Cyrene
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- Silphium, the herb that made Cyrene rich and appeared on most of its coins, was harvested to extinction by the end of the 1st century AD.
- During a famine in the late 320s BC, Cyrene sent more than 800,000 medimni of grain, roughly 40 million litres, to Greek cities and the Macedonian royal family.
- Around 570 BC the Cyreneans decisively defeated an Egyptian army sent by Pharaoh Apries at the Battle of Irasa.
- Pindar's Fourth and Fifth Pythian Odes celebrate chariot-race victories won by Cyrene's king Arcesilaus IV in 462 and 460 BC.
- In 2005 Italian archaeologists uncovered 76 intact Roman statues of the 2nd century AD that an earthquake had buried for some 1,630 years.
- The headless marble statue known as the Venus of Cyrene was taken to Rome and only returned to Libya in 2008.
- Simon of Cyrene, who carries the cross of Jesus in the Gospels, came from the city, and Coptic tradition holds that Saint Mark was born here.
- Jason of Cyrene, a Hellenised Jewish writer of around 100 BC, wrote a five-volume history later abridged as the Second Book of Maccabees.
- Cyrene built its own treasury at the sanctuary of Delphi between about 350 and 325 BC.
- Excavators have found skeletons of people crushed by falling masonry in the earthquake of AD 365.
Why it is worth it
Cyrene was one of the great cities of the ancient Greek world, founded on a ridge of the Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountain of north-eastern Libya, about 600 m above the sea. By Greek tradition settlers from the island of Thera arrived around 631 BC under Battus I at the urging of the oracle at Delphi, and the pottery found on site confirms a settlement in the mid-seventh century. The Battiad kings grew rich exporting horses and silphium, a prized medicinal plant. Cyrene gave its name to the whole region of Cyrenaica and produced the philosopher Aristippus, the poet Callimachus and Eratosthenes, who first calculated the circumference of the Earth.
The ruins spread over a large area and are strikingly complete. At the western end, the Sanctuary of Apollo grew around a sacred spring, the Fountain of Apollo, with the god's temple going back to the seventh century BC. The Agora lies in the centre of the city. To the east stands the Temple of Zeus, built around 500–480 BC, 68 m long and roughly the size of the Parthenon. South of the ravine lies the sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone.
Around the city lies one of the largest known Greek necropoleis: about 20 square kilometres of rock-cut tombs, temple-fronted graves and sarcophagi cut into the hillsides, used from the sixth century BC to the fifth century AD. Cyrene passed to Ptolemaic Egypt and then to Rome, was devastated in the revolt of AD 115 and by earthquakes in 262 and 365, and was eventually abandoned. Excavation began in earnest in the early twentieth century, and the site has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1982. Its port, Apollonia, lies on the coast below.
Getting there
The ruins lie just north of the town of Shahhat, about 2 km away, with Bayda to the west. The nearest airport is Al Abraq International (LAQ), about 10 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Cyrene, also sometimes anglicized as Kyrene, was an ancient Greek colony and Roman city near present-day Shahhat in northeastern Libya in North Africa. It was part of the Pentapolis, an important group of five cities in the region, and gave the area its classical and early modern name Cyrenaica.
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