The country’s precipitation is restricted to the winter, between October and May, and varies in quantity from area to area. The highest rainfall is about Cyrene near the summit of the Jebel, where the annual average is 600 mm, but may reach 1000 mm in good years. On the desert fringes and on the southern slopes of the Jebel, on the other hand, precipitation averages only 100 mm. Rainfall decreases from west to east and from north to south, averaging 200-300 mm at Bengazi, 400 mm along the north coast. The west coast, south of Bengazi, however, receives no more than 150-200 mm., and the same applies to the country’s coast east of Martuba. But against these averages must be set the common view of the inhabitants, that drought is apt to recur every fourth year.
The rainy season coincides with the season of maximum coolness, which restricts evaporation; but the permeable character of the country’s rocks causes the loss of much water by infiltration to deep strata, in so far as the runoff does not flow to waste in the wadis. On the other hand the Jebel’s relatively high rainfall has caused the formation over certain areas of layers of terra rossa, the residues of limestones in dissolution; this is a fertile water-retaining soil which possesses most of the elements required for the successful growing of cereals. These soils are distributed along the plateau between al-Gubba on the east and al-Abbiar on the west. The Plateau further possesses scattered tracts of loam, sand and chalk.
Permanently-flowing streams are rare in the country owing to the permeable character of its rock. Such, nevertheless, are Wadi Derna, which springs west of ‛Ein Mara, and the Lethe near Bengazi, which flows entirely underground. Springs which break out from the rocks of the Jebel are few, as a result of the relative scarcity of water-tables formed by impermeable strata. Where such exist, they are marl strata situated principally in the eastern Jebel, the most plentiful springs being concentrated between Derna in the east and ‛Ein Targuna on the west. Further westward, springs are rare, and centre in the Tecnis region. An isolated area of wells is to be found in the Martuba district, east of Derna. South of the Tecnis-Marawa-Slonta-Derna line, and east of the coastal belt south of Bengazi (Gemines, Solluk), the only available sources of water are cisterns and wells, and the southern limit of the area of cisterns is marked by the line through Sauno, Mesus and el-Mekhili.
Despite the shortage of water prevailing over a considerable part of the country, the plateau’s height above sea-level over most of its area ensures a heavy dew-precipitation even in the summer months. This applies especially to the coastal belt, where summer disparities between night and day temperatures produce dew-precipitating mists.[8] Thanks to these summer dews and to winter rains, the Plateau possesses a rich plant covering, in the form of woodland and shrubs, which in the hot months become coveted pasture for the flock-owning population of the desert fringes. Thus considerable remnants of woodland survive between Messa and Mameli, chiefly cypress, while the plateau is further clothed by the juniper, lentisk, olive, ilex, arbutus, laurel, lotus and wild fig. The plateau flora also includes bushes such as poterium spinosum, the sunrose, thyme, sage, the giant fennel and the drias. Esparto grass flourishes in the Bengazi area, and along the north-western shores, between Bengazi and Tocra, the date palm. Forest ceases with the steppe, where rainfall is inadequate to support it; here low scrubs, such as wormwood, saltwort, spurge, flax, and various worts, upon which flocks can pasture, grow in the rainy season. On the steppe, springs are replaced by wells, and trees such as the thorn, lotus, and rus oxyacantha are restricted to the depressions.
Thus one of the country’s most outstanding phenomena is created — the seasonal transhumance of flocks to the plateau in summer for pasture and water, and their return southward to the fringes of the plateau and to the steppe when autumn comes. With the return of summer the nomadic shepherd re-ascends the plateau and there sojourns till the autumn, sowing corn immediately after the first rains. He then reverts to the steppelands of the south to enjoy the renewed winter pastures. In harmony with this natural division between plateau and steppe, cattle and goats are at home on the Jebel, while the steppe is the home of the sheep and the camel; sheep drink little, and in the winter, hardly at all, camels at long intervals. This seasonal movement between the cultivated and steppeland areas exists in various forms in most countries of the Mediterranean and north Africa, but in few of them is the phenomenon so pronounced as in Cyrenaica, where it is such as to create an antagonism between the nomadic tribes and the settled agricultural population, when such should appear in the form of colonists from without. We shall see that this antagonism furnishes the key to an understanding of the ancient history of Cyrene.
The contrasting characteristics of the country’s two main zones — the plateau and the steppe, may be summarized in the words of Professor Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard: “In Cyrenaica stand always contrasted the mountain and the plain, the forest and the steppe, the red soils and the white, the country of springs and the country of wells, the arable country and the grazing grounds, the region of goats and cows and the region of sheep and camels, settled life and nomadism...”[9]
CHAPTER TWO
THE GREEK COLONIZATION
1. Monarchy and Democracy
Various attempts have been made by scholars to prove that the settlement of the Greeks of Thera in Libya was preceded by an older wave of Greek settlers. Allusions to this older colonization have been found in the verses of Pindar, who tells of the encounter of the settlers of Thera with the Antenorids who had come to Libya with Helen after the capture of Troy; further in the interpretation of other texts such as the Lindus Temple Chronicle and the epic writings of Eugammon. Various philologists have sought to attribute distinctive ancient elements surviving in the Cyrenean dialect, to an earlier stratum of Greek-speaking settlers in eastern Libya.[10] Schachermeier[11] has argued, that as early as the second millennium B.C., Achaeans who had reached Libya by way of Cyrene, joined the alliance of Libyan tribes to attack Egypt.
All these conjectures have encountered the insurmountable difficulty that there is no real archaeological evidence for such an early settlement. The first conclusions of Stucchi, that finds made in recent excavations at Cyrene (1959-1961), included late Minoan pottery and a Middle or Late Minoan seal[12] have been rebutted by Boardman, who dates these objects at earliest to approximately 600 B.C.[13] Pottery from excavations at Teucheira, Bengazi, and Cyrene itself, does not precede the middle of the 7th century B.C. at earliest,[14] and that at Euhesperides begins, on present evidence, in the first quarter of the 6th.[15] At Apollonia the earliest strata appear to have dated not long after the colonization of Cyrene.[16] Libya was nevertheless known to the Homeric epic when it assumed its final form in the 8th century B.C., and the story of Korobios — as well as his rescue by a Samian vessel that touched the Isle of Plataea (see below), suggests that the coast was not unvisited by the Greeks before the Battiad colonization. Pre-Theran finds, nevertheless, are at the moment confined to a Minoan lentoid intaglio from Apollonia,[17] a Mycenaean bull-figure found in the Temple of Apollo at Cyrene,[18] and a late Minoan lentoid gem reported by Boardman from an archaic Greek stratum at Teucheira.[19]
8
E. C. Semple,
11
14
Stucchi,
15
Information from M. Vickers —