Berber Pre-Roman Libya
- See also Ancient Libya (Tripolitania and Cyrenaica)
Archaeological evidence indicates that from at least the thirtieth millennium BC. Libya's coastal plain shared in a Neolithic culture, skilled in the domestication of cattle and cultivation of crops, that was common to the whole Mediterranean littoral. To the south, in what is now the Sahara Desert, nomadic hunters and herders roamed a large, well-watered savanna that was abundant in game and provided pastures for their livestock. Their culture flourished until the region began to dry out after 2000 BC. Scattering before the encroaching desert and invading horsemen, the savanna people migrated into the Sudan or were absorbed by the Berbers.
The origin of the Berbers is a partial mystery. Archaeological and linguistic evidence strongly suggests southwestern Asia as the point from which the ancestors of the Berbers may have begun their migration into North Africa early in the third millennium BC. Over the succeeding centuries they extended their range from Egypt to the Niger Basin. Caucasians of predominantly Mediterranean stock, the Berbers present a broad range of physical types and speak a variety of mutually unintelligible Berber dialects that belong to the Berber family of the Afro-Asiatic language family. They rarely developed a sense of a full Berber nationhood, as we understand it today. They have historically identified themselves in terms of their tribes, clans, or kingdoms. Collectively, Berbers referred to themselves simply as imazighen, to which has been attributed the meaning "free men".
Inscriptions found in Egypt dating from the Old Kingdom (ca. 2700–2200 BC) are the earliest known recorded testimony of the Berber migration and also the earliest written documentation of Libyan history. At least as early as this period, troublesome Berber tribes, one of which was identified in Egyptian records as the Levu (or "Libyans"), were raiding eastward as far as the Nile Delta and attempting to settle there. During the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2200-1700 BC) the Egyptian pharaohs succeeded in imposing their overlordship on these eastern Berbers and extracted tribute from them. Many Berbers served in the army of the pharaohs, and some rose to positions of importance in the Egyptian state. One such Berber officer seized control of Egypt in about 950 BC and, as Sheshonk I, ruled as pharaoh. His successors of the twenty-second and twenty-third dynasties are also believed to have been Berbers.
To the Ancient Greeks, Libya was one of the three known continents along with Asia and Europe. In this sense, Libya was the whole known African continent to the west of the Nile Valley and extended south of Egypt. Herodotus described the inhabitants of Libya as two peoples: The Libyans in northern Africa and the Ethiopians in the south. According to Herodotus, Libya began where ancient Egypt ended, and extended to Cape Spartel, south of Tangier on the Atlantic coast. Both the Greeks and the Phoenicians colonized North African soil, and Punic civilization emerged, although its central city of Carthage was not in present-day Libya but in neighboring Tunisia.
The territory of modern Libya had separate histories until Roman times, as Tripoli and Cyrenaica.
Cyrenaica was Greek before it was Roman. It was also known as Pentapolis, the "five cities" being Cyrene (near the village of Shahhat) with its port of Apollonia (Susa), Arsinoe (Taucheira), Berenice (Benghazi) and Barca (Marj). From the oldest and most famous of the Greek colonies the fertile coastal plain took the name of Cyrenaica.
Read more about this topic: History Of Libya