Among the inscribed stones brought from Cyrene to London by R. M. Smith and E. A. Porcher, and now in the British Museum, is a group of four marble fragments which deserve renewed consideration. They were found in ruins to the north of the Temple of Apollo, which must either be the Temple of Artemis or a structure closely associated with it. They concern the activity of a priestess of Artemis during the reign of Trajan. As A. Wilhelm was the first to notice, the future tense of the verb ἀριστιϵῖ in A, l. 21 shows the text to be an invitation to ἂριστον (= approximately lunch), issued by the priestess to the maidens of the city and its territory. In view of its subsequent inscription the occasion must have been one of unusual importance; certainly no similar text has been found in Cyrene.

The last full edition was by F. H. Marshall in 1916; a re-examination of the stone suggests some new readings and restorations:

The torture of Marsyas was represented in many sculptures and paintings of the classical period, and indeed one such statuette is at present located in the Cyrene Museum (Inv. No.C14255; Archive No.30). This unpublished statuette, which is made of Pentelic marble and has a total height of 0.82 m (including base), was found near the Forum of Proculus (Caesareum) at Cyrene.

Pindar relates how Marsyas found the cursed flute which the vain Athena had discarded and how he later challenged Apollo (playing the lyre) to a musical contest. Apollo agreed on condition that the winner might do as he chose to the loser. Marsyas lost the contest and as a result was tied to a pine tree and flayed alive. The basis of this legend is undoubtedly the contrast between the music of the lyre employed in the worship of the Ionian Apollo and that of the flute used in the religion of Southern Phyrgia.

This statuette at Cyrene portrays the sufferings of Marsyas. It is a splendid composition, full of action and yet beautifully harmonious. The hair and the beard are carefully and naturally rendered; the expression of the face is powerful, and Marsyas' despair has been shown most effectively by the distorted features of the face, as indicated by the long upward curve of the eyebrows. The grooves on the forehead and the oblique setting of the eyes enhance the effect. Marsyas has been given a shaggy horse tail and probably also horse ears, and the veins of his body stand out as if they are going to burst, while the muscles are stretched to breaking point. The head has thick hair, which is slightly tangled and seems to be drenched in sweat.

Although some examples of hand mirrors are known from older excavations in Libya, a rock cut tomb at Sidi Hussein, Benghazi, has recently produced a piece with radiate edging, the first example of this type to be recorded for the country.

The mirror unfortunately lacks its handle. It has the usual standard form of disc, decorated on the back with two heavy series of concentric circles at edge and centre, with, between them, a single circle. The radius of the piece is about 5.6 cm measured to the tip of a perfect ray. There are fourteen surviving rays, though originally there were probably sixteen. At the back there are traces of the solder plate of the handle in the form of a fleshy stylised willow leaf.

The origin of this type of mirror can be traced back to the hand mirrors represented on South Italian painted pottery of the fourth and third centuries B.C., as shown for example on a small Apulian oinochoe in Chester (pl.B). No actual examples have yet been found, though a mirror which may well be related was found during excavations at Locri Epizephyrii and is now in the Museo Nazionale, Reggio di Calabria (inv. no.5201).

The Roman radiate mirror has a border with between ten and thirty rays, usually with a simple terminal knob giving the characteristic profile. As with all Roman hand mirrors, the handle was separately cast using a bronze with a slightly higher percentage of lead than was used in the disc, probably so as to give extra weight and balance to the piece, as well as to aid the casting process.

A peculiar and very distinct group of portraits have in recent years aroused the interest of an increasing number of students of Roman art. These are the Cyrenaican funerary portraits, some 117 of which were studied and published for the first time as a separate series by E. Rosenbaum in 1960. Several of these portraits have found their way into European collections of ancient sculpture in these last two centuries. One is presently housed in the Museo Nazionale in Rome, and six are in the possession of the Museum Authorities in Malta. Six of the portraits published by Rosenbaum come from the British Museum. To these a seventh one (PLATE 00) should be added, which has remained unpublished having escaped the attention of both Rosenbaum and the compiler of the volume devoted to Cyrenaica of the Corpus Signorum Imperii Romani for Great Britain. Considering the easily noticeable character of this type of funerary sculpture it is somewhat surprising that neither of the two distinguished scholars became aware of the existence of this portrait. It has to be said, however, that no mention of it is made in either Smith and Porcher, or the catalogue of sculpture of the British Museum.

The large scale housing programme of the Libyan Government is changing the appearance of many of the towns of Libya. As part of this programme, the National Housing Corporation have recently adopted new standards for housing design, in order to ensure that the houses are better suited to the needs of the population in different parts of the country. During the investigations to develop new standards, the traditional housing in a number of regions of the country was studied, with a special emphasis on the way it relates to the climate and the way of life of the inhabitants. One of the most interesting traditional house forms was found in the oasis of Ghadames. My interest in the houses of Ghadames is not only in their history, their location in Libya or the climatic extremes to which they are subjected, but in the unusual form developed to provide protection from the climate, and the way that this form relates to the social patterns.

Ghadames lies on the western border of Libya, close to the junction with the borders of Algeria and Tunisia. It is located about 400 km from the coast, and about 450 km from Tripoli. The journey from Tripoli can be made in a few hours by the regular internal flight or in a day by car or bus. After leaving the green coastal strip the road crosses the Jafara plain and climbs the escarpment at Nalut. From Nalut the road runs south across the steppe and desert, past the oases of Sinawn and Derj to Ghadames.

Al-Tijānī was a highly-placed scholar and man of letters at Tunis. At the beginning of the fourteenth century A.D., the eighth century A.H., he made a devious and slow journey from Tunis to a point between Tripoli and Misurata, returning much more directly. On the way he employed his considerable leisure to correspond with his acquaintances, often in verse, and still more to collect, by diligent inquiry, the material for the account which he wrote of his adventure. The journey itself became the thread upon which were strung descriptions of each place he visited, first the topography, then the history, the men of religion, and finally the poets illustrated by generous quotations from their works. In this way he managed to provide a great deal of information, at first and second hand, about the route and its interest, contemporary and antiquarian, for an educated gentleman with a taste for literature and literary composition. Some of this information is known to us from other sources; al-Tijānī belonged to the classical Arab literary tradition of the Maghrib as it grew by constant repetition. Some of it is new, because the author drew on works which have not otherwise survived. The rest is al-Tijānī's own contribution, his invaluable tale of what he did and saw. The resultant work, known as the Riḥla or Journey of al-Tijānī, was published in a French translation by Alphonse Rousseau in the Journal Asiatique in 1852–3; this excluded the poetry and a great deal of anecdote, which the translator considered to be ‘sujet de nul intérêt’. The translation itself is not always accurate; nevertheless it is valuable as a guide. The full Arabic text was published at Tunis in 1927, and in a critical edition in 1958.

The commitment to reinstatement of the sharī‘a, or traditional law of Islam, has been a striking feature of the programme of Libya's revolutionary government. Before 1969, legal development in Libya had conformed to the universally observable trend in Islamic societies of introducing secular laws on Western lines at the expense of the sharī‘a. True, the sharī‘a had not been superseded in Libya to as great an extent as in some countries, but its influence was largely restricted to matters of personal status and the regulation of certain traditional Islamic institutions. Civil and commercial codes on the French model had been introduced, and the Libyan Penal Code was inspired by the French and Italian versions. In 1971 the Revolutionary Command Council set up a commission to revise Libyan law in accordance with the sharī‘a, a task given renewed emphasis in 1975, when a law was passed reorganizing the commission. Since 1971 a number of laws modelled on the sharī‘a have been promulgated and, presumably, more are yet to come.

An understanding of this remarkable development has been slow in coming. Information on Libyan law is regrettably difficult to obtain outside Libya, and many potentially illuminating sources remain unavailable to Western students. The impression one gleans from the incomplete materials presently available is that broad guidelines for the work of the commission revising the laws have been set. On a given legal issue the most lenient solution is to be selected from among the doctrines of the schools of Islamic jurisprudence, with consideration being given to the public welfare (maṣlaḥa) and Libya's traditional adherence to the Mālikī doctrine. However, one would like to know much more about the rationale underlying the specific enactments. Nonetheless, since this important trend has now been under way for several years, a tentative assessment, even if based on an inadequate range of sources, is long overdue.

Benghazi has been photographed many times from the air, but few are aware that the layout of the city was-recorded in air photographs taken very early in the twentieth century. (International Archiv für Photogrametrie 1914). These photographs provide an unusually detailed impression of the streets, public buildings and dwellings of the city, and also allow students of the Middle Eastern and North African city to observe the evolution of the city by studying later comparative photography. Libya is especially rich in such imagery at least for the recent past (Allan 1969). The purpose of this brief study is to draw attention to the rich source of evidence available in air photo records through an interpretation of an early twentieth century image along with just one of the more recent photographs taken in this area in 1965.

The determination of the date of the old photo-mosaic is the first task of interpretation. The journal in which it was published appeared in 1914, which places the image earlier than the outbreak of World War I and possibly prior to the occupation of northern Libya by Italian forces in 1911. The photo shows no evidence of the buildings which were constructed by the Italian colonists. Nor has there been any significant transformation at the harbour. In the eastern extremity of the early twentieth century city there is an assemblage of military equipment, accommodation and transport. Whether this is evidence of Turkish or Italian occupation is difficult to determine, and so we must be satisfied at this stage to date the photographs between 1911 and 1913.