Since the revolution of September 1969 very bold and expensive experiments have been mounted to test the productivity of Libya's soil and water resources. Ten years on it is appropriate to review these experiments in terms of the extension of the irrigated and cultivated area as well as with respect to the impact of such innovations on the renewable natural resources base and the viability of agricultural production in existing or changed economic circumstances.

Libyan economic development takes place in the special circumstances of an oil economy in which the massive oil revenues accruing to the government are deployed almost exclusively through the public sector via ministries and secretariats. In an oil economy a special and inescapable burden of responsibility falls to the government to lead and direct economic and social change (Penrose 1973, p7) and this role has at no time been avoided by the revolutionary government. On the contrary there has been a progressive rationalisation of activity and property since 1969 so that by 1979 almost all commercial and industrial activity, as well as housing and services were controlled by government agencies.

The agricultural sector has been affected by this trend towards public intervention directly through the capital invested in cultivation, irrigation and livestock and indirectly through the control of the marketing of agricultural products. The final phase of this interaction is seen in the new proposal to reorganize the farming of the coastal strip of the Jefara Plain and the coastal area as far as east Misuratah, with a view to creating viable agricultural units able to support a Libyan family with no outside labour. The economic, social and ideological implications of this proposal are immense not to speak of the opportunity which such a reorganization would present for the rational management of the crucial and much impaired groundwater resource upon which irrigated farming depends in the favoured and therefore ‘over-developed’ coastal strip.

Among the inscriptions of ancient Teucheira copied by R. Pacho during his visit to Cyrenaica in 1825 is a Latin funerary text for a Roman legionary veteran named M. Aurelius Apollonius. Traditionally his legion has been interpreted as XV Apollinaris – reasonably enough on the basis of Pacho's drawing. W. Rossberg, who was the first to discuss the text, recalled that a veteran might well have come to Cyrenaica as one of the colonists settled there by Hadrian after the Jewish Revolt of A.D.115/7; and when it became known that XV Apollinaris was in fact one of the legions from which those colonists were drawn the idea was, rightly, revived by S. Applebaum. It must, however, be rejected, for rediscovery of the inscription shows that it has been misread, that the legion is II Adiutrix and the veteran probably a Cyrenaican himself.

The inscription is to be found in Quarry IX to the east of the ancient city and has been for many years masked by a palm tree. It occupies an approximately rectangular area above the door of a rock-cut tomb in the west wall of the quarry. Its letters are 0.035–0.04 m. high in lines 1–4, 0.05 in line 5, and are very unevenly spaced throughout since the cutter had to avoid holes in the surface of the stone. There are superscript bars above the abbreviations in lines 1, 2 and the figure in line 3.

The large numbers of roughly-cut inscriptions on the inner face of the ancient city wall at Tocra, in the area south of the east gate, have often attracted attention. Interest in them flagged when it was realised that they consisted essentially of personal names; but recent developments in onomastic studies have given a new significance to personal names. Moreover since R. G. Goodchild dug there in the sixties it has been apparent that the inscribed stretch of the city-wall had been utilised for one side of a gymnasium courtyard and that the inscriptions on it are ephebic, so that they should throw some light on a civic instituion very much at the heart of the city's life. My purpose here, however, is simply to clarify the date at which the surviving texts were cut.

The gymnasium has produced two main and one subsidiary series of texts. The first consists of graffiti on blocks found in situ on the inner face of the city wall as described above, and also on the inner face of the gymnasium wall flanking the main east/west street of the city, with additional items on blocks which patently derive from the gymnasium, but are found loose or re-used in many other parts of the site. Their appearance gives the impression that they were the work of the ephebes themselves and, since they often overcut one another, that they were produced over a period of time. They normally present personal names without patronymics, often in groups or in pairs, and with a brief indication that the associated persons were customary companions and sometimes certainly lovers.

During his four decades of rule, Genseric appears to many Africans – Catholic and pro-Roman – as the incarnation of the Antichrist. For the African municipal aristocracy he represented the image of a greedy barbarian obsessed with power, the persecutor and the gravedigger of Romanitas. If we look closely, Genseric had learned from the Romans how to manage strength and diplomacy, for negotiating with the Romans in particular. He sought to perpetuate his conquests by organising treaties with Ravenna and Constantinople, which did not prevent him from launching parallel plundering campaigns in Africa and along the coast that brought him respect and financial gain. First king of the vandals, he managed to create the first barbaric state on the territory of the empire. He was the type of leader who can be considered a visionary, bringing to fulfilment the material, political and spiritual conquests of a new era, the Spätantike.

During their second campaign at the temple of Apollo in August 1861, Robert Murdoch Smith and Edwin Porcher discovered a large marble female head along the northern edge of the building's peristasis. The sculpture was subsequently sent to the British Museum. A recent re-examination of the head suggests that it deserves serious more attention than it has hitherto merited, principally for its quality, and the fact that it displays characteristics highly indicative of Hellenistic royal portraiture. Furthermore, comparison with a similarly sized and modelled male head discovered inside the temple presently identified as ‘Ptolemy Apion’ suggests the two should be considered as companion pieces. This paper attempts to identify the subject of the female head within the context of other sculpture originating from the temple, together with epigraphy relating to the Ptolemaic family at Cyrene. It also explores the possibility of a royal portrait group erected inside Cyrene's primary sacred space.

By kind permission of the Department of Antiquities and of Professor Antonino Di Vita, Director of the Italian Mission, and with the financial support of the Society for Libyan Studies, the Oxford Craven Committee and the Cambridge Faculty Board of Classics, the authors spent three weeks in the early summer of 1974 studying the circus at Lepcis Magna. During the sixty years in which Italian archaeologists have been working at Lepcis, parts of the circus have been cleared or excavated on several different occasions. Work was begun in 1924-5 by R. Bartoccini at the monumental arch at the eastern end of the arena and on the seating on the north-east curve. He also uncovered the meta prima and the adjacent east end of the spina. Since 1960 a much larger area has been uncovered successively by E. Vergara-Caffarelli, F. Russo and A. Di Vita, as part of the larger project of clearing and restoring the whole of the amphitheatre-circus complex. Although work in most recent years has concentrated upon the complete clearance and restoration of the amphitheatre (which is cut into the hillside immediately south of the circus), two-thirds of the long south side of the circus has been revealed together with about half of the spina and most of the starting gates (carceres) at the west end.

On May 1, 1973 Sayyed Mohamed A. Sarria informed the controller of the office at Leptis that there was a large cavity on the construction site of an Indian contracting company working on an electrical project. The Controller went to inspect the cavity on May 15th. The site is located near an old castle, named Gasr Gelda, and about 500 metres north-west of the Moah family residence, which is about 2.5 km south of Leptis. When the cavity was examined it was identified as the courtyard of an ancient tomb, 3 m deep. After cleaning the courtyard, the workmen found the main entrances of two tombs which were closed by two big stones. Each tomb (Fig.1) consists of a small underground chamber with a gently curving ceiling and plastered walls (see plates 1 and 2).

Many important objects were found in Tomb 1 and these were transferred to the Leptis museum store (see plate 3). The second was found empty, having probably not been used. It seems to have been dug in the rock and it had several niches.

Exploring the musical soundscape of a city like Tripoli is fascinating as much as it is challenging to retrieve meanings underlying the same soundscape. The fine blend between, for instance, ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ musical practices and aesthetics, appertaining to this soundscape, presents the music researcher with a complex scenario to investigate. For this purpose, contemporary music research recognises music ethnography (superficially defined as the writing about the way people get involved in and make music) as a means by which such scenarios can be explored. In line with this, the present article explores Tripoli's musical soundscape by presenting vignettes of people listening to music, actively participating in musical events, as well as making music. Such depictions must shed light on the musical life in contemporary Libya with particular focus on the musical life in Tripoli. The commentary accompanying these vignettes links the sound not only with the people interacting with it, but also with the events that generate it, the place in which it evolves and the socio-cultural context that endows it with meaning.

The difficulty with the study of Libyan history, certainly before the sixteenth century, is twofold: firstly the definition of Libya as a subject, secondly the lack of information. The definition of the subject starts from the modern political boundaries, which do not predate the Ottomans; the lack of information must be related to the fact that most of the territory is desert, and peripheral to the concerns of wealthier and more powerful neighbours — Egypt, Tunis, Kanem/Borno, and the maritime empires of western Europe. Instead of a positive entity of which the modern political limits are only the most recent expression, it is all too easy to see a hollow space between neighbours north, south, east and west. How to fill that space conceptually and evidentially is the problem explicit or implicit in all the literature over the years since the foundation of the Society for Libyan Studies. This essay does not aim to be exhaustive, simply to indicate the lines of thought and investigation, and offer some conclusions.

Oil wealth has transformed Libya, a desertic and sparsely populated country, bringing dramatic demographic changes (Zoghlami 1979). El Mehdawi and Clarke (1982) and Lawless and Kezeiri (1983) describe and analyse the growing polarisation of the population in the north-west and north-east coastal regions which contain the two largest cities, Tripoli and Benghazi. They show that in recent years spatial duality has been sharply intensified by strong rural to urban migration and also by an increase in interregional migration. The concentration of new development programmes in certain urban centres has been the main cause of the development differential among the regions. As a result the regions which include the most important urban centres have become the most prosperous and the others have become less developed or even depressed. This has been the main cause of the rapid increase in both rural to urban migration and interregional migration. The inhabitants of the less developed regions have continued to move in increasing numbers to those which are more developed. The large majority of migrants who moved from these less developed regions are represented by rural people who have changed their place of residence and their occupation. They have left their work in the rural sector to seek employment in the industrial and service sector. As a result agricultural production has declined. The agrarian sector now employs less than a quarter of the Libyan workforce and the percentage of nomads and semi-nomads has declined to under 10% of the population. Albergani and Vignet-Zunz (1982) have shown that colonial invasion and occupation followed by the Second World War threatened the Bedouin of the Jebel Akhdar with extinction, not through sedentarisation but through the mass migration of a devastated rural population. The advent of oil and the high salary levels available in urban centres further encouraged this tendency. Gannous (1979) studied the movement of Bedouin from rural areas to the town of Al Abiyar and the erosion of Bedouin culture by urban values.

Libya is by most definitions an oil-based economy. Yet academic study of the national oil industry is at best fragmentary. The reasons for the poor showing of the Libyan oil industry in the literature stem partly from the relative decline in its international importance since the mid-1970s and partly from the ambiguity over acknowledgement of the role of the oil industry within Libya.

The growth of the Libyan oil industry dates from 1951 and the coming of national independence. There had been surveys of a small scale and technologically limited kind in Libya in the Italian period. Some shows of oil had been discovered in Tripolitania as early as 1914 when water wells were drilled to supply Tripoli city (Waddams 1980, 27). Other oil was discovered in Tripolitania in the 1930s and a full scale exploration programme was prepared in the years 1937–1940 by the Italian national oil corporation under the geological guidance of Professor Ardito Desio, but never fully implemented due to the onset of war. Indeed, Desio was to return as a consultant to the oil companies working in Libya in the 1950s.

In 1953 a mineral law was issued which paved the way for the grant of concessions to foreign oil companies to explore and develop oil resources. A petroleum law was promulgated in 1955 which offered rather more favourable terms on fees, rents, royalties and expensing to the oil companies than were available in other longer established oil producing states of North Africa and the Middle East (cf. Waddams, 1980, 57–70). At the same time, the assets of the oil companies in Libya were given far reaching protection under amendments of the petroleum law. The consequence of the generous operating terms of this and subsequent revisions of the law (1961 and 1965) was a rapid growth in the number of concessionaries exploring for oil within the country. The open-door policy pursued by the government was much criticised at a later period. Undoubtedly, however, it did succeed in attracting a wide spectrum of oil companies into Libya, including the major ones, such as Esso, Royal Dutch/Shell, Texaco, Gulf, BP and Mobil, together with many small independent interests. The best international techniques for exploration and development were put to work in Libya within a very short space of time, bringing the country rapidly into the ranks of the main oil-exporting states. Oil exports began on a commercial scale in September 1961 from Esso's Zelten fields in the Sirtican area, concession No. 6.

The purpose of this paper is to present several avenues of reflection linked first to the onomastics of the African episcopate of the Byzantine period, then to its development. A quick overview of the most typical characteristics of onomastics of this period will be presented, followed by a description of the remarkable development of this African episcopate between the sixth and the beginning of the eighth century. It will conclude with observations on the African onomastic repertoire of the Protobyzantine era, which reflects the evolution of mentalities within the very interior of the African Christian people and the different circles within it.

Based on an analysis of the Islamic literature and a comparison with the toponyms and archaeology of the region, this article contributes to the topography of Lepcis Magna by identifying the location of the village of Banu Hassan ten kilometres to the west of Lepcis, in the territory of Silin. A survey of the site, still known as Qaryat Banū Hassan, confirms its potential as the road station mentioned by both al-Idrīsī and al-‘Abdarī, though erroneously located by al-Idrisi to the east of Lepcis.

After the victory of El-Alamein, a military administration was set up in Libya to act as a caretaker government until a peace-treaty should be concluded. This administration assumed, as part of its responsibilities, the care of the country's antiquities. In Cyrenaica the staff of the Italian Soprintendenza had been withdrawn; in Tripolitania, under Dr. G. Pesce, the Soprintendenza remained in operation. At the instance of Sir Mortimer (then Brigadier) Wheeler, Major J. B. Ward-Perkins, who was serving with the Eighth Army, was appointed Acting Adviser in Archaeology to the British Military Administration. In the summer of 1943 he made a number of recommendations as to the safeguarding of the antiquities, and in August 1944 Major C. G. C. Hyslop was appointed as Antiquities Officer for the two Libyan territories, Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, under British control. The British Antiquities Officer worked in close conjunction with the Italian Soprintendenza at Tripoli, but in Cyrenaica he had to rely almost entirely on his own resources. Maintenance and reorganization were first priorities but Hyslop also found time to issue an English guidebook to Cyrenaica. Major D. E. L. Haynes who followed Hyslop as Antiquities Officer late in 1945 produced a similar volume on Tripolitania, which after two subsequent editions and revisions commissioned by the Libyan Government in 1955 and 1959, is still the standard guide-book to the classical antiquities. Haynes was succeeded by Goodchild in September 1946, followed by Morgan in 1948 and Johns in 1950. The main responsibility of the Antiquities Department continued to be the care of the important coastal sites excavated by Italian archaeologists between 1912 and 1942, but the presence of British forces with personnel trained in desert travel and also with facilities such as transport, stores, camping-equipment, made it possible to carry out archaeological field work, especially in the pre-desert areas.

In the article The Hellenistic and Byzantine Defences of Tocra (Taucheira) by David Smith and James Crow, which appeared in Libyan Studies 29 (1998), photographs by David Smith and Charles Daniels were used, but not explicitly attributed. The attributions are:

Figs 5-8, 10-12, 15-18, 20, 22-24: David Smith.

Figs 4, 9, 14, 21: Charles Daniels.