Libya History

History

Libya has a long history of incursions and empires, but it did not become a unified and independent country until 1951. Historically it had three regions of Triploitania to the west, Cyrenaica to the east and The Fezzan to the south.

Around 8,000 BC, Neolithic peoples of the Sahara started recording their lives in rock paintings, showing an abundance of wildlife and vegetation, long since gone. 7,000 years later Phoenician traders, from the eastern Mediterranean, introduced olive growing to the North African coast and started a successful trade in olive oil. They founded the ports of Sabratha, Leptis and Oea (modern day Tripoli). Also exporting gold, ivory, ebony and slaves from the Sudan brought north through the desert trading routes. This Punic empire, now centred on Carthage controlled the coast from Tripolitania to the Atlantic and continued its dominance until the rise of the Roman Empire in the first century BC.

In the east the Greeks established the city of Cyrene in 631 BC, on the Green Mountain or Jebel Akhdar. Here even today a variety of agriculture takes place in a more moderate climate than the rest of Libya. The Greek influence was already waning with the arrival of the Romans and it was not until the second century AD that the magnificent roman towns, still to be seen today, reached their peak.

An earthquake in 365 AD caused the final demise of the Roman occupation and large areas of the shoreline towns became buried under the sands, only to be partially resurrected by Byzantine incursions.

The Arabs, that form the mainstay of the current population, brought the trappings of Islam in the 7th century, conquering the largely Berber inhabitants. But by the 15th century, Spanish control and that by the Knights of St. John of Malta left their marks and the Ottomans eventually had 350 years of occupation. In 1911 the Italians took over and remained dominant until the Second World War. Libya saw some major battles along the coast between Benghazi and El Alamein in Egypt, which culminated with the British taking control of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica until independence in 1951.

During the reign of King Idris Libya's vast oil wealth began to be exploited. Corruption in the regime probably led to the revolution of 1st September 1968, when the colonels took over in an almost bloodless coup. Colonel Ghadaffi has led the country for 36 years, through a long period of sanctions resulting from state approved terrorist activity, culminating in the bombing of the PanAM Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988. Now sanctions have been removed and oil interests are once again booming on an international scale, it is time to start encouraging tourism, probably for the first time in Libya's history.