Sabratha

A Roman stage wall still standing three storeys up, and an eroding coast taking it

Sabratha lies on the Mediterranean coast of Libya about 70 km west of Tripoli, the westernmost of the three cities of Roman Tripolis, with Oea and Leptis Magna. It began, perhaps around 500 BCE, as the Phoenician trading post of Tsabratan, probably a Berber name for a settlement already there, the last of the three Phoenician posts in Tripolitania, with a small natural harbour sheltered from the westerly winds. Through it went olive oil and exotic goods from the African interior. Excavators have found a tophet, a Punic cemetery, and stelae to the goddess Tanit beneath the Roman town.

It passed under Carthage, then to the short-lived Numidian kingdom of Massinissa, and in 46 BCE into the Roman province of Africa Nova. The great years came in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. Sabratha became a colony in 157, its population rose to as many as 30,000, its area doubled, and under the Severan emperors, whose founder Septimius Severus was born at nearby Leptis Magna, it built in imported marble: temples to Liber Pater, Serapis, Isis and Hercules, baths, an amphitheatre, and a new quarter along the sea. Its theatre is the jewel, its stage front rising three storeys and nearly 25 metres, among the best-preserved Roman theatres in the world. In the middle of the 2nd century the city also heard the most famous trial in its history, when the writer Apuleius answered a charge of witchcraft after marrying a rich widow, in the speech that survives as his Apologia.

Four earthquakes, including that of 365, and the Vandal invasions of the 5th century brought it down. Justinian's reconquest in 533 gave it a last revival, with new walls around a fraction of the old city and churches with exceptional mosaics, but after the Arab conquest of 643 trade moved to Tripoli and Sabratha dwindled to a village.

Italian archaeologists began excavating in 1921, and a British team under Kathleen Kenyon and John Ward-Perkins worked there from 1948 to 1951; in 1943 Agatha Christie's husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, was posted there handing out grain rations. UNESCO listed the site in 1982. Its buildings are mostly calcarenite, a friable local stone badly weathered by sea spray, and storms are eating the soft coast, with the baths, the olive press and the harbour the worst damaged.