Leptis Magna
LEPTIS MAGNA (ἡ Λέπτις μεγάλη, Λεπτιμάγνα, Procop. B. V. 2.21 ; also Λέπτις, simply; aft. Νεάπολις; Leptimagnensis Civitas, Cod. Just. 1.27. 2: Eth. and Adj. Λεπτιτανός, Leptitanus: Lebda, large Ru.), the chief of the three cities which formed the African Tripolis, in the district between the Syrtes (Regio Syrtica, aft. Tripolitana), on the N. coast of Africa; the other two being Oea and Sabrata. Leptis was one of the most ancient Phoenician colonies on this coast, having been founded by the Sidonians (Sal. Jug. 19, 78); and its site was one of the most favourable that can be imagined for a city of the first class. It stood at one of those parts of the coast where the table-land of the Great Desert falls off to the sea by a succession of mountain ridges, enclosing valleys which are thus sheltered from those encroachments of sand that cover the shore where no such protection exists, while they lie open to the breezes of the Mediterranean. The country, in fact, resembles, on a small scale, the terraces of the Cyrenaic coast; and its great beauty and fertility have excited the admiration alike of ancient and modern writers. (Ammian. Marc. 28.6 ; Della Cella ; Beechy; Barth, &c.) Each of these valleys is watered by its streamlet, generally very insignificant and even intermittent, but sometimes worthy of being styled a river, as in the case of the CINYPS and of the smaller stream, further to the west, upon which Leptis stood. The excellence of the site was much enhanced by the shelter afforded by the promontory HERMAEUM (Ras-al-Ashan), W. of the city, to the roadstead in its front. The ruins of Leptis are of vast extent, of which a great portion is buried under the sand which has drifted over them from the sea. From what can be traced, however, it is clear that these remains contain the ruins of three different cities.
1.The original city, or Old Leptis, still exhibits in its ruins the characteristics of an ancient Phoenician settlement; and, in its site, its sea-walls and quays, its harbour, and its defences on the land side, it bears a striking general resemblance to Carthage. It was built on an elevated tongue of land, jutting out from the W. bank of the little river, the mouth of which formed its port, having been artificially enlarged for that purpose. The banks of the river, as well as the seaward face of the promontory, are lined with walls of massive masonry, serving as sea-walls as well as quays, and containing some curious vaulted chambers, which are supposed to have been docks for ships which were kept (as at Carthage) for a last resource, in case the citadel should be taken by an enemy. These structures are of a harder stone than the other buildings of the city; the latter being of a light sandstone, which gave the place a glittering whiteness to the voyager approaching it from the sea. (Stadiasm. Mar. Mag. p. 453, G., p. 297, H.). On the land side the isthmus was defended by three lines of massive stone walls, the position of each being admirably adapted to the nature of the ground; and, in a depression of the ground between the outmost and middle line, there seems to have been a canal, connecting the harbour in the mouth of the river with the roadstead W. of the city. Opposite to this tongue of land, on the E. side of the river, is a much lower, less projecting, and more rounded promontory, which could not have been left out of the system of external works, although no part of the city was built upon it. Accordingly we find here, besides the quays along the river side, and vaults in them, which served for warehouses, a remarkable building, which seems to have been a fort. Its superstructure is of brick, and certainly not of Phoenician work; but it probably stood on foundations coeval with the city. This is the only example of the use of brick in the ruins of Leptis, with the exception of the walls which surmount the sea-defences already described. From this eastern, as well as from the western point of land, an artificial mole was built out, to give additional shelter to the port on either side; but, through not permitting a free egress to the sand which is washed up on that coast in vast quantities with every tide, these moles have been the chief cause of the destruction, first of the port, and afterwards of the city. The former event had already happened at the date of the Stadiasmus, which describes Leptis as having no harbour (ἀλίμενος). The harbour still existed, however, at the time of the restoration of the city by Septimius Severus, and small vessels could even ascend to some distance above the city, as is proved by a quay of Roman work on the W. bank, at a spot where the river is still deep, though its mouth is now lost in the sand-hills.
2.The Old City (πόλις) thus described became gradually, like the Byrsa of Carthage, the citadel of a much more extensive New City (Νεάπολις), which grew up beyond its limits, on the W. bank of the river, where its magnificent buildings now lie hidden beneath the sand. This NEW CITY, as in the case of Carthage and several other Phoenician cities of like growth, gave its name to the place, which was hence called NEAPOLIS not, however, as at Carthage [comp. CARTHAGO Vol. 1. p. 529. § i.], to the disuse of the old name, LEPTIS which was never entirely lost, and which became the prevailing name in the later times of the ancient world, and is the name which the ruins still retain (Lebda). Under the early emperors both names are found almost indifferently; but with a slight indication of the preference given to NEAPOLIS and it seems probable that the name Leptis, with the epithet Magna to distinguish it from LEPTIS PARVA, prevailed at last for the sake of avoiding any confusion with NEAPOLIS in Zeugitana. (Strab. 17. p. 835, Νεάπολις, ἥν καὶ Λέπτιν καλοῦσιν : Mela, however, 1.7.5, has Leptis only, with the epithet altera: Pliny (Plin. Nat. 5.4. s. 4, misled, as usual, by the abundance of his authorities, makes Leptis and Neapolis different cities, and he distinguishes this from the other Leptis as Leptis altera, quae cognominatur magna: Ptolemy (Ptol. 4.3.13, has Νεάπολις ἡ καὶ Λέπτις μεγάλη : Jtin. Ant. p. 63, and Tab. Peut. Lepti Magna Colonia; Scyl. pp. 111, 112, 113, Gronov. Νέα Πόλις; Stadiasm. p. 435, Λέπτις, vulg. Λέπτης, the coins all have the name LEPTIS simply, with the addition, on some of them, of the epithet COLONIA VICTRIX JULIA; but it is very uncertain to which of the two cities of the name these coins belong; Eckhel, vol. iv. pp. 130, 131; Rasche, s. v.) We learn from Sallust that the commercial intercourse of Leptis with the native tribes had led to a sharing of the connubium, and hence to an admixture of the language of the city with the Libyan dialects (Jug. 78). In fact, Leptis, like the neighbouring Tripoly, which, with a vastly inferior site, has succeeded to its position, was the great emporium for the trade with the Garamantes and Phazania and the eastern part of Inner Libya. But the remains of the New City seem to belong almost entirely to the period of the Roman Empire, and especially to the reign of Septimius Severus, who restored and beautified this his native city. (Spart. Sev. 1; Aurel. Vict. Ep. 20.) It had already before acquired considerable importance under the Romans, whose cause it espoused in the war with Jugurtha (Sal. Jug. 77--79: as to its later condition see Tac. Hist. 4.50); and if, as Eckhel inclines to believe, the coins with the epigraph COL. VIC. IUL. LEP. belong mostly, if not entirely, to Leptis Magna, it must have been made a colony in the earliest period of the empire. It was still a flourishing and populous fortified city in the 4th century, when it was greatly injured by an assault of a Libyan tribe, called the AURUSIANI (Ammian. 28.6); and it never recovered from the blow.
3.Justinian is said to have enclosed a portion of it with a new wall; but the city itself was already too far buried in the sand to be restored; and, as far as we can make out, the little that Justinian attempted seems to have amounted only to the enclosure of a suburb, or old Libyan camp, some distance to the E. of the river, on the W. bank of which the city itself had stood. (Procop. de Aed. 6.4; comp. Barth.) Its ruin was completed during the Arab conquest (Leo, Afr. p. 435); and, though we find it, in the middle ages, the seat of populous Arab camps, no attempt has been made to make use of the splendid site, which is now occupied by the insignificant village of Legâtah, and the hamlet of El-Hush, which consists of only four houses. (For particulars of the ruins, see Lucas, Proceedings of the Association, &c. vol. 2. p. 66, Lond. 1810; Della Cella, Viaggio, &c. p. 40; Beechey, Proceedings, &c. chap. vi. pp. 50, foll.; Russell's Barbary; Barth, Wanderungen, &c. pp. 305--315.) COIN OF LEPTIS.[P.S]
On the coast 120 km E of Tripoli (Oea), the farthest E of the three cities (treis poleis) that gave the region its name. Originally a Punic settlement, established not later than 500 B.C. beside a small natural harbor at the mouth of the wadi Lebda, the city flourished and rapidly expanded under Augustus and his successors, reaching a peak of prosperity in the reign of Septimius Severus, who was himself a native of Leptis. The subsequent decline, accelerated by the growing strength of the tribes of the interior and by the Vandal conquest of ca. A.D. 455, was compounded by disastrous winter floods and by the incursion of the mobile sand dunes which finally covered (and in so doing preserved) the site. After Justinian's reconquest in A.D. 533, a relatively small area around the port was refortified. The Arab conquest of A.D. 643 put an end to effective urban life.
The excavations of the 1920s and 1930s uncovered large stretches of the street plan and many of the principal public monuments, but relatively little of the domestic and commercial quarters. The Punic settlement lay on the W side of the mouth of the wadi and still awaits systematic examination. The Roman town grew outwards from this nucleus, its growth shaped largely by the lines of two pre-existing roads: the road that linked the harbor with the rich olive-growing country in the hills to the S, curving gently up the low watershed to the N and W of the wadi, and the main coastal road, which at this point passed some 800 m to the S of the early settlement.
The initial development took the form of a series of orthogonally gridded quarters laid out in rapid succession along the first of these roads (the so-called Via Trionfale) which thus became the main axial street of the imperial town: the first, including the Forum Vetus, immediately adjoining the Punic settlement (ca. 30-20 B.C.?); next, an extension S to the market (last decade of the 1st c. B.C.); and subsequently (late Augustan-Tiberian), a further extension S towards, and orthogonal to, the coast road, which thus became the main transverse street (the “Decumanus”) of the later imperial town. The area to the S of this street awaits excavation, as does also most of the area to the E of the wadi, which seems largely to have retained a residential, semisuburban character. The main attested urban development in the later 1st and 2d c. lay to the W, where the formal grid of streets extended at least as far as the Hunting Baths.
The Forum Vetus, stripped of its Byzantine accretions, presents an unusually complete picture of an early imperial forum complex. The 1st c. buildings were all built of the fine local limestone in a provincial style that incorporated many pre-Roman details. The irregular alignment of the NE side reflects the orientation of the pre-existing settlement. Along the NW side are three temples: one, dedicated to Liber Pater, an early Augustan building standing on a lofty podium; next to it, and linked with it at podium level to form a single platform, a temple of Rome and Augustus (Tiberian), the find spot of a large group of Julio-Claudian statuary now in the Tripoli Museum; and at the N corner, a smaller temple of unknown dedication, dated between 5 B.C. and A.D. 2. The opposite, SE side was occupied by the Basilica Vetus (Tiberian or Claudian), and in A.D. 53 the whole open area was paved and enclosed on three sides by porticos. Three more temples occupied the SW side: one to Magna Mater (A.D. 72); one of Trajanic date, later converted into a church; and, at the W corner, a small courtyard-shrine in honor of Antoninus Pius (A.D. 153). The curia, obliquely opposite the entrance to the basilica, was added in the early 2d c., during the course of which most of the earlier buildings, both here and elsewhere in the city, were partly rebuilt in marble.
The market, built in 9-8 B.C. on what was then the outskirts of the growing city, was an enclosed, porticoed structure with two octagonal pavilions, one original and one rebuilt in the early 3d c. The many surviving fittings include the market benches and the official tables of weights and measures. Nearby, on the site of a Punic cemetery, is the theater (A.D. 1-2). At the head of the magnificent limestone cavea stood a small Temple of Ceres (A.D. 35-36) and a (later) portico. The pavement of the orchestra replaces an earlier floor of elaborately painted stucco, and the marble scaenae frons is of Antonine date. Beyond it is a well-preserved, quadrangular porticus post scaenam enclosing a central temple of the Di Augusti (A.D. 43). Between the theater and the main street, much altered by later structures, lay a large porticoed enclosure, along the frontage of which ran a monumental chalcidicum (A.D. 11-12) containing offices and a small Shrine of Venus Chalcidica. Two honorary arches masked the change of alignment of the main street, one recording the paving of the streets in A.D. 35-36, the other a quadrifrons erected in honor of Trajan in A.D. 110. Yet another, in honor of Vespasian (A.D. 77-78), was demolished to make way for the Byzantine Gate.
Continuing S down the main street, one arrives at the crossing of the Decumanus, the center of the expanded city where, shortly after 200, an ornate quadrifrons arch was erected in honor of Septimius Severus. The sculpture from this arch is now in the Tripoli Museum. It includes four large relief panels from the attic, two portraying triumphal processions, one a sacrlficial scene, and one symbolic of the solidarity of the imperial family. A second set of eight figured panels adorned the inner face of the arch. The carving throughout is the work of sculptors from Asia Minor and their local pupils.
To the W of this point recent excavations have uncovered a courtyard building with two apses, thought to be a schola, a small late bath, and a 2d c. temple. Beyond this the west gate of the 4th c. walls incorporates a monumental arch (perhaps of Antoninus Pius; the inscription is lost) and beyond this again are the remains of a fine quadrifrons arch in honor of M. Aurelius (A.D. 173).
In the opposite direction, E of the Severan Arch, one passes through a quarter of which the blocked doorways attest a period in late antiquity when only the main streets were kept open. Beyond it, angled in beside the wadi, lie the Hadrianic baths, a huge symmetrical building, completed in A.D. 127 on the model of the great imperial baths of Rome and later several times remodeled, notably under Commodus. The monumental porticoed palaestra in front is an Antonine addition.
The accession of Septimius Severus was predictably the signal for an outburst of building activity. In addition to the quadrifrons arch, a possible enlargement of the circus, and the construction of new cisterns and of an underground aqueduct from the wadi Caam, 20 km to the E, the next three decades saw the completion of a vast building program, comprising a new, enclosed harbor, a colonnaded street leading up from it to a monumental piazza beside the Hadrianic baths and, beside the street, a grandiose new forum and basilica. Much of the land for the program was reclaimed from the former wadi bed.
Before Severus the harbor seems to have consisted largely of quays and warehouses alongside the sheltered natural anchorage afforded by the wadi mouth, mainly along the W bank. The new scheme saw the creation of an artificial basin, some 21 ha in extent, with a narrow entrance between two projecting, artificial moles. Along the W mole there were warehouses (unexcavated) and at the seaward extremity a lighthouse; along the E mole, a signal tower, a small temple, and a row of warehouses fronted by a portico with an upper gallery. Facing out across the harbor, on a high, stepped podium, was a Temple of Jupiter Dolichenus. The arrangements for berthing the individual ships, with steps down and mooring rings, are unusually well preserved.
The colonnaded street was 366 m long, with a central carriageway about 21 m wide. The flanking porticos were raised on tall pedestals, with columns of green Karystos marble, carrying arches instead of the usual architraves. Off the NW side opened the basilica and forum, ingeniously sited so as to minimize the differences of alignment imposed by the irregularities of the site available. The basilica itself was a grandiose rectangular hall, measuring about 30.48 m from floor to ceiling and flanked by lateral aisles with galleries over them; at either end of the central nave was a large, concretevaulted apse, incorporating a pair of engaged columnar orders, and beside each apse stood a pair of pilasters carved with scenes from the stories of the city's patron divinities, Herakles (the Punic Melqarth) and Dionysos (Shadrap or Liber Pater). The forum was a huge open space, nearly 60 m wide, enclosed on three sides by tall, arcaded porticos, similar to those of the colonnaded street; and on the fourth side, facing the basilica from the head of a lofty podium and fronted by a spreading flight of steps, was an octastyle temple in honor of the Severan family. The columns of this, which stood on sculptured pedestals of Pentelic marble, were of red Assuan granite, as also were those of the basilica. A feature of both forum and basilica is the large number of marble workers' signatures, all in Greek. In the 6th c. the basilica was converted into a church and the forum into a barracks.
At the head of the colonnaded street, where it met, at a variety of angles, the Hadrianic baths and palaestra, the main street from the theater, and a second colonnaded street running up the wadi behind the baths, the original design envisaged a circular piazza enclosed within a portico. This axially neutral scheme was, however, dropped in favor of the establishment of a new dominating axis by the construction on the E side, symmetrically between the two colonnaded streets, of a huge scenographic fountain building. Half of the central hemicycle has fallen outwards, but the rest of it is still standing to its full height, together with considerable remains of the engaged marble orders that decorated it. The Severan complex was originally planned to include other buildings beside the colonnaded street, but though the ground was cleared the only one to be built was a hemicyclical exedra on the N side of the piazza. The adjoining church dates from the 6th c., when a section of the Byzantine city wall was built across the piazza itself.
The many outlying buildings include, near the NE corner of the town, a large amphitheater (A.D. 56) built into a disused quarry and, between it and the sea, a circus. To the W of the Old Forum are the “new excavations” (1955-60), of which the most conspicuous monument is a late, unfinished bath of “imperial” type, with a hexagonal caldarium. Beyond this lie the 4th c. walls, and beyond these the Hunting Baths, a 3d c. concrete-vaulted building of which the structure, paintings, and mosaics were found almost intact beneath the sand dunes. To the S, up the wadi Lebda, are two large cisterns and a massive dam built to divert the flood waters of the wadi round the city. The suburban villas include the rich Villa del Nib (mosaics in Tripoli Museum). The cemeteries have not been systematically explored. The small museum is primarily a lapidary collection. All the finer sculpture is in Tripoli.
BIBLIOGRAPHYP. Romanelli, Leptis Magna (1924); “Leptis Magna,” EAA IV (1961) 572-94; R. Bartoccini, Le Terme di Lepcis (1929); “L'arco quadrifronte dei Severi a Lepcis,” Africa Italiana, 4 (1931) 32-152; “Il Porto Romano di Leptis Magna,” Bollettino del Centro Studi per la Storia dell'Archiettura 13 (Suppl. to 1958) (1960); J. B. Ward-Perkins, “Severan Art and Architecture at Leptis Magna,” JRS 38 (1948) 59-80; idem & J.M.C. Toynbee, “The Hunting Baths at Leptis Magna,” Archaeologia 93 (1949) 165-95; N. Degrassi, “Il mercato romano di Leptis Magna,” Quaderni di Archeologia della Libia 2 (1951) 27-70; DEL. Haynes, An Archaeological and Historical Guide to the pre-Islamic Antiquities of Tripolitania (1955) 71-106; R. Bianchi Bandinelli, E. Vergara Caffarelli and G. Caputo, Leptis Magna (1964); M. F. Squarciapino, Leptis Magna (1966).
J. B. WARD-PERKINS