History of Libya

[citation needed] The Phoenicians were some of the first to establish coastal trading posts in Libya, when the merchants of Tyre (in present-day Lebanon) developed commercial relations with the various Berber tribes and made treaties with them to ensure their cooperation in the exploitation of raw materials.

After the fall of Carthage, the Romans did not immediately occupy Tripolitania (the region around Tripoli), but left it under control of the Berber kings of Numidia, until the coastal cities asked and obtained its protection.

[8] Ptolemy Apion, the last Greek ruler, bequeathed Cyrenaica to Rome, which formally annexed the region in 74 BCE and joined it to Crete as a Roman province.

[10] As part of the Africa Nova province, Tripolitania was prosperous,[8] and reached a golden age in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, when the city of Leptis Magna, home to the Severan dynasty, was at its height.

[8] On the other side, Cyrenaica's first Christian communities were established by the time of the Emperor Claudius[9] but was heavily devastated during the Diaspora revolt,[11] and almost depopulated of Greeks and Jews alike,[12] and, although repopulated by Trajan with military colonies,[11] from then started its decadence.

Merchants and artisans from many parts of the Roman world established themselves in North Africa, but the character of the cities of Tripolitania remained decidedly Punic and, in Cyrenaica, Greek.

Tripolitania was a major exporter of olive oil,[13] as well as a center for the trade of ivory and wild animals[13] conveyed to the coast by the Garamantes, while Cyrenaica remained an important source of wines, drugs, and horses.

[15] The decline of the Roman Empire saw the classical cities fall into ruin, a process hastened by the Vandals' destructive sweep though North Africa in the 5th century.

In outlying areas neglected by the Vandals,[16] the inhabitants had sought the protection of tribal chieftains and, having grown accustomed to their autonomy, resisted re-assimilation into the imperial system.

[16] When the Empire returned (now as East Romans) as part of Justinian's reconquests of the 6th century, efforts were made to strengthen the old cities, but it was only a last gasp before they collapsed into disuse.

Byzantine rule in Africa did prolong the Roman ideal of imperial unity there for another century and a half however, and prevented the ascendancy of the Berber nomads in the coastal region.

[17] Tenuous Byzantine control over Libya was restricted to a few poorly defended coastal strongholds, and as such, the Arab horsemen who first crossed into the Pentapolis of Cyrenaica in September 643 CE encountered little resistance.

[18] In 647 an army of 40,000 Arabs, led by Abdullah ibn Saad, the foster-brother of Caliph Uthman, penetrated deep into Western Libya and took Tripoli from the Byzantines definitively.

Townsmen valued the security that permitted them to practice their commerce and trade in peace, while the Punicized farmers recognized their affinity with the Semitic Arabs to whom they looked to protect their lands.

When Caliph Harun al-Rashid appointed Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab as his governor of Ifriqiya in 800, Libya enjoyed considerable local autonomy under the Aghlabid dynasty.

During Fatimid rule, Tripoli thrived on the trade in slaves and gold brought from the Sudan and on the sale of wool, leather, and salt shipped from its docks to Italy in exchange for wood and iron goods.

Ibn Ziri's Berber Zirid dynasty ultimately broke away from the Shiite Fatimids, and recognised the Sunni Abbasids of Baghdad as rightful Caliphs.

After a successful invasion of Tripoli by Habsburg Spain in 1510,[21] and its handover to the Knights of St. John, the Ottoman admiral Sinan Pasha finally took control of Libya in 1551.

In the 1580s, the rulers of Fezzan gave their allegiance to the sultan, and although Ottoman authority was absent in Cyrenaica, a bey was stationed in Benghazi late in the next century to act as agent of the government in Tripoli.

The Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II twice sent his aide-de-camp Azmzade Sadik El Mueyyed to meet Sheikh Senussi to cultivate positive relations and counter the West European scramble for Africa.

The Libyan National Assembly drafted the Constitution and passed a resolution accepting it in a meeting held in the city of Benghazi on Sunday, 6th Muharram, Hegiras 1371: 7 October 1951.

[58][59] After popular movements overturned the rulers of Tunisia and Egypt, its immediate neighbors to the west and east, Libya experienced a full-scale revolt beginning on 17 February 2011.

[61][62] On 27 February 2011, the National Transitional Council was established under the stewardship of Mustafa Abdul Jalil, Gaddafi's former justice minister, to administer the areas of Libya under rebel control.

[67][68][69] Pro-Gaddafi forces were able to respond militarily to rebel pushes in Western Libya and launched a counterattack along the coast toward Benghazi, the de facto centre of the uprising.

[70] The town of Zawiya, 48 kilometres (30 mi) from Tripoli, was bombarded by Air Force planes and Army tanks and seized by Jamahiriya troops, "exercising a level of brutality not yet seen in the conflict".

[82] On 19 March, the first Allied act to secure the no-fly zone began when French military jets entered Libyan airspace on a reconnaissance mission heralding attacks on enemy targets.

Mahmoud Jibril served as the NTC's de facto head of government from 5 March 2011 through the end of the war, but he announced he would resign after Libya was declared to have been "liberated" from Gaddafi's rule.

[97] On 25 August 2012, in what "appears to be the most blatant sectarian attack" since the end of the civil war, unnamed organized assailants bulldozed a Sufi mosque with graves, in broad daylight in the center of the Libyan capital Tripoli.

The agreement, effective immediately, required that all foreign fighters leave Libya within three months while a joint police force would patrol disputed areas.

On September 10, 2023, catastrophic floods due to dam failures generated by Storm Daniel devastated the port city of Derna, killing nearly 7,000 and leaving over 10,000 missing.