Leptis Magna

A Roman capital preserved by the sand that buried it

Leptis Magna lies on the Mediterranean coast of Libya at the mouth of the Wadi Lebda, just east of Al-Khums and about 130 km east of Tripoli, and it holds what UNESCO calls the most complete and impressive Roman ruins in all of North Africa. The reason is sand. After the city fell to the Arab conquest in the 640s and was abandoned, wind-blown sand from the interior buried it, and kept it for some 800 years.

It began as a Phoenician trading post in the 7th century BC, later settled by Carthaginians, a harbour town that grew rich on Mediterranean and trans-Saharan trade and on the olive groves of its coastland. It was strong enough to see off a Greek attempt to settle nearby around 515 BC. It allied with Rome in 111 BC, kept its Punic constitution and language into the 1st century AD, and by 46 BC could pay Julius Caesar three million pounds of olive oil a year in tax. Trajan made it a colonia.

Its great son was Septimius Severus, born here, emperor from 193 to 211. He freed the city from property and land taxes and launched a building programme fit for a capital. A colonnaded street some 410 metres long ran from the centre to the improved harbour and ended in a circular piazza with an ornamental fountain house; the two main roads crossed under a massive four-way arch carved with the glories of Severus and his family; and the Severan basilica, dedicated in 216, five years after his death, ran 160 metres long, its pilasters carved with the Life of Dionysus and the Labours of Hercules beside a new forum of imported marble and granite. There were Hadrian's baths, a circus about 460 metres long, an amphitheatre of AD 56, a 19 km aqueduct and the Hunting Baths, still painted with a leopard hunt.

The decline came with insecure frontiers and hard times. The legion that guarded it was disbanded in 238, a disastrous raid struck in 363, the Vandals took the city in 439, and after the Eastern Empire took it back in 533 Berber raids kept it from ever recovering its old importance.

Travellers rediscovered the ruins in the 17th and 18th centuries, and they helped shape the Neoclassical style. Italian archaeologists excavated much of the city in the 20th century, and in the Second World War Mortimer Wheeler and John Ward-Perkins talked the Royal Air Force out of putting a radar station on it. UNESCO listed it in 1982, and finds from the site fill the Leptis Magna Museum and the Al-Saraya Al-Hamra museum in Tripoli.