Famine on a Greek island seeded a green mountain colony in eastern Libya
Around 631 BC settlers fleeing famine on Thera founded Cyrene on Libya's eastern bulge, giving the whole region its name. Cyrenaica is an unexpected slice of the Mediterranean: a limestone upland called the Green Mountain, wheat-growing red soils and oak savanna, with the Sahara pressing in from the south and east.
The region covers Libya's east between the 16th and 25th meridians, reaching deep into the desert to include the Kufra District. Its backbone is a block of Miocene limestone that rises sharply from the sea and slopes gently away inland. The Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountain, parallels the shoreline between two gulfs, Sidra in the west and Bomba in the east, topping out at 882 metres. There is no continuous coastal plain; the longest stretch runs past Benghazi, and beyond it the shore is mostly cliffs. Above an escarpment lies the Marj Plain at about 300 metres, with a higher, dissected plateau around 700 metres.
Climate makes the difference. The mountain and its coast enjoy hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters, supporting forest, maquis, garrigue and oak savanna. Red soils on the Marj Plain have produced wheat and barley since antiquity, springs rise in the highlands, and wild olives are common. The woodland is retreating. Writing for the UN's food and farming agency in 1996, analysts reckoned the forest had shrunk from 500,000 hectares to 320,000, mostly cleared for crops. Further east, the lower Jebel el-Akabah, known anciently as Marmarica, is much drier, the desert reaches the sea, and salt-gathering and sponge fishing once mattered more than farming. South of the highlands spreads the Libyan Desert with its great sand seas and scattered oases such as Awjila.
The earliest recorded inhabitants were Ancient Libyans, and in the 13th century BC Egyptian records describe the Libu and Meshwesh tribes raiding Egypt. The Theran colonists were led by Aristoteles, who took the name Battos; his Battiad descendants held on despite bitter rivalry with neighbouring Greek cities. The coastal zone became known as the Pentapolis, the five cities, and later joined Crete in a single Roman province. In the Islamic era it was called Barqa after the city of Barca.
Italy colonised the region in 1911, and Britain administered it from 1943 until 1951, when it became part of the Kingdom of Libya.
Source: Cyrenaica
