In 1977 it was decided to concentrate all efforts on the cemetery of Saniat ben Howedi and answer certain questions unanswered in 1973. In that year it appeared that where the cemetery mound stood at its highest, upper and lower tombs existed. Work had been concentrated on the upper layer and some 30 tombs were dug. They were all found to be either circular drum-like structures, 6–8 ft in size, or larger, square constructions 10–12 ft across, with a central circular shaft. The tombs, for the most part, faced east and had stele, or ‘hands’ and offering tables on their principal side. Sometimes these were placed within an area enclosed, or partly surrounded by a low mud-brick wall, which contained other vessels, clearly intended as offerings for the deceased.

Although the skeletons had survived (where the tombs had not been robbed), finds were sparse, consisting mainly of lamps, jug/flagons, local imitations of fine red ware plate/dishes, with the occasional genuine fine red ware plate. Dating was difficult, but where possible it suggested the third—fourth centuries (if not the fifth).

Investigation showed that where the mound was not present the circular and later square tombs appeared to have been built either against, or directly on top of, earlier tombs. Two of these earlier tombs were excavated and found to contain a mass of late first-century pottery, in a somewhat damaged state. This consisted of amphoras, fine red ware bowls and dishes, mostly of northern Italian manufacture, imported and local coarse ware vessels, as well as glass and faience bowls. In each tomb a saddle quern, broken, and a smashed soft chalk rubber were found, suggesting that the occupants had been female. The skeletons, unfortunately, had survived in neither case. One tomb, no.15 in the cemetery numbering system, faced west, the other, no.17, faced east. Both had survived intact from antiquity, but the objects within them, especially no.17, were, in many cases, badly shattered (see the Fourth Annual Report of the Society, p.35).

Excavations at El-Medeinah, ancient Surt (in previous reports erroneously called Medinat Sultan) took place between July 11 and August 6th 1977. The excavations were financed by the Department of Antiquities of Libya and by the Society for Libyan Studies. Participants of the excavations were Mr. Abdulhamid Abdussaid, Technical Director of the Department of Antiquities, Libya, Mr. Masoud Shagluf, Controller of Antiquities, Benghazi, Dr. Géza Fehérvári, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London on behalf of the Society for Libyan Studies, Mr. Idris Ahmad Badi, Inspector of Antiquities, Benghazi, Mr. Michael Blyth and Mrs. Marta Kozary Blyth, Architects, Miss Marga Foley, Conservation student, Institute of Archaeology, University of London, Miss Caroline Ballingal, student, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and Mrs. Iren Fehérvári.

The aims of the season's work were:

1. to prepare an overall survey map of the site,

2. to prepare for publication the previously excavated pottery, and

3. to open a trial trench in the mosque area in order to investigate earlier occupation levels, and a second one inside the mosque to establish the existence of a ṗre-Fāṭimid mosque.

With regard to the survey of the site, Professor Lucien Golvin of the University of Aix-en-Provence began such work on the site in June, 1975 and laid down a number of reference points on a 50 m grid. It was decided that the present survey should be based on Professor Golvin's grid, and implemented as necessary. A new reference system was evolved which will be used in future excavations. A contour map of 1:1000 was produced which extends beyond the suggested line of the city walls as they were set by the Department of Antiquities under the direction of Dr. Mohammad Mostafa. The map depicts the contours at 50 cm intervals and includes all the previously excavated areas and visible features of the site (Fig.1).

IRT 480, dated by reference to the Emperors Honorius and Theodosius in the years between A.D. 408 and 423, honours Flavious Ortygius, v(ir) c(larissimus) et sp(ectabilis) com(es) et dux p(rovinciae) T(ripolitanae), for achievements connected with the Austuriani which I had failed to decipher when IRT was published. Although it adds disappointingly little to knowledge, it seems worth recording a reading made in 1975 when I saw the stone in a particularly good cross light.

It was, of course, already deducible that the Austuriani had not ceased to raid Tripolitania after the notorious occasions in 363–5 which led to the scandal of Count Romanus; and Professor Chastagnol has recently associated the titles of officials in the province in the late Fourth and early Fifth centuries (including that of Ortygius) with a series of experiments to deal with the military problem they created. A particularly bad raid seems to be implied by the inscription of Ortygius.

Excavation and study work was continued by the University of Pennsylvania expedition under the direction of Professor Donald White from late June to early September 1976 in the Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone at Wadi Bel Gadir, Cyrene (Shahat). With the help of a grant from the Society for Libyan Studies, I was able to begin my study of the votive and portrait sculpture excavated in the sanctuary and to travel to sites and museums in the Cyrenaica and Tripolitania for comparanda research. The 1976 season proved to be a fruitful one, not only for examination of sculpture from previous seasons, but also for acquisition of several fine pieces from new excavation. One life size marble female of Grosse Herkulanerin type (known from 1974) was unearthed and brought to the Casa Parisi sculpture yard, a new overlife size marble female (perhaps representing a priestess) and two underlife size marble peplophoroi of good workmanship were among the major pieces excavated. The two portrait finds were a fine marble female head in a Faustina the Elder hairstyle and a small limestone male head with Alexander the Great overtones. There were several statuettes found, including one of Demeter with her daughter Persephone seated in her lap which has parallels in both Eleusis and the Athenian Agora.

On my first visit to Cyrene in summer 1972 I was so intrigued by the figurative relief standing on the south side of the so-called Valley Street, immediately to the east of the modern village of Shahat, that I decided to include it in my doctoral thesis. I visited the site in the distinguished company of the late Prof. D. E. Strong, who was then my research supervisor, and Mr. Philip Kenrick. We spent together some hours in front of this fascinating monument discussing a number of points concerning the architecture of the building to which it belonged, the identification of the figures, the iconography of the then hypothetical portraits, and the reading of the inscription. A full description and discussion of the monument were given by Professor Strong in a lecture delivered at the British Museum on the occasion of the opening of the Exhibition of Libyan Antiquities on 14th June, 1973, and later published in the Society for Libyan Studies Report. I returned to Cyrene in summer 1973 in order to make a more thorough examination of the relief and to produce a number of detailed photographs of the heads. The contents of this article are the result of these observations and the stimulating discussions I had with Professor Strong on the subject.

For a comprehensive description of the relief I refer the reader to Strong's contribution in the Fourth Annual Report, but it is appropriate to recapitulate briefly. The relief in question constituted the figured frieze of the entablature of a monumental gateway resting on Corinthian columns. Beneath the frieze, which must have been more than 11m long, ran an inscription in two lines of standard monumental Greek letters. All the architectural elements, including the frieze, are carved on a very gritty and shelly limestone. The state of preservation is very poor: the figures on the right hand block are almost completely lost and elsewhere heads and limbs have fallen off, in some cases being cemented back. The best preserved are the central figures, but even here the sugary limestone has eroded to some extent (Fig.Ia).

On May 1, 1973 Sayyed Mohamed A. Sarria informed the controller of the office at Leptis that there was a large cavity on the construction site of an Indian contracting company working on an electrical project. The Controller went to inspect the cavity on May 15th. The site is located near an old castle, named Gasr Gelda, and about 500 metres north-west of the Moah family residence, which is about 2.5 km south of Leptis. When the cavity was examined it was identified as the courtyard of an ancient tomb, 3 m deep. After cleaning the courtyard, the workmen found the main entrances of two tombs which were closed by two big stones. Each tomb (Fig.1) consists of a small underground chamber with a gently curving ceiling and plastered walls (see plates 1 and 2).

Many important objects were found in Tomb 1 and these were transferred to the Leptis museum store (see plate 3). The second was found empty, having probably not been used. It seems to have been dug in the rock and it had several niches.

A central archaeological and historical problem is that of population. It is reflected in the question often posed by the student or visitor of an ancient city: how big was X?; how many people lived here? The reply is unlikely to be more than an informed guess and, in most cases, a mere hazard, exposing a fundamental lacuna in historical knowledge. The problem of population size is not simply of casual interest; it affects almost every aspect of a balanced picture of life in ancient times.

Explicit classical allusions to population figures survive in only a very few cases (Alexandria, for example, had more than 300,000 free inhabitants in the first century B.C., according to Diodorus). In their absence it is extremely difficult to assess the number of inhabitants of a city at a given time, a situation further complicated by the fact that in Roman times a city comprised not just a built-up area, perhaps defined by walls, but also a neighbouring territory which it owned. The inhabitants of the territorium were liable to be counted with the city dwellers, thus producing a definition of urban population which differs radically from our modern concept.

Despite the inherent difficulties, demographic studies have periodically occupied the attention of a number of archaeologists and historians, and in recent years two major works have appeared. In The Economy of the Roman Empire Richard Duncan-Jones devotes an important chapter to the size of cities. After reviewing the various methods used to calculate the size of urban populations, he puts forward figures of his own, based principally on the interpretation of epigraphic evidence. As one of his examples has a specific Libyan connection, it is worth summarising here. The town concerned is Oea (modern Tripoli). Duncan-Jones applies an approach first outlined in 1886 by J. Beloch, in examining ancient records of large-scale gifts for public feasts or cash hand-outs (sportulae). These records provide important clues to the size of the urban population at the time of the benefaction. In the case of Oea, two pieces of evidence have been preserved. The first is given by Apuleius in the Apologia, a speech prepared for his defence (in a trial at Sabratha) against a charge of winning his Oean wife, Pudentilla, by magic.

Cyrenaica, excluding the Jebel Akhdar, forms part of the Libyan Sahara. It is a true desert with a mean annual rainfall generally less than 20 mm, and a land surface of sand, gravel or rock, largely devoid of vegetation (Plate 1). Yet a few thousand years ago, the Libyan Sahara, as elsewhere in North Africa, enjoyed an abundant rainfall and supported a varied flora and fauna as can be seen from pre-historic rock paintings. The abundant rainfall filled huge subterranean reservoirs which since then have been slowly draining to the Mediterranean Sea or low lying sabkhats and inland lakes. In consequence of the moderate relief of the Sahara and the wide regional extent and uniform structure of the sedimentary basins which form the reservoirs, the groundwater bodies occur in huge flow systems which may extend over several hundreds of miles. The reservoirs' thicknesses vary but the two most important series, the Continental Intercalaire or Nubian, and the Continental Terminal of mid-Tertiary to recent age, frequently exceed 3000 feet. Two major flow systems occur in Cyrenaica, in the Sirte and Kufra basins (Fig.1).

Until oil was discovered in the late nineteen fifties, groundwater development in Cyrenaica was mainly concentrated in coastal areas where the prevailing rainfall is sufficient to permit some recharge, and in a few interior scattered oases — Giarabub, Jalo-Augila, Kufra and Tazerbo, where the ground surface lies close to the upper phreatic (water table) surface of regional groundwater systems.

Oil exploration requires fairly large supplies of water for the main drilling operations. During exploration in the Sirte basin it was discovered that water of variable quality could be found virtually anywhere at moderate depths between 100 and 500 feet below ground level. Oil company practice to obtain temporary water supplies is to drill two or three simply constructed water wells to a few hundred feet below the water table, and to pump by air lift. The wells are subsequently capped, when no longer required.

Carbonate and clastic sediments of Jurassic and Cretaceous age are exposed along the fault-scarp of Djebel Nefusa in north-western Libya. Previous geological investigations have been mainly restricted to the eastern sector of the scarp. Recent studies by the authors in the western sector of Djebel Nefusa and on equivalent sediments in southern Tunisia have allowed the first regional interpretation of these rocks.

The area studied lies geographically and geologically at the edge of the Saharan Platform, a large cratonic block, composed of rocks of Precambrian-Palaeozoic age. To the north and east lies a downfaulted sedimentary basin (Gabes-Sabratha Basin) containing a large thickness of Mesozoic sediments. The location of the sections measured along Djebel Nefusa are depicted in Fig.1.

The stratigraphic nomenclature of the rock succession of Djebel Nefusa was first established in the east and continued laterally towards the west by later workers. Difficulties in the application of this nomenclature are presented by the recognition of facies changes previously overlooked by earlier investigators. However, as a framework for understanding these changes and the sedimentary processes which caused them, the stratigraphy erected by Magnier (1963) is adopted.