Learn about: What was the ancient city of Cyrene?
The ancient cemetery at Cyrene spreads across limestone cliffs where ancient Greek families carved elaborate tombs for their dead. Walking through the site in early morning, you can still see where stonemasons shaped columns and doorways directly into the rock face around 500 BC. Some families kept things simple. Others commissioned painted scenes of banquets and celebrations, the colours still visible in protected corners after two and a half thousand years.
Then the bulldozers arrived.
Local farmers demolished 2 kilometres of these ancient burial chambers, flattening them to clear agricultural land in August 2013. UNESCO estimates about 30 per cent of the cemetery has been destroyed or built over. The threat didn't stop there. Storm Daniel hit in September 2023, sending floodwaters through excavated temples and washing irreplaceable archaeological evidence into the Mediterranean. This World Heritage Site survived more than a thousand years of continuous occupation but may not survive the current century.
Ancient Cyrene sits on a plateau in northeastern Libya, 18 kilometres inland from the coast at 1,800 feet elevation. Greek colonists from the island of Thera founded the city around 631 BC, drawn by reliable springs, winter rainfall, and fertile soil in an otherwise harsh landscape. The location proved remarkable for reasons nobody anticipated. This remote North African colony produced some of the ancient world's most accomplished scholars.¹
Eratosthenes grew up here before calculating Earth's circumference using shadows and geometry, getting within 15 per cent of the actual figure despite working with ancient technology. Aristippus founded an entire school of philosophy in Cyrene, arguing that pleasure was life's highest goal. Callimachus wrote roughly 800 literary works whilst serving as chief librarian at Alexandria, influencing Roman poets for centuries. The city exported a mystery plant called silphium, valued so highly it appeared on Cyrene's coins. Overharvesting drove it extinct.
The Temple of Zeus at Cyrene matched Athens's Parthenon in scale and ambition. Each column measured nearly 2 metres across, with capitals weighing about 17 tonnes. The Jewish Revolt of 115 AD brought systematic destruction as insurgents undermined 46 columns, toppling one of the largest temples the Greeks ever built.² Parts have been reconstructed, giving modern visitors a sense of the original overwhelming scale. Standing next to a re-erected column makes you feel appropriately small, which was rather the point.
"Cyrene produced scholars who measured Earth's circumference, founded hedonistic philosophy, and catalogued the ancient world's knowledge."
The Temple of Zeus: Rivalling the Parthenon
Learn about: How big was the Temple of Zeus at Cyrene?
Construction and Scale
Learn about: Was the Temple of Zeus bigger than the Parthenon?
