The Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya has, since 1980, been involved in no fewer than three important judgments at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, dealing with Libya-Tunisia, the Libya-Malta and the Libya-Chad boundaries. The Government of Libya accepted all the judgments made at the ICJ without equivocation.

The settlement of the Mediterranean continental shelf issues with Tunisia (1982) and with Malta (1985) may be seen as technical adjustments leading to a fixing of boundaries in undemarcated areas. Both judgments were comparatively favourable to Libya and extended Libya's area of hydrocarbon activities off-shore.

In the matter of Libyan land claims to the Aouzou strip on the Chad borderlands, the situation was rather different. The international boundary between Libya and Chad was laid down under a 1955 convention. In 1972 the Libyan Government annexed the Aouzou strip. The ICJ gave its judgment on 3rd February 1994, by 16 votes to 1 finding that the boundary between the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and the Republic of Chad is defined by the Treaty of Friendship and Good Neighbourliness concluded on 10th August 1955 between the French Republic and the United Kingdom of Libya, thus restoring the Aouzou strip to Chad.

A select bibliography of sources dealing with Libya's international boundaries is attached, itemising key texts in Western languages.

The purpose of this paper is to present several avenues of reflection linked first to the onomastics of the African episcopate of the Byzantine period, then to its development. A quick overview of the most typical characteristics of onomastics of this period will be presented, followed by a description of the remarkable development of this African episcopate between the sixth and the beginning of the eighth century. It will conclude with observations on the African onomastic repertoire of the Protobyzantine era, which reflects the evolution of mentalities within the very interior of the African Christian people and the different circles within it.

The difficulty with the study of Libyan history, certainly before the sixteenth century, is twofold: firstly the definition of Libya as a subject, secondly the lack of information. The definition of the subject starts from the modern political boundaries, which do not predate the Ottomans; the lack of information must be related to the fact that most of the territory is desert, and peripheral to the concerns of wealthier and more powerful neighbours — Egypt, Tunis, Kanem/Borno, and the maritime empires of western Europe. Instead of a positive entity of which the modern political limits are only the most recent expression, it is all too easy to see a hollow space between neighbours north, south, east and west. How to fill that space conceptually and evidentially is the problem explicit or implicit in all the literature over the years since the foundation of the Society for Libyan Studies. This essay does not aim to be exhaustive, simply to indicate the lines of thought and investigation, and offer some conclusions.

Oil wealth has transformed Libya, a desertic and sparsely populated country, bringing dramatic demographic changes (Zoghlami 1979). El Mehdawi and Clarke (1982) and Lawless and Kezeiri (1983) describe and analyse the growing polarisation of the population in the north-west and north-east coastal regions which contain the two largest cities, Tripoli and Benghazi. They show that in recent years spatial duality has been sharply intensified by strong rural to urban migration and also by an increase in interregional migration. The concentration of new development programmes in certain urban centres has been the main cause of the development differential among the regions. As a result the regions which include the most important urban centres have become the most prosperous and the others have become less developed or even depressed. This has been the main cause of the rapid increase in both rural to urban migration and interregional migration. The inhabitants of the less developed regions have continued to move in increasing numbers to those which are more developed. The large majority of migrants who moved from these less developed regions are represented by rural people who have changed their place of residence and their occupation. They have left their work in the rural sector to seek employment in the industrial and service sector. As a result agricultural production has declined. The agrarian sector now employs less than a quarter of the Libyan workforce and the percentage of nomads and semi-nomads has declined to under 10% of the population. Albergani and Vignet-Zunz (1982) have shown that colonial invasion and occupation followed by the Second World War threatened the Bedouin of the Jebel Akhdar with extinction, not through sedentarisation but through the mass migration of a devastated rural population. The advent of oil and the high salary levels available in urban centres further encouraged this tendency. Gannous (1979) studied the movement of Bedouin from rural areas to the town of Al Abiyar and the erosion of Bedouin culture by urban values.

After the victory of El-Alamein, a military administration was set up in Libya to act as a caretaker government until a peace-treaty should be concluded. This administration assumed, as part of its responsibilities, the care of the country's antiquities. In Cyrenaica the staff of the Italian Soprintendenza had been withdrawn; in Tripolitania, under Dr. G. Pesce, the Soprintendenza remained in operation. At the instance of Sir Mortimer (then Brigadier) Wheeler, Major J. B. Ward-Perkins, who was serving with the Eighth Army, was appointed Acting Adviser in Archaeology to the British Military Administration. In the summer of 1943 he made a number of recommendations as to the safeguarding of the antiquities, and in August 1944 Major C. G. C. Hyslop was appointed as Antiquities Officer for the two Libyan territories, Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, under British control. The British Antiquities Officer worked in close conjunction with the Italian Soprintendenza at Tripoli, but in Cyrenaica he had to rely almost entirely on his own resources. Maintenance and reorganization were first priorities but Hyslop also found time to issue an English guidebook to Cyrenaica. Major D. E. L. Haynes who followed Hyslop as Antiquities Officer late in 1945 produced a similar volume on Tripolitania, which after two subsequent editions and revisions commissioned by the Libyan Government in 1955 and 1959, is still the standard guide-book to the classical antiquities. Haynes was succeeded by Goodchild in September 1946, followed by Morgan in 1948 and Johns in 1950. The main responsibility of the Antiquities Department continued to be the care of the important coastal sites excavated by Italian archaeologists between 1912 and 1942, but the presence of British forces with personnel trained in desert travel and also with facilities such as transport, stores, camping-equipment, made it possible to carry out archaeological field work, especially in the pre-desert areas.

Terracotta figures have been uncovered in vast quantities in the cemeteries of the Greek cities of Cyrenaica from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. While the terracottas from more recent excavations have of course remained in Libya, the majority of those brought to light in the nineteenth century are now divided between the national museums of three European capitals: Paris, Madrid and London. The Louvre collection is the largest of the three, consisting of some 400 pieces, mostly acquired by the consul M. Vattier de Bourville in the cemeteries of Cyrene and Benghazi in 1848; the majority are of the Hellenistic period, and have recently received full publication in the final volume of Mme Simone Besques' monumental catalogue. The Cyrenaican terracottas in Madrid, purchased from the collection of one Tómas Asensi in 1876, are about ninety in number, and of these roughly half are Hellenistic in date; the few given a provenance are said to come from the cemeteries of Cyrene. The Madrid terracottas were published by Alfred Laumonier in 1921, and the descriptions and photographs in his catalogue are still useful.

The British Museum has around 300 terracotta figures from Cyrenaica, of which approximately 180 whole figures or fragments can be counted as Hellenistic. The archaic and classical figures were published by Dr Reynold Higgins in the first volume of his catalogue of British Museum terracottas, while a significant proportion of the later pieces were included by H. B. Walters in his earlier catalogue. However, the entire collection of post-classical Cyrenaican material will be treated in greater detail in the new catalogue of the British Museum's Hellenistic terracottas, currently in preparation.

The 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea will shape worldwide maritime management and offshore jurisdiction for generations to come. Libya will gain substantially from the new convention notably in respect of a 12 nautical mile territorial waters, and the acquisition of one of the largest Exclusive Economic Zones in the Mediterranean. The known resources of this zone are not abundant, though some useful oilfields have been found. Several of Libya's offshore boundaries remain to be fixed, and Libya's claim to the Gulf of Surt as ‘historic waters’ creates some uncertainty. An upsurge in Libyan offshore activity, including conservation activities, is likely in the future.

Bardia has a natural deep-water harbour confined by cliffs, making it an ideal submarine haven. It held a strategic position in the last war in connection with the capture of Tobruk, and was used by both the Germans and British as a supply base (Fig. 1). Set back from the shoreline were numerous single-storey, flat-roofed buildings overlooking the harbour, one of which was a lookout post where the mural under discussion survives.

On 30th December 1941 the Allies launched a decisive attack on Bardia (Liddell Hart 1953, 177–178), which surrendered on 2nd January 1942 (Murphy 1961, 511–512). On 27 th January Rommel had struck again at Benghazi; General Auchinleck gave orders to withdraw, and formed a front line near Gazala in early February.

According to its contemporary War Diary, the 5th Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment arrived in the Western Desert from Palestine and Syria on 20th February, and two days later took over from the 11th Indian Brigade approximately 20 miles south of Gazala (W.O.169/5076). One of the soldiers in this batallion was Private John Frederick Brill 4617871 of the Royal Army Service Corps, the artist of the mural in the Painted Room at Bardia.

The only building which has been preserved from the ancient urban fabric of Tripoli, Oea in antiquity, is the Triumphal Arch. By considering Arab sources, we may shed new light on its evolution, the place it had been in the past and the way it was considered during those times. If we compare two excerpts from Arab-Muslim historiography, written by local travellers, with Western testimonies, we see that the monument was reinterpreted in the light of the new culture which was established in the region and of the local history of the city.

This article is a reassessment of an inscription dated to 473 H. / AD 1080–81 from Qasr al-Hammâm, in the hinterland of Lepcis Magna. The inscription is contextualised within the historical literature of the period and a new reading is proposed; following a careful analysis of the architecture it is suggested that the original plan of the qasr is of medieval date rather than earlier. The inscription appears to corroborate the reliability of Ibn Khaldoūn regarding the settlement of the āl-Sālim tribe in the vicinity of Lepcis: the late eleventh century ‘Émir Sālim’ referred to by Khaldoūn is in all probability the same man as the emir mentioned in the inscription.

In the course of research on Alan Rowe's Cyrenaican expeditions, when he was Special Lecturer at Manchester University, Rowe's career as an Egyptologist came unexpectedly to light from his personal papers, national archives and the records of various museums. What emerged was a picture of a man who had an active life, not only in Egypt and Cyrenaica, but also in Australia, Palestine and Syria.

The Garden Tomb is a remarkable funerary complex in the Southern Necropolis of Cyrene, consisting of two burial chambers set within a courtyard with a monumental Doric façade. The architectural arrangement of the main tomb, most likely dating back to the fourth century BC, shows at least three phases of re-use and alterations of the original interior, in use until the Late Imperial period. Three sculptures belonging to the tomb and the decorative features of the exterior (entrance door kymation) and interior (red, blue and ochre wall paint in the main burial) of the monument are noteworthy. The epigraphic apparatus, drawn in charcoal on the walls of the main burial, is significant both in terms of the form of the letters and its content: one of the two inscriptions appears to give the price of loculi for sale.