Leptis or Lepcis Magna, also known by other names in antiquity, was a prominent city of the Carthaginian Empire and Roman Libya at the mouth of the Wadi Lebda in the Mediterranean.

[4] Kenneth D. Matthews Jr. writes:[11] During the reign of Augustus, Leptis Magna was classified as a civitas libera et immunis, or a free community, over which the governor had an absolute minimum of control.

The natural harbor had a tendency to silt up, but the Severan changes made this worse, and the eastern wharves are extremely well preserved, since they were scarcely used.

Leptis prospered through trans-Saharan trade in various valuable goods, including ivory, wild animals for the gladiatorial arena, gold dust, carbuncle, precious woods like ebony, and ostrich feathers.

Ammianus Marcellinus recounts that the crisis was worsened by a corrupt Roman governor named Romanus, who demanded bribes to protect the city during a major tribal raid.

The ruined city could not pay these and complained to the emperor Valentinian I. Romanus then bribed people at court and arranged for the Leptan envoys to be punished "for bringing false accusations".

In 439, Leptis Magna and the rest of the cities of Tripolitania fell under the control of the Vandals when their king, Gaiseric, captured Carthage from the Romans and made it his capital.

[14][failed verification] During the decade 565–578 AD, Christian missionaries from Leptis Magna even began to move once more among the Berber tribes as far south as the Fezzan in the Libyan desert and converted the Garamantes.

Part of an ancient temple was brought from Leptis Magna to the British Museum in 1816 and installed at the Fort Belvedere royal residence in England in 1826.

In June 2005, it was revealed that archaeologists from the University of Hamburg had been working along the coast of Libya when they uncovered a 30 ft length of five colorful mosaics created during the 1st or 2nd century.

The mosaics show with exceptional clarity depictions of a warrior in combat with a deer, four young men wrestling a wild bull to the ground, and a gladiator resting in a state of fatigue and staring at his slain opponent.

[21] When asked if the historic site could be targeted in an airstrike, NATO refused to rule out the possibility of such an action, saying that it had not been able to confirm the rebels' report that weapons were being hidden at the location.

[22] Shortly after the war, Libyan archaeologist Hafed Walda reported that Leptis Magna, along with nearby Rasaimergib Fort and the western Tripolis of Sabratha, had "so far seen no visible loss" from either fighting on the ground or bombings conducted by international forces.

[23] In the midst of the Second Libyan Civil War and the disappearance of governmental and international support for the site, people living in the area organized to voluntarily protect and maintain Leptis Magna.

In 2022, the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report included them in the list of African cultural sites which would be threatened by flooding and coastal erosion by the end of the century, but only if climate change followed RCP 8.5, which is the scenario of high and continually increasing greenhouse gas emissions associated with the warming of over 4 °C.,[26] and is no longer considered very likely.

Thus, it is a matter of time before the Leptis Magna ruins are threatened by rising water levels, unless they can be protected by adaptation efforts such as sea walls.