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March 7, 2004 The New York Times
In Qaddafi’s Realm, Shadows of the Caesars
By PATRICK E. TYLER

FEW Americans have visited Libya since Ronald Reagan clashed with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in the 1980’s. Those were the days when American warplanes shot their way across the "line of death" in the Gulf of Sidra, when Libya was accused of responsibility for the Belle Disco bombing in Berlin and when Mr. Reagan unfurled his retribution with those "you can run but you can’t hide" airstrikes on Tripoli and Benghazi.

More American bombers have crossed this part of the palm-studded North African coastline than American tour operators, who were banned from doing so until last month under trade barriers imposed by the United States. But all changed after last December’s dramatic reversal by Colonel Qaddafi, who vowed to rid the country of illicit weapons and begin reconciliation with the West.

Now that all the centrifuges used to enrich uranium for Libya’s secret nuclear bomb project have been safely stored in American warehouses, and the vats of mustard gas have been neutralized, President Bush has lifted restrictions on travel to Libya.

The great sucking sound that may soon be heard in the Mediterranean will be the influx of oil and other executives and American tourists returning to the most splendid display of Roman civilization that exists outside Italy.

For at their peak, under the Roman Emperor Lucius Septimius Severus, who ruled the empire from 193 to 211 A.D., the three great cities of the Libyan coast, Leptis Magna, Oea and Sabratha, rivaled Rome itself in splendor, architecture and wealth. In fact, the emperor was a native of Leptis Magna.

What Americans are going to discover with amazement is just how much is left standing in Leptis Magna, 75 miles east of Tripoli and in Sabratha, 50 miles to the west of the capital. For what happened on this coast of golden sandstone after Rome collapsed and after Muslim conquerors swept over the region in the seventh century was that nature sealed Leptis Magna and Sabratha under a blanket of sand.

The cities lay there until the Italian conquest of 1911. During two periods of intense excavation, in the 1920’s and 1950’s, the broad outlines of both places and their stunning architectural relics emerged.

Mustafa Turjman has walked these streets for more than 20 years as a tour guide and historian at Leptis Magna and his eyes still light up as he strolls through Hadrian’s Baths and along the colonnaded street to the Forum of Severus, which covers about three acres. Here was the shopping mall for a rich metropolis and later, a grand basilica next door.

"It is still possible to imagine the life that existed here," he says, "because the streets take you to the homes of merchants and from there to the temples, theaters and markets."

After a 90-minute trip by car from Tripoli, the approach to Leptis is through a stand of pine and eucalyptus trees off a parking lot. When you emerge from the trees, the Arch of Septimius rises magnificently over a landscape that is deceptively green because so much vegetation still mixes with the ruins. The Triumphal Arch, probably built for the emperor’s visit in A.D. 203, stands there eerily at the head of a broad avenue called Cardo Maximus like a gateway to another era. The mammoth paving stones radiate the brute force of Roman power.

Visitors who walk down into the ruins discover a great hinterland of neighborhoods, with houses built of native sandstone. Residents walked on multicolored mosaic floors and drank from underground cisterns where rainwater was stored.

In the city’s baths, even the toilet was a forum. Toilet seats were cut into marble slabs and arranged in a common room without stalls. The room had its own subterranean water course providing sewerage.

"In Leptis Magna, you do get a fine sense of what a great Roman city was like," says Graeme Barker, professor of archaeology at the University of Leicester in England. "You can walk around the streets and the great public spaces."

At the grand Baths of Hadrian, citizens lolled in saunas heated by olive-wood fires and dipped into cold water and heated pools surrounded by marble Corinthian colonnades.

What you can’t do here, Mr. Barker says, is see how 95 percent of the ordinary folk lived, because so much of the city remains unexcavated, beneath layers of sand and vegetation. With all that there is to see, "only a small proportion of the total site is excavated," he says.

The theater seated several thousand people for musical and dance productions, but a more robust fare drew the big crowds to the Circus for chariot races around a course three football fields long and one wide. The outlines are still visible today on the beach below the amphitheater at the east end of the city. Built out of the contours of the quarry that provided much of the building material for the city, it seated 16,000 people. There gladiators slashed at each other and wild animals were slaughtered. Lions and tigers were then released to prey upon criminals or other prisoners who were thrown onto the set for blood sport.

Mosaics discovered in the ruins of one Roman villa near here depict wild animal hunts on a stage decorated with trees and plants to resemble a tropical scene. They are now at the National Museum in Tripoli.

Like many other Mediterranean ports, Leptis was founded by Phoenician traders as a hub to gather the wheat and olive crops from fertile areas on the coast and in the interior. The port’s contours are still visible under the promontory occupied by the ruins of the ancient lighthouse.

Then, the sea was full of ships. Today, Colonel Qaddafi forbids recreational sailing, something the current British ambassador, Anthony Layden, an avid sailor, neglected to check when he accepted a posting here. He now keeps his sloop moored in Malta.

The modern capital, Tripoli, occupies the site of Oea, one of the "three cities," from which Tripoli derives its name.

Commerce and the voraciously exploitive economy of Rome fueled a lusty culture of acquisition. Down the centuries of war and conquest, these great cities were lucky to escape the kind of destruction that visited Carthage. Even Julius Caesar spared Leptis after he discovered in 46 B.C. that it was sheltering Cato the Younger, his enemy in the civil war that led to the fall of the Republic. (Cato committed suicide and Caesar levied a huge fine on Leptis.).

The chariot racecourse here was among the largest anywhere, and the beasts of Africa – lions, leopards and elephants – were paraded before enthusiastic crowds before the animals were slaughtered in games staged at the adjacent amphitheater.

On the January morning when I visited Leptis, there were no more than a half-dozen people on the streets of this ancient city, which was home to nearly 100,000 people at its peak.

"The magic of Libya is that often these sites are totally deserted," says Paul Bennett, chairman of the Society for Libyan Studies in Britain. "I can remember the first time I walked the streets of Leptis. I was wearing headphones and playing the ‘Paris’ symphonies and no one was there and it was just fabulous."

It is likely that even after Libya opens up, it will still be possible to duplicate this experience, many experts believe, because the tourism industry will take time to develop. At the moment, there is only one hotel in the country that meets European standards, the Corinthia, which is under Maltese management, situated on Tripoli’s waterfront. Although the 20th century has seen the first mass excavations of these Roman cities, over all it has not been kind to Libya, an Italian colony from 1911 to 1943. When Italy entered its Fascist period under Mussolini, the Roman treasures of North Africa were dug up as icons of Italian imperialism.

"The politics of the spade was very much operating in North Africa at that time," says David Mattingly, who teaches Roman archaeology at the University of Leicester. "And it was partly an attempt to disenfranchise the Libyans from their own past and to make the Roman past of Libya an Italian preserve."

A railroad was laid into Leptis in the 1920’s (its tracks are still visible) and thousands of workers spent years hauling hundreds of tons of sand and dirt off the ruins.

Indigenous rebellion was brutally suppressed, and ordinary Libyans were not allowed to walk the streets in central Tripoli where Italians lived in grand buildings.

"The Libyans were treated horribly during the colonial period and the resentment still complicates Libya’s relations with Italy today," one Western ambassador says. For that reason also, the amazing Roman ruins here are not the source of national pride that a visitor might expect.

But the prospect of a boom in tourism and resulting new wealth is likely to awaken Libya’s population of 5.4 million to a part of their history largely ignored since Colonel Qaddafi in 1969 overthrew King Idris, the ineffectual monarch who was installed when the country became independent in 1951.

Prime Minister Shukri Ghanem, an economic reformer appointed by Colonel Qaddafi last June, said in January that tourism was a great national resource "that has not yet been tapped." The first step, he added then would be the lifting of the travel ban to Libya. That signal would tell the world that Libya is open for investors to build the kind of infrastructure – hotels, restaurants, roads and airports like those of Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco – to better exploit their greatest long-term national resource: antiquities under a warm sun beside a crystalline sea.

Visitor Information

What to See

Leptis Magna is 75 miles east of Tripoli on the coastal highway. The site is open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. all year, and longer in the summer. Admission is $2.25, at 1.36 Libyan dinars to the dollar. A fee ranging from $6.80 to $13.60 is charged for carrying cameras or video equipment into the site. Museum admission is $1.50.

Sabratha is 50 miles west of Tripoli on the coastal highway. It is open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission charges are the same as for Leptis Magna.

Both sites are reachable by taxi or bus from Tripoli, and both have parking areas equipped with restrooms, coffee shops, souvenir stands and travel guides. There is a small museum on each site.

Guides charge about $37.50 a day

The best statuary and mosaics are in the National Museum on Green Square in downtown Tripoli. Travel guides are also available in the museum for walking tours in the old quarter of Tripoli.

Where to Stay

The best hotel in Tripoli is the Corinthia Bab Africa, at Souk al-Thulatha al-Gadim. Rooms there are $200 to $300 a night; telephone (218) 21 335 1990, fax (218) 21 335 1992. Details can be found on the Internet at www.corinthiahotels…..

The Corinthia’s front-office manager is Paul Pace, e-mail: pace@corinthia.ly”>ppace@corinthia.ly.

PATRICK E. TYLER is chief of the London bureau of The Times.