Ancient city of Derna in Libya

The town was founded in the 15th century on the site of Darnis, an ancient Greek colony (rock tombs remain). The city was one of an important Mediterranean port in the ancient world of the Greeks and Romans.

The history of the region commences with the Greek colonization of Cyrene ca. 631 B.C. Herodotos says that Delphi directed Thera to send a small band of settlers under the leadership of Battos to found a city in Libya. After six years of living by the sea not far from Darnis, Battos moved his people to Cyrene where they were assured of a constant supply of water and the protection of the high ground.

Derna, also spelled Darnah, town, northeastern Libya, situated on the Mediterranean coast east of Benghazi. It lies on the eastern ridges of the Akhḍar Mountains in the delta of the small Wadi Derna.

In 1801 the French troops on their way to Egypt were refused a landing by the plucky inhabitants. Derna once played an important role in U.S. military history. In 1805, Consul William Eaton led seven U.S. marines and several hundred Greek, Arab and Turkish mercenaries on a 500-mile march from Alexandria to Derna, where his odd little army took the city from a larger Karamanli force in little more than an hour.

Derna experienced a plague in 1816 and a cholera outbreak and an earthquake in 1834. It was a slave port until the 1850s.
Ancient city of Derna in Libya

Ancient city of Cyrene in Libya

The region known as Cyrenaica (and in Roman times also as the Pentapolis) comprised an important group of cities: notably Cyrene, Apollonia, Euesperides/Berenice, Barke, Ptolemais and Taucheira. It was successively a center for Greek colonization in Libya, a kingdom based around the power and wealth of Cyrene, a satellite of the Hellenistic kingdom in Egypt, and a Roman province for long governed jointly with Crete.

Cyrene was important Greek city in the North of Arica lying between Alexandria and Carthage. It was founded by Battus who led a colony form the Island of Thera, and he and his descendants rule over the city of 8 generations.

The founding of Cyrene by Thera is recorded at length by Herodotus. A pilgrimage to the oracle at Delphi resulted in the advice to found a new city in Libya. The advice was ignored for seven years during which time, according to Herodotus, “not a drop of rain fell in Thera.” The drought had worsened and the people were in great distress. A committee was appointed to go to the oracle, again. The priestess repeated the same message, that they must found a colony in Libya for their fortunes to mend.

The Greek conscripts sailed to the coast of North Africa, where they were eventually led to a place where “the sky leaked through a hole in the heavens.” It rained often – glorious to the Therans. They established their new city-state, Cyrene, on the fertile highland ground in 631 BC.

Son of Ptolemy VIII, Euergetes II (Physcin) (d, 116 BC), by a concubine he became ruler of Cyrene before the end of the second century. And when he died in 96 BC, he bequeathed his kingdom to Rome. Cyrene became subject to the Egyptian Ptolemies and was eventually formed with the Island of Crete, into a Roman province.
Ancient city of Cyrene in Libya

Tripoli, Libya

The city also known as Tripoli-of-the-West. At the heart of Tripolitania (the northwestern part of the country) was its metropolis, Tripoli, for centuries a terminal for caravans plying the Saharan trade routes and a port sheltering pirates and slave traders. Tripolitania's cultural ties were with the Maghrib (Maghreb), of which it was a part geographically and culturally and with which it shared a common history.

Libya’s earliest inhabitants were the semi-nomadic Berbers, whose descendants still live throughout North Africa’s Atlas Mountains. Phoenician merchants from the Levant began to settle in what is today Libya from around 1000 BC

The Phoenicians founded Tripoli in the 8th century BC. It originally comprised three neighborhoods situated in the current location of Al Mina. It was the center of a Phoenician confederation with Sidon and Tyre and Arados Island, hence the name "Tripolis", meaning "triple city". This city enjoyed the highest repute amongst the cities of Phoenicia for there, as it happens, the Phoenicians held their common council and deliberated on matters of supreme importance.

Roman settlements appeared in Libya in the third century BC. Later Rome triumphed over Carthage and destroyed the city in 149 B.C. The Phoenician Tripolis: Oya, Sparta, and Leptis-Magna, close to the modern Tripoli, became a Roman city.

The Arabs arrived in Libya much before Islam, from Yemen and settled around the water recourses of the mountains. In 10th Century AD the Fatimid Caliph, Al-Muiz, conquered the city. It became an independent province encompassing Lattakia (Syria), experiencing a commercial and cultural boom that rendered it a significant center of Shiia.

In 1109 Tripoli was conquered by Raymond de Saint Gilles, Count of Toulouse. It became the capital of Tripoli County, one of the main Crusader states, and remained under domination by the Franks for almost two centuries under the name “Triple”.

In 1289 the Mamluks conquered the Crusader city that was situated on the peninsula, razed it to the ground but keeping the St. Gilles Citadel and the Cathedral, today known as “Taynal Mosque”, and rebuilt a new city two kilometers to the east at the foot of the citadel and straddling the Abu Ali river. During this period, Tripoli witnessed a substantial growth in its economic and political power.
Tripoli, Libya

City of Tripoli

Tripoli is a capital city and principle seaport on the North African coast of Libya. Tripoli was founded in 7th century BC, by Phoenician. The Phoenicians settled in Uiat, the ancient Tripoli, in a place than endured a deep harbor, well protected by a promontory to the northeast and guarded to the west by a low hill. It became one of the four Punic settlement of significance (the others being Carthage, Sabratha and Leptis Magna). Tripoli is Libya’s only ancient city to have been continuously occupied, since that time.

Following the fall of the Carthage in 146 BC, the city came briefly under the jurisdiction of the Nubian kingdom, before becoming a Roman protectorate. Under the Romans, who named the city Oea, Tripoli grew prosperous.

The first city wall may be attributed to the 4th century AD, when the attacks of nomads from the interior became a menace. When the Vandals overran North Africa in the 5th century the damage to the city was devastating.

In 643 AD Tripoli was conquered by Arabs headed by Amr Ibn al-As who entered the city from the sea, probably from the northwest, where there were no fortifications.

By 1000, Tripoli had become an important center of intercontinental trade between sub-Saharan Africa, southern Europe, Egypt, and the Middle East.

Peter of Navarre, who had conquered Oran in 1509 and Bougie in January 1510, reached Tripoli with his Spanish troops in July 1510; the city was much damaged by the attack and the looting of Spaniards, who however reconstructed the castle in the form it has preserved more or less up to this day.

The city was then occupied by the Ottomans in 1551. In 1771 the Ottoman governor of Tripoli established his own dynasty the Qaramanli dynasty which lasted until the Ottomans re-occupied the area in 1835.
City of Tripoli