resume permanent residence in Cyrenaica until the removal of some aspects of foreign control in 1947. Under the terms of the 1947 peace treaty with the Allies, Italy relinquished all claims to Libya.
United Kingdom of Libya
On November 21, 1949, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution stating that Libya should become independent before January 1, 1952. Idris represented Libya in the subsequent UN negotiations. On December 24, 1951, Libya declared its independence as the United Kingdom of Libya, a constitutional and hereditary monarchy under King Idris.
The discovery of significant oil reserves in 1959 and the subsequent income from petroleum sales enabled one of the world's poorest nations to establish an extremely wealthy state. Although oil drastically improved the Libyan government's finances, popular resentment began to build over the increased concentration of the nation's wealth in the hands of King Idris and the national elite. This discontent continued to mount with the rise of Nasserism and Arab nationalism throughout North Africa and the Middle East.
Coup of Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi
On September 1, 1969, a small group of military officers led by then 27-year-old army officer Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi staged a coup d’état against King Idris. At the time, Idris was in Turkey for medical treatment. His nephew, Crown Prince Sayyid Hasan ar-Rida al-Mahdi as-Sanussi, became King. It was clear that the revolutionary officers who had announced the deposition of King Idris did not want to appoint him over the instruments of state as King. Sayyid quickly found that he had substantially less power as the new King than he had earlier had as a mere Prince. Before the end of September 1, Sayyid Hasan ar-Rida had been formally deposed by the revolutionary army officers and put under house arrest. Meanwhile, revolutionary officers abolished the monarchy, and proclaimed the new Libyan Arab Republic. Gaddafi was, and is to this day, referred to as the "Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution" in government statements and the official press.
Geography
Libya extends over 1,759,540 square kilometres (679,182 sq. mi), making it the 17th largest nation in the world by size . Libya is somewhat smaller than Indonesia, and roughly the size of the US state of Alaska. It is bound to the north by the Mediterranean Sea, the west by Tunisia and Algeria, the southwest by Niger, the south by Chad and Sudan and to the east by Egypt. At 1770 kilometres (1100 miles), Libya's coastline is the longest of any African country bordering the Mediterranean. The portion of the Mediterranean Sea north of Libya is often called the Libyan Sea. The climate is mostly dry and desertlike in nature. However, the northern regions enjoy a milder Mediterranean climate.
Natural hazards come in the form of hot, dry, dust-laden sirocco (known in Libya as the gibli). This is a southern wind blowing from one to four days in spring and autumn. There are also dust storms and sandstorms. Oases can also be found scattered throughout Libya, the most important of which are Ghadames and Kufra .
Libyan Desert
The Libyan Desert, which covers much of Libya, is one of the most arid places on earth. In places, decades may pass without rain, and even in the highlands rainfall happens erratically, once every 5–10 years. At Uweinat, the last recorded rainfall was in September 1998. There is a large depression, the Qattara Depression, just to the south of the northernmost scarp, with Siwa oasis at its western extremity. The depression continues in a shallower form west, to the oases of Jaghbub and Jalo.
Likewise, the temperature in the Libyan desert can be extreme; in 1922, the town of Al 'Aziziyah, which is located Southwest of Tripoli, recorded an air temperature of 57.8 °C (136.0 °F), generally accepted as the highest recorded naturally occurring air temperature reached on Earth.
There are a few scattered uninhabited small oases, usually linked to the major depressions, where water can be found by digging to a few feet in depth. In the west there is a widely dispersed group of oases in unconnected shallow depressions, the Kufra group, consisting of Tazerbo, Rebianae and Kufra. Aside from the scarps, the general flatness is only interrupted by a series of plateaus and massifs near the centre of the Libyan Desert, around the convergence of the Egyptian-Sudanese-Libyan borders.
Slightly further to the south are the massifs of Arkenu, Uweinat and Kissu. These granite mountains are very ancient, having formed long before the sandstones surrounding them. Arkenu and Western Uweinat are ring complexes very similar to those in the Aïr Mountains. Eastern Uweinat (the highest point in the Libyan Desert) is a raised sandstone plateau adjacent to the granite part further west. The plain to the north of Uweinat is dotted with eroded volcanic features.
With the discovery of oil in the 1950s also came the discovery of a massive aquifer underneath much of the country. The water in this aquifer pre-dates the last ice ages and the Sahara desert itself. The country is also home to the Arkenu craters, double impact craters found in the desert.