The history of Libya

Libya is mostly desert, and its history has been made along a thin coastal strip and a chain of Saharan oases. The Amazigh (Berber) peoples who lived there in antiquity were joined by Phoenician traders in the west and Greek colonists in the east, and for centuries the land was split between Tripolitania, looking towards Carthage and Tunisia, Cyrenaica, looking towards Egypt and Greece, and the Fezzan, tied to the trade routes of the Sahara. Rome, Byzantium, the Arab caliphates, the Ottomans and Italy each ruled some or all of it. Independent from 1951, Libya was a kingdom until 1969, then lived under Muammar Gaddafi for 42 years, and since his fall in 2011 has been divided between rival governments and armed groups.

Ten thousand years ago the Sahara was far wetter than it is now, with lakes, grassland and animals such as elephants, giraffes and crocodiles. Hunters and later cattle herders left a remarkable record of this world in the rock art of the Akakus (Acacus) mountains and the Wadi Mathendous in the south-west, where carved and painted scenes show wild game, herds and human figures. As the climate dried after about 5,000 years ago, people moved towards the oases, the mountains and the coast.

The peoples of the region were known to the Egyptians, who called some of them the Tjehenu and the Libu. The Libu gave their name to "Libya", which the Greeks later used for most of Africa west of Egypt. Egyptian inscriptions record Libyan raids on the Nile Delta, and around 1208 BCE the pharaoh Merneptah defeated a Libyan coalition allied with the Sea Peoples. Libyan soldiers and settlers nevertheless became established in Egypt, and around 943 BCE a commander of Libyan descent, Shoshenq I, founded the Twenty-second Dynasty, one of several Libyan-origin lines of the Third Intermediate Period of Egypt.

In the Fezzan a Saharan people, the Garamantes, built one of the most sophisticated societies of the ancient desert. Settled there by about 1000 BCE, they dug networks of underground channels, known as foggaras, to bring groundwater to their fields, and grew wheat, barley and dates in the middle of the Sahara. Their capital Garama, near modern Germa, was a real town, and their kingdom covered a large part of south-western Libya. Herodotus mentioned them in the fifth century BCE, describing them driving four-horse chariots. The Garamantes traded with the Mediterranean, sending enslaved people, ivory and other goods north and buying Roman wine, glass and pottery. Their power faded as the water they had mined ran low, and their kingdom ended in the seventh century CE.

On the western coast, traders from Tyre and other cities of Phoenicia set up harbours that grew into the towns of Oea (later Tripoli), Lepcis (Leptis Magna) and Sabratha. These "three cities" gave the region its name, Tripolitania. By the fifth century BCE they lay within the sphere of Carthage, and their culture, language and religion were Punic.

The east took a different path. Around 631 BCE colonists from the Aegean island of Thera, led by Battus, founded Cyrene on a fertile plateau near the sea. Cyrene grew rich on grain, horses and silphium, a plant used in medicine and cooking that became its emblem, and four more cities followed to form the Pentapolis, among them Euhesperides, later Berenice and today Benghazi. Cyrene became a respected centre of ancient Greek learning, known for its physicians and philosophers. The Persian king Cambyses II brought Cyrenaica under the Achaemenid Empire after conquering Egypt in 525 BCE, and in 331 BCE the cities submitted to Alexander the Great. After his death Cyrenaica passed to the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt.

Rome won control of North Africa through the Punic Wars, which ended with the destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE. The last Ptolemaic ruler of Cyrene, Ptolemy Apion, left his kingdom to Rome in his will, and in 74 BCE it was organised as a province, later joined with Crete. Tripolitania came under Roman rule in stages and was attached to the province of Africa. Under Augustus Roman forces campaigned deep into the Fezzan against the Garamantes.

For the next four centuries the coast was part of the Roman Empire. Tripolitania was famous for olive oil, and Leptis Magna became one of the grandest cities of Roman Africa. One of its sons, Septimius Severus, became emperor in 193 and lavished buildings on his birthplace, including a new forum, basilica and harbour, whose ruins, with those of Sabratha and Cyrene, are now UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Cyrenaica kept its Greek character and had a large Jewish community, but it was devastated by the Jewish revolt of 115 to 117 and its suppression. Christianity spread through both regions from the second and third centuries.

As Roman power weakened in the West, the Vandals crossed into Africa in 429 and took over Tripolitania, while Cyrenaica stayed with the eastern empire. In 533 to 534 the generals of Justinian I destroyed the Vandal kingdom and restored imperial rule. The Byzantine Empire fortified the coastal towns, but its hold was weak, taxes were resented and the Amazigh tribes of the interior were largely independent.

Arab armies arrived soon after taking Egypt. In 643 Amr ibn al-As occupied Cyrenaica, which the Arabs called Barqa, and raided Tripoli, which was taken definitively a few years later. Uqba ibn Nafi pushed into the Fezzan in the 660s. Libya was then governed under the Rashidun, Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, though often through local dynasties. Islam spread among the Amazigh, many of whom adopted Ibadi doctrines that set them apart from the caliphs, and Jebel Nafusa in the west remains an Ibadi and Amazigh heartland.

In 800 the caliph Harun al-Rashid made Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab governor of Ifriqiya, and his Aghlabid dynasty ruled Tripolitania from Kairouan. The Shia Fatimid Caliphate displaced them in 909 and, after moving its capital to Cairo in 973, left the west to the Zirids. When the Zirids broke with the Fatimids in the eleventh century, the Fatimids are said to have encouraged the Bedouin tribes of the Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym to move west. Their migration reshaped the countryside, spread pastoral nomadism and did more than anything else to make Libya Arabic-speaking.

The later Middle Ages brought a succession of outside powers. Normans from Sicily held Tripoli from 1146 to 1158, the Almohad Caliphate then took the coast, and from the thirteenth century Tripolitania was ruled by the Hafsid dynasty of Tunis, while Cyrenaica was more closely linked to Egypt and the Mamluk Sultanate. Caravans carrying gold, enslaved Africans, ivory and salt crossed the Fezzan towards Kanem and Bornu around Lake Chad, linking the coast with the Kanem–Bornu Empire and the Sahel.

In 1510 Spain captured Tripoli, and the emperor Charles V handed it to the Knights of St John, who also held Malta. The Ottoman Empire took the city in 1551, and the corsair admiral Turgut Reis became its governor and rebuilt it. Ottoman authority was later extended to the Fezzan and, loosely, to Cyrenaica. Real power soon passed to the janissary garrison and to officers called deys, and Tripoli lived on corsair raids against Mediterranean shipping, ransom and the trans-Saharan trade, including a large trade in enslaved black Africans that continued in practice until the late nineteenth century.

In 1711 Ahmed Karamanli, a cavalry officer of mixed Turkish and local descent, seized power and made the governorship hereditary. His dynasty paid tribute to Istanbul but acted almost as an independent kingdom, collecting payments from European states and the young United States in return for leaving their ships alone. A refusal to keep paying led to the First Barbary War of 1801 to 1805 with the United States. As corsair income dried up after the Napoleonic Wars, the dynasty fell into debt and civil war, and in 1835 the Ottomans deposed the last Karamanli and returned to direct rule.

In the nineteenth century a new religious force arose in the east. The Sanusi order, a Sufi brotherhood founded by Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi, who established his lodge in Cyrenaica in the 1840s, built a network of lodges across the desert, settling disputes, teaching and protecting trade. By 1900 it was the real authority among the Bedouin of Cyrenaica and much of the interior.

Italy, a latecomer to the Scramble for Africa, invaded in October 1911 and forced the Ottomans to cede the territory in 1912. Conquering the interior took twenty years. Resistance was strongest in Cyrenaica, where the Sanusi and the Bedouin fought on under the elderly teacher Omar Mukhtar. Under the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini, generals Pietro Badoglio and Rodolfo Graziani crushed the rebellion with extreme brutality. From 1930 roughly 100,000 people, half the population of Cyrenaica, were driven from the Jebel Akhdar into concentration camps on the coast, where tens of thousands died of hunger and disease, while a barbed-wire fence was built along the Egyptian border to cut off supplies. Historians estimate that a quarter or more of Cyrenaica's people died during the war. Mukhtar was captured and hanged in September 1931, and the resistance ended the next year.

In 1934 Italy joined the provinces into a single colony, reviving the classical name Libya. Some 150,000 Italian settlers were brought in, roads and farm villages were built on confiscated land, and Libyans were pushed to the margins. In the Second World War the coast became a battlefield between British Commonwealth forces and the Italians and Germans, with the siege of Tobruk in 1941 and armies swinging back and forth until the Axis was driven out early in 1943.

After the war Britain administered Tripolitania and Cyrenaica and France the Fezzan. The great powers could not agree on Libya's future, and in 1949 the United Nations decided that it should become independent. On 24 December 1951 the United Kingdom of Libya was proclaimed, a federation under King Idris I, head of the Sanusi order, who had led the exile resistance from Egypt. It was one of the first African states to win independence in the era of decolonisation, and at the time one of the poorest countries in the world, dependent on rent from British and American military bases.

Everything changed when oil was found in commercial quantities in 1959. Revenues poured in during the 1960s, and the federation was abolished in 1963. But the monarchy was seen by many young Libyans as conservative, pro-Western and remote, and Arab nationalism, inspired by Gamal Abdel Nasser in neighbouring Egypt, spread in the army.

On 1 September 1969 a group of junior officers led by 27-year-old Captain Muammar Gaddafi seized power while the king was abroad. The new regime closed the foreign bases, expelled the remaining Italian settlers and nationalised much of the oil industry. In 1977 Gaddafi proclaimed the Jamahiriya, a "state of the masses" supposedly run by people's congresses and committees, as set out in his Green Book. In practice power stayed with Gaddafi and his security services. Political parties were banned, revolutionary committees watched the population, and opponents were imprisoned, executed or hunted down abroad. In 1996 about 1,200 prisoners were killed at Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.

Oil wealth paid for housing, free health care and education, and the Great Man-Made River, which piped fossil water from beneath the Sahara to the coast. Abroad, Gaddafi pursued a restless and often violent policy. Libya fought a long war in Chad over the Aouzou Strip, which ended in Libyan defeat in 1987, and backed armed groups in many countries during the Cold War. After a Berlin nightclub bombing, the United States bombed Tripoli and Benghazi in 1986. Libyan agents were blamed for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, which killed 270 people, and of a French airliner over Niger in 1989, and UN sanctions followed in 1992. Gaddafi later handed over suspects, paid compensation and in 2003 gave up his weapons of mass destruction programmes, after which sanctions were lifted and Western leaders visited Tripoli.

Inspired by the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, protests broke out in Benghazi in February 2011 and quickly became an armed rebellion. When government forces advanced on Benghazi, the UN Security Council authorised military action to protect civilians, and NATO air strikes helped the rebels take Tripoli in August. Gaddafi was captured and killed near his home town of Sirte on 20 October 2011.

The National Transitional Council handed over to an elected General National Congress in 2012, but the state never regained control of the many militias formed during the war. In September 2012 an attack on the US mission in Benghazi killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. In 2014, after disputed elections, the country split between authorities in Tripoli and a parliament in the east, backed by the forces of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar. Jihadists of the Islamic State group seized Derna and Sirte before being driven out by 2016. A UN-backed Government of National Accord was set up in Tripoli under the 2015 Skhirat agreement, and in April 2019 Haftar launched an offensive on the capital. Foreign powers backed both sides, with Turkey supporting Tripoli and the United Arab Emirates and Egypt supporting Haftar, until his forces were pushed back in 2020 and a ceasefire was signed that October.

A Government of National Unity under Abdul Hamid Dbeibah took office in 2021 to lead the country to elections planned for that December, but they were postponed indefinitely, and rival governments in Tripoli and the east have persisted. In September 2023 Storm Daniel caused two dams to collapse above the eastern city of Derna, killing thousands of people in the worst natural disaster in Libya's modern history. In May 2025 the killing of a powerful militia commander set off heavy fighting in Tripoli, and in February 2026 Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the former leader's son and a would-be presidential candidate, was killed. In April 2026 the two rival governments approved a unified state budget for the first time in more than a decade, though the country remained politically divided.