Talk:Libya

• Here* in 117 Trajan repopulated Libya, where the Jews had revolted and been massacred.

I propose that in 117 CE *there* Trajan repopulated Libya with Dorians from Crete, who would become the ancestor of the speakers of the Greek-descended language Kerrannahekka. The local language drifted farther away from Standard Greek after the 3rd century CE, when the local cities went into a three-century decline.

108 826 505 inhabbitants? Why Libya is so much more populated compared to *here*?--Pedromoderno 23:46, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Maybe the Sudanese immigrants was more than we expected. Plus you have Greeks, Sicilians, and Neapolitans all there as well.

The country is entirely desert except for a narrow strip along the coast. There are no rivers of consequence. The oases can only support so many. I'm not sure the land can physically support as many people as you propose. - Geoff 01:22, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Mr. Mills (corr 4/5/17: Miles, thank you very much) hasn't really been back to IB in awhile. I talk to him on conculture; that's the place I'd go in order to want permission to change it. Misterxeight 01:23, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

4/4/17: Still working on (reasonable) updated population figures.

Minority Ethnic Groups

The mostly endogamous Dawwada are a distinct ethnic group of Fezzan who live around the Qaber'awn oasis where they traditionally harvested brine shrimp in the salty lake and sold them to caravans (including the Senussi Order). From this livelihood their name, the 'Worm-folk', derives. They are distinct in appearance from the Berbers, the Toubou, and the Bedouin, and have been likened to the "Khoisan" of southern Africa. They may be a relic population. Their language is an Arabic dialect, although there is virtually nothing published on the subject. The ethnolinguist Francesco Cioppino (1976) has published a short list of terms that appear to be unique to the dialect; he theorizes these are the relict vocabulary of their original language.

In 1980, the Libyan government intended to move the Dawwada from their traditonal home and relocate them to settlement of concerete apartments in the Ouadi Bashir to the south of the erg. The area would afterwards would become a tourism destination. The Dawwada leadership, however, prevented their removal by agreeing to host the tourism center themselves, which now includes an open-air patio, sleeping huts, a souvenir shop, and a nightly performance of traditional songs. Some Dawwada feel that the leadership sold their heritage at too high a price and refer to themselves as "museum Dawwada", but others feel that the ability to remain at the oasis was worth the price.

The Tripoli Department of Marine Biology maintains a small lab in the oasis to study the brine shrimp and assess the possibility of transport and cultivation in oases with salination increase.

National Symbol

I think that the Sahara Cypress (in Tamanghasset, Libya) should be a symbol of the Libyan state.

4/4/17: Tamanrasset, according to the maps, is in Mali. So back to the population drawing board.

Arab Conquest

642 - Amr ibn al-A'as conquers Cyrenaica and renames the Pentapolis Barqah.

647 - Arabs conquer Tripoli

? - Companion of the Prophet Ruwaifi bin Thabit al-Ansari dies at Barqah. The place is long known as Sidi Rafaa after him.

665 - Invasion of Tripoli by Exarch Gennadius

750 - The Abbasids overthrow the the Umayyads and appoint Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab as governor of Libya. He founds the Aghlabid dynasty.

c. 900 - The Ismailis conquer the Aghlabids

972 - The Shiite Fatimids conquer Egypt.

11th c. - The Fatimid governor of Libya switches sides, pledges allegiance to the Sunni Caliph in Baghdad. In response, the Fatimids send the Banu Hilal and the Banu Sulaym to Libya. The Banu Hilal spread widely, but the Banu Sulaym settle primarily in Libya, esp. Cyrenaica, depriving the Amazigh of their farmlands and turning them into pasture.

1114 - Christian communities still extant in Algeria

1150 - Reference to the Bishop of Kairouan

15th c. - Still Berber Christians in Tunis and Nefzaoua.

Jaghbub

1787 - Muhammad ibn Ali al-Senussi is born in Mostagenem

1835 - Al-Senussi founds a zawiya at Abu Qubays in Mecca

1845 - Al-Senussi's son Sayyid Muhammad al-Mahdi is born.

1847 - Wahhabi pressure forces al-Senussi to leave Mecca. He moves to Cyrenaica and establishes a al-zawiya al-Bayda near Sidi Rafaa.

1855 - Ottoman surveillance forces al-Senussi to move to Jaghbub, 30 miles NW of Siwa.

1860 - Al-Senussi dies.

1881 - Muhammad Ahmad declares himself the Mahdi and tries to convince Muhammad al-Mahdi to join him. Muhammad al-Mahdi ignores him.

1889 - The pasha of Benghazi meets with Muhammad al-Mahdi with Ottoman troops. His was the power in Tripoli and Benghazi.

1894 - As a result of the Benghazi visit, Muhammad al-Mahdi moves his headquarters to Jof in al-Kufra. French colonialism is a threat.

1902 - Muhammad al-Mahdi dies, succeeded by Ahmed Sharif es-Senussi, who serves as regent for his cousin Muhammad Idris.

1911 - Italy conquers Libya from the Ottomans.

1917 - Muhammad Idris signs a treaty with Italy ceding control of Libya to him.

1920 - Muhammad Idris is recognized as Emir of Cyrenaica.

1925 - Jaghbub is transferred from Egypt to Italy.

1931 (Feb) - Marshal Radolfo Graziani decides to build a fence from Jaghbub to Bardia (Petras Maior).

1931 (Sep) - The Jaghbub fence is complete.

1940-1941 - The Siege of Giarabub.

1984 - Qaddafi closes the university at Jaghbub.

Spain Substitute and the Knights of St John

Juan, feel free to put the correct Iberian and Southern Italian principalities *there* in Libyan history *there* - I just retruned to active duty and Libya and tangents are complicated enough. Theophilus88

More Materials

Libya Romano-Jewish Wars

In 73 CE, the Jews of Cyrene revolted against the Romans and were defeated.

In 115 CE, a Cyrenaean Jew named Lukuas or Andreas revolted. Andreas destroyed the civil and religious infrastructure of the Pentapolis and later marched his army to Alexandria, which he sacked. This revolt ended in 117 with the devastation and depopulation of the region. For three years the land remained desolate.

In 120 CE, the Roman Emperor Trajan repopulated the region with Greeks from Laconia and Sparta exclusively, including the royal ancestors of Synesius, Bishop of Ptolemais.

The Secession of Cyrenaean Christianity

The Cyrenaean Christians possessed even more of a neo-Platonic streak than the Scots of Egypt. The Bishops of Cyrene were technically in communion with the Patriarch of Alexandria (the Scottish Pope) until the eve of the Muslim invasion in 642 CE.

In 642, the Muslims invaded Egypt, but were rebuffed by the Scots. A contingent of the Muslim army found itself in Cyrenaica, whose leaders under the Bishop of Euhesperides agreed to allow the Muslim to use Cyrenaica as a staging point for fruitless attacks against the Scots of Egypt and the African Catholics of Tripoli and Carthage in exchange for recognition as a distinct religious group. From this period onward, the Cyrenaean Christians, whom the Arabs called Qrennahin, were openly Apollinarian.

In 647, the Muslim army took Tripoli, and killed the Exarch of Africa, Gregory the Patrician, a member of the imperial Heraclian clan. Gennadius, a Byzantine general, assumed the position of Exarch despite no appointment to the position. He convinced the Arabs under ʿAbdallāh ibn Saʿd ibn Abī Sarḥ to leave by offering them an annual tribute. Tripoli, on the other hand, had fallen into Muslim hands in 643. One of the companions of the prophet died and was buried at Barca (Barqah)

In 663, Constans II, the advocate of Monothelitism as a compromise between Chalcedonian orthodoxy and Miaphysitism, moved the imperial court to Syracuse, triggering rumors that this was a permanent move. Constans II demanded an increase in tribute from Africa. In 664, Gennadius, a staunch Chalcedonian, refused to send the additional revenue, and furthermore ejected Constans II’s representative. Although the local Christians were Chalcedonian, they could not abide this disrespect to the emperor. A local official, Eleutherios the Younger, led the revolt that expelled Gennadius in 665 and succeeded Gennadius as Exarch. Gennadius, meanwhile, fled to the court of the Umayyad Caliph Muʿāwiyah I at Damascus, who provided an army with which Gennadius would take back the Exarchate; Gennadius, however, died at Alexandria. The Muslim army continued onwards.

Minorities Subsection

Could I sketch out some stuff for Libya's contemporary Eastern Orthodox Christians and Jews? Off the top of my head, I figure that about half of Libya's remaining Eastern Orthodox Christians are Black Greeks, the remaining 50% being mostly Greeks, Hellenized Balkan minorities, and recent immigrants from E. Europe (our world's Libya had Serbian and Ukrainian construction workers and engineers). Tripoli's community would probably be mostly black, with probably less than a couple hundred being Greeks-from-Greece. Also, does it mess with anything you've written if Tunis still has an extant (albeit heavily Italianized) Christian Berber community remaining? Misterxeight 10:31, 12 April 2017 (PDT)

IMO any Christian Berbers in Tunis/Cartàggini should be conversions made by the Sicilians (which would also explain the Italianization, or perhaps more appropriately Sicilianisation)--most Berbers before the Islamisation process seem to have been pagans. Juanmartinvelezlinares 07:08, 13 April 2017 (PDT)

You're not completely wrong, but you're not completely right, either.

Yes, most Berbers were pagan by the time the Muslims charged west out of Egypt. That's why it was so easy for them to bridge the gap between Islam and Berber paganism: both were into tribal, humanistic values. That doesn't mean there were no Berber Christians at all. The last Christians died out sometime near the turn of the 16th Century according to Mohammad Talbi in his book Le Christianisme Maghrébin de la conquête musulmane a sa disparition d'une tentative explication (1990, found in Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands, Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries). The final Christians amassed in Tunis, enough that by the end of the first 25 years of the 1400's, the population of Christians in the city increased. All I'm asking is to extend their lifeline for another couple of centuries, which, as we have a pagan Lithuania and a pagan Jersey Islands, I don't think it's asking for much. Misterxeight 11:13, 13 April 2017 (PDT)

You're right, actually. My apologies. What size do you think we should give them, and what rite would they follow? (I seem to recall that most Berber Christians were Roman Catholics of the African Rite.)Juanmartinvelezlinares 17:22, 13 April 2017 (PDT)

I would think they'd be in the low thousands and almost entirely Latin Rite Roman Catholics. The book says that their Catholicism was alien to Spanish missionaries sent to North Africa during their final years (some, but not all of these missionaries also ended up staying and converting to Islam), but I'd just chalk that up to the liturgy being pretty similar to the rest of the Catholic world with plenty of folk belief and syncretic-religious expression outside the church. Pretty standard stuff in Africa. Misterxeight 23:51, 13 April 2017 (PDT)