Who Guards Leptis Magna
Libya has five World Heritage sites and all five went onto the danger list in July 2016, but what happened to them since 2011 has varied enormously — a bank vault in Benghazi was cut open and emptied of a hoard excavated at Cyrene in 1917, tombs at Cyrene have been bulldozed for building plots, and Leptis Magna is essentially intact. The difference is not international listing, and it is not state capacity, because for long stretches there was not much of either.
Leptis Magna is the most complete Roman city on the Mediterranean and it is in better condition than most of the ones you can reach on a budget airline. The Severan forum, the basilica, the colonnaded street down to the silted harbour, the four-way arch of AD 203 carved with the emperor and his two sons — Septimius Severus was born in this town in 145 and spent imperial revenue rebuilding it, and the results are still standing on the shore at al-Khums, a hundred and twenty kilometres east of Tripoli. Libya has been through a revolution, an air campaign, two civil wars and a period with two rival governments since February 2011. The city is fine.
That is not the pattern across the country and it is not what most people assume. In the same period a bank vault in Benghazi was cut open from below and emptied of a hoard of antiquities. Rock-cut tombs at Cyrene have been bulldozed to clear building plots. Rock art in the Tadrart Acacus was sprayed with paint. Five Libyan sites carry a World Heritage inscription; all five went onto the List of World Heritage in Danger in July 2016, at one stroke, in a single decision. The listings are identical. The outcomes are not, and the reason is worth being precise about.
What a listing is, and is not
Leptis Magna, Sabratha and Cyrene were inscribed in 1982, the Tadrart Acacus in 1985 and the old town of Ghadames in 1986 — an unusually strong showing for a country of six or seven million people, and a reflection of how much of the Roman and Greek Mediterranean happens to sit on this coast. The danger listing of 2016 was decided at the World Heritage Committee session in Istanbul and cited armed conflict, the loss of institutional control and, at Cyrene specifically, urban encroachment. What a danger listing actually does is publish a fact and unlock a small pot of emergency assistance. It puts no one on the ground. It does not fund a guard, repair a fence or stop a bulldozer, and the countries that most need it are by definition the ones least able to act on it.
What was actually lost
The largest single loss was portable. In May 2011, while Benghazi was the seat of the uprising, thieves broke into a vault of the National Commercial Bank in the city by cutting through concrete from the floor below and took the so-called Benghazi Treasure — coins, jewellery, figurines and cut gems excavated at Cyrene by an Italian expedition in 1917 and boxed in the bank for safekeeping. The count usually reported runs to several thousand coins; nobody has been able to verify it since, because the inventory and the objects went together. Almost none of it has been recovered. At Cyrene the damage is the opposite kind: immovable and incremental, tombs cut into the rock along the road being cleared for houses, documented repeatedly since 2013 and never quite stopped. In the Acacus, spray paint went onto painted and engraved panels that had survived several thousand years of weather. Sabratha took blast and small-arms damage when armed groups fought over the town around it in 2017. Ghadames needs something duller than any of that: mud plaster, reapplied every year by people who live there, which stopped happening at scale when the old town emptied into the new one in the 1980s.
A World Heritage listing is a letter. What kept Leptis Magna standing was a payroll that stopped being paid and the people who kept turning up anyway.
The department that kept working
Libya's Department of Antiquities inherited its structure, its site guards and a good deal of its excavation record from the Italian archaeological administration of the colonial period, and it kept the same basic arrangement afterwards: salaried inspectors and a resident guard force living beside the sites they watch. That arrangement is unglamorous and it turned out to be the thing that mattered. Through 2011 the guards at Leptis Magna stayed at their posts, often unpaid, and men from al-Khums organised themselves to watch the perimeter — the site is the town's single largest asset and everyone in it knows so. When reports circulated in June 2011 that military vehicles had been parked among the ruins, the argument that followed was conducted in public, and the site went onto a no-strike list rather than into a target set. Nothing at Leptis was bombed.
Why Cyrene went differently
Cyrene had the same legal protection and a much harder geometry. The ancient city and its necropolis sprawl for kilometres across the Jebel Akhdar directly beneath a living town, Shahat, that needed to expand; the boundary between a protected zone and a building plot is a line on a map held by an office that spent years without functioning courts behind it. Guards can watch a walled site with two gates. They cannot watch a necropolis that runs along a public road for an afternoon's drive, when the person with the excavator has a plausible claim to the ground and no authority above the department is going to enforce against him. Then in September 2023 Storm Daniel put upwards of 400 mm of rain on the Jebel Akhdar in a day — the gauge at Al-Bayda recorded most of a normal year's total inside twenty-four hours — the two dams above Derna failed and took much of that city into the sea, and the same water came off the escarpment through Cyrene, moving earth and undercutting structures. A department that had spent twelve years defending sites against people was handed a problem that had nothing to do with anyone.
The argument about opening the gates
Since about 2021 Leptis Magna has been receiving visitors again, and overwhelmingly they are Libyan — families out from Tripoli at the weekend, school groups, wedding photographers. A small number of foreign groups have come with sponsoring agencies. Inside the profession this is argued about honestly and in both directions. Visitors bring wear, litter and the risk of somebody climbing on a cornice, and the site has no ticketing infrastructure worth the name. They also produce the only constituency that has ever reliably protected an archaeological site anywhere: a local public that considers it theirs and complains loudly when something happens to it. The department has generally taken the second view, and on the record of the last fifteen years it is difficult to argue with.
What the record actually shows
Set the five sites side by side and the variable that predicts the outcome is not the strength of the listing, the size of the budget or which administration nominally held the territory. It is whether a specific group of people lived close enough to a site to treat guarding it as their own business. Leptis had that and is intact. Ghadames has it partially — the families who still come back to replaster their houses are the reason the roofed quarter has not slumped. Cyrene had the misfortune to be underneath a town that needed the land, and the Acacus is eight hundred kilometres from anywhere with an interest in it. The lesson is not comfortable for the institutions that write the letters, and it is not an argument against listing, which at least creates a public record of what is being lost. It is an argument about where protection actually comes from, and in Libya the answer has been local, unpaid and consistently better than anything sent from outside.