It is becoming increasingly clear that, beginning from the Late Bronze age, links between the Aegean world and the North African coast remained unbroken except perhaps for a brief interlude immediately after the foundation of the Phoenician colonies in the area between the Gulf of Syrte and what is now Tunisia. The example of Cyrene, which has not received the attention it merits outside the narrow circle of Libyan experts, is one of the most clear-cut and eloquent. Even though the paucity of finds and their provenance from infill call for caution, reanalysis of the archaeological record—which has recently gained an important new component—sheds fresh light on the Phoenician colonial process as a whole. The reanalysis, whatever one's point of view, should not be restricted by conventional chronology, and should encourage us to reconsider other accepted ideas about the growth of the original settlement and the links between the Battiad royal family and other members of the Cyrenaican community.

Apollonia's East Fort, set on a promontory overlooking the sea east of the walled town, is part of a series of outlying fortresses guarding access to the port and Cyrene. Excavated by the University of Michigan in 1967, the fort is dated by coins and pottery to the second half of the fourth or first quarter of the third century BC. A striking design feature is its use of cut-down bedrock for the lower wall levels. The same technique is employed for Cyrene's Hellenistic defensive curtain north of the Caravanserai and later in the construction of Roman-period Gasr el-Haneia. It is furthermore utilised in a fairly broad range of tombs and cultic monuments throughout the province. Traceable as far back as the Neolithic period, rupestrian architecture first appears in Egypt by the Middle Kingdom. Between c. 1000 and 500 BC it spreads from thence to Syro-Palestine, western Asia Minor, Urartu and eventually as far east as India. Rather than owing its deployment in Cyrenaica to the building traditions of Egypt, it is more likely the result of the region's second wave of colonists arriving from Asia Minor c. 580 BC, given that Cyrene's Archaic rock-cut tombs bear comparison with the contemporary tomb architecture of SW Turkey.

Terracotta figures have been uncovered in vast quantities in the cemeteries of the Greek cities of Cyrenaica from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. While the terracottas from more recent excavations have of course remained in Libya, the majority of those brought to light in the nineteenth century are now divided between the national museums of three European capitals: Paris, Madrid and London. The Louvre collection is the largest of the three, consisting of some 400 pieces, mostly acquired by the consul M. Vattier de Bourville in the cemeteries of Cyrene and Benghazi in 1848; the majority are of the Hellenistic period, and have recently received full publication in the final volume of Mme Simone Besques' monumental catalogue. The Cyrenaican terracottas in Madrid, purchased from the collection of one Tómas Asensi in 1876, are about ninety in number, and of these roughly half are Hellenistic in date; the few given a provenance are said to come from the cemeteries of Cyrene. The Madrid terracottas were published by Alfred Laumonier in 1921, and the descriptions and photographs in his catalogue are still useful.

The British Museum has around 300 terracotta figures from Cyrenaica, of which approximately 180 whole figures or fragments can be counted as Hellenistic. The archaic and classical figures were published by Dr Reynold Higgins in the first volume of his catalogue of British Museum terracottas, while a significant proportion of the later pieces were included by H. B. Walters in his earlier catalogue. However, the entire collection of post-classical Cyrenaican material will be treated in greater detail in the new catalogue of the British Museum's Hellenistic terracottas, currently in preparation.

Bardia has a natural deep-water harbour confined by cliffs, making it an ideal submarine haven. It held a strategic position in the last war in connection with the capture of Tobruk, and was used by both the Germans and British as a supply base (Fig. 1). Set back from the shoreline were numerous single-storey, flat-roofed buildings overlooking the harbour, one of which was a lookout post where the mural under discussion survives.

On 30th December 1941 the Allies launched a decisive attack on Bardia (Liddell Hart 1953, 177–178), which surrendered on 2nd January 1942 (Murphy 1961, 511–512). On 27 th January Rommel had struck again at Benghazi; General Auchinleck gave orders to withdraw, and formed a front line near Gazala in early February.

According to its contemporary War Diary, the 5th Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment arrived in the Western Desert from Palestine and Syria on 20th February, and two days later took over from the 11th Indian Brigade approximately 20 miles south of Gazala (W.O.169/5076). One of the soldiers in this batallion was Private John Frederick Brill 4617871 of the Royal Army Service Corps, the artist of the mural in the Painted Room at Bardia.

The 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea will shape worldwide maritime management and offshore jurisdiction for generations to come. Libya will gain substantially from the new convention notably in respect of a 12 nautical mile territorial waters, and the acquisition of one of the largest Exclusive Economic Zones in the Mediterranean. The known resources of this zone are not abundant, though some useful oilfields have been found. Several of Libya's offshore boundaries remain to be fixed, and Libya's claim to the Gulf of Surt as ‘historic waters’ creates some uncertainty. An upsurge in Libyan offshore activity, including conservation activities, is likely in the future.

The Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya has, since 1980, been involved in no fewer than three important judgments at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, dealing with Libya-Tunisia, the Libya-Malta and the Libya-Chad boundaries. The Government of Libya accepted all the judgments made at the ICJ without equivocation.

The settlement of the Mediterranean continental shelf issues with Tunisia (1982) and with Malta (1985) may be seen as technical adjustments leading to a fixing of boundaries in undemarcated areas. Both judgments were comparatively favourable to Libya and extended Libya's area of hydrocarbon activities off-shore.

In the matter of Libyan land claims to the Aouzou strip on the Chad borderlands, the situation was rather different. The international boundary between Libya and Chad was laid down under a 1955 convention. In 1972 the Libyan Government annexed the Aouzou strip. The ICJ gave its judgment on 3rd February 1994, by 16 votes to 1 finding that the boundary between the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and the Republic of Chad is defined by the Treaty of Friendship and Good Neighbourliness concluded on 10th August 1955 between the French Republic and the United Kingdom of Libya, thus restoring the Aouzou strip to Chad.

A select bibliography of sources dealing with Libya's international boundaries is attached, itemising key texts in Western languages.

Ain Wif is well known to students of Roman Tripolitania as the settlement and military road-station of Thenadassa, studied and published by Goodchild and Ward-Perkins. The site lies on the summit of the eastern bank of the Wadi Wif prior to its confluence with the larger Wadi Hammam, and is some fifteen kilometres west of Sidi as Sid (Tazzoli) village. The ain (spring) is marked by a small oasis of palms and, as Goodchild and Ward-Perkins pointed out, the assured water-supply was presumably the determining factor in the establishment of the Roman settlement, sometime in the first century A.D.

During a visit to the site in December 1978, as Research Assistant to Olwen Brogan for the Society of Libyan Studies, I discovered a dense concentration of struck flints immediately to the north-east of the oasis. (Plate ?. Map ref. UR 463 686 on sheet 1989. II, Qarat al Bayda, series P761 of the U.S. Army Map Service). With the help of Miss Tina Watson, 124 struck flints, mostly waste flakes, and a number of fire-crazed flints were picked up from the surface within the space of half an hour. The main concentration lies within an area of about five metres square on sand and gravel and, no doubt, represents a prehistoric knapping-floor. It is doubtful whether much, if any, stratigraphy will be found on the site.

Le lien étroit qui existe entre la cité et son territoire est une évidence qui a gagné en force avec le développement des recherches sur la chôra. En ce qui concerne la Libye, j'ai abordé la question lors du congrès tenu à Cambridge en 1983, et j'ai tenté de présenter une esquisse d'ensemble lors de la rencontre tenue à Paris en 1984. Si je désire m'arrêter cette fois-ci sur le territoire de Taucheira, c'est en raison de l'originalité qu'il présente parmi ceux des cités grecques de Libye. Taucheira est en effet la cité la plus ancienne après Cyrène, et sa fondation remonte certainement aux dernières années du VIIème siècle. J'ai d'autre part eu déjà l'occasion de montrer que, à l'origine, le site ne comportait aucun port naturel. Dans ces conditions, on peut légitimement se demander quel était l'intérêt de cette fondation. La question prend toute son actualité en raison de la reprise de travaux archéologiques d'ampleur grâce au Département des Antiquités de Libye avec le concours du Département d'Archéologie de l'Université Garyounis de Benghazi, sous la conduite de M. Fouad Bentaher.

Le territoire de Taucheira est bien défini, que ce soit du point de vue de la topographie, de la géologie ou de l'hydrographie.

Du point de vue topographique, le territoire de Taucheira est un élément de la plaine côtière qui prend naissance au Nord-Est au ras Tolmeita et qui s'étend jusqu'au fond de la Grande Syrte, en s'élargissant progressivement au fur et à mesure que l'on vas vers le Sud. Au Nord-Est, la côte vient baigner le pied du premier gradin. Au droit de Taucheira la plaine côtière mesure environ 4,5 km. D'une facon générale, cette plaine côtière offre toutes les caractéristiques du Sahel cyrénéen.

Calcreted debris flow breccias which form the lowermost Pleistocene deposits in the Hammadah Al Hamrah region are locally overlain by well cemented conglomerates of the Old Wadi Terraces. These are commonly capped by a younger, mature calcrete which is also found patchily developed on the Tertiary and Mesozoic limestone bedrock. Basalt lava flows rest either on an eroded surface in the conglomerates or directly on the debris flows; however, their relationship to the younger calcrete is rarely seen. In the area north-east of Mizdah a pre-younger calcrete age for the basalts is proposed on the basis of calcrete-filled fissures which invade the topmost part of the lava sequence. Similarity of the Mizdah sequence to that at Wadi Ghan in the Jabal Nafusah supports correlation of the conglomerates and basalt with Unit Q2 and the younger calcrete event with the upper calcrete of the Jifarah/Wadi Ghan areas. The calcreted breccia/debris flow deposits in turn correlate with Unit Q1 and the lower calcrete.

This paper publishes the texts of three new Roman milestones and two other Latin texts from the vicinity of Bani Walid. These stones were found lying on the ground in the western suburbs of the city, apparently having been collected up and put aside by the landowners in clearing their fields to grow crops on their farms. Although previously postulated, these milestones are the first confirmation that a Roman road ran through Bani Walid. As a group these new texts offer new insight into the development of the transport infrastructure and agricultural economy of this Pre-Desert zone in the third century AD.

The Garden Tomb is a remarkable funerary complex in the Southern Necropolis of Cyrene, consisting of two burial chambers set within a courtyard with a monumental Doric façade. The architectural arrangement of the main tomb, most likely dating back to the fourth century BC, shows at least three phases of re-use and alterations of the original interior, in use until the Late Imperial period. Three sculptures belonging to the tomb and the decorative features of the exterior (entrance door kymation) and interior (red, blue and ochre wall paint in the main burial) of the monument are noteworthy. The epigraphic apparatus, drawn in charcoal on the walls of the main burial, is significant both in terms of the form of the letters and its content: one of the two inscriptions appears to give the price of loculi for sale.

Legumes seem to have been cultivated and to have formed an essential part of the human diet during the Greek and Roman periods. This paper examines the cultivation of pulses in Cyrenaica during the Hellenistic era. It considers the regional production capacity for legumes to meet local needs and argues the involvement of different kinds of pulses in interregional commerce alongside cereals and other dry grains. This study has been implemented via investigating Hellenistic epigraphic evidence from Cyrene. It has traced the cost of pulses mentioned in inscriptions of the fourth and third/second centuries BC and compared them with that of wheat and barley. Pulses and cereal costs indicated by Diocletian's ‘Edict on Maximum Prices of AD 301’ have also been investigated to assess the general trend of their prices over time. The examination demonstrates that varieties of pulses were produced in Cyrenaica during the Hellenistic era and were likely as significant as wheat and barley. It also indicates that they were probably traded from the region alongside other dry commodities.

This paper considers some of the general issues relating to the history of exploration in the Libyan (Western) Desert. These issues are: why there have been remarkably few books on desert exploration; the despised role of the motor car which was so important in the exploration of the Libyan Desert; the longevity of some explorers, the prominent role of women in Islamic travels; the great deal of time – sometimes years – that some of the explorers spent in the field; the role of indigenous people; the parts played by professionals, and amateurs; the undertaking of scientific work of high quality, not least in the field of geomorphology; and the international nature of exploration.

It is proposed that the problem of the relationships between prehistoric art and archaeological context should not be based upon specific examples, but rather upon a global consideration of the stratigraphic sequence known for any given area. This paper addresses this general problem, using the particular data provided by research in the Tadrart Acacus (Libya). The methods used in the field work and the sequence of occupation reconstructed for the entire region are presented. As a specific example, the site of Uan Muhuggiag in the Wadi Teshuinat is discussed. As a result of its deep stratigraphy it is possible to establish precise connections between different artistic ‘styles’ and particular cultural horizons.