Of the five great cities of the ancient Cyrenaican Pentapolis, Ptolemais is the largest and, paradoxically, the least visited. With 280 hectares inside its walls —more ground than Cyrene—, it was a capital deliberately designed by a king: Ptolemais was born in the 3rd century BC as an urban project of the Ptolemies of Egypt, who built it over an older Greek settlement to consolidate their control over the region.
That planned origin explains its most astonishing feature: the Square of the Cisterns, a system of seventeen vaulted reservoirs able to store 7,000 kilolitres of water, fed by a Roman aqueduct that brought water from more than eight kilometres away. Add to that a hippodrome, an amphitheatre, three separate theatres and the luxurious mansion known as the Palazzo delle Colonne, with its mosaics and marble peristyle, one of the finest surviving examples of Hellenistic domestic architecture in the Mediterranean.
This page describes that heritage in the detail it deserves. But it has to be said as clearly as the history is told: Libya is at level 4, «Do Not Travel», for practically every Western foreign ministry, and Cyrenaica —where Ptolemais lies— also requires a specific entry permit and has its own instability on top of that of the rest of the country.
Before it was called Ptolemais, there was a small Greek settlement here of unknown name, founded in the late 7th century BC. In the 3rd century BC, a Ptolemaic king of Egypt —probably Ptolemy III Euergetes, between 246 and 221 BC— turned it into a new, monumental city of 280 hectares, the largest in the whole Cyrenaican Pentapolis, with a cistern system and a street plan of imperial ambition. Rome took it over in 96 BC, and under the emperor Diocletian, around AD 301, Ptolemais became capital of the province of Libya Superior. It came through the great earthquake of AD 365 relatively well, but in 411 it was destroyed by raids of Libyan tribes (the Austuriani); Justinian rebuilt it in the 6th century, though it never regained its former political weight. The Arab conquest of the 7th century put a definitive end to urban life. Modern excavations began in the 1930s and, since 2001, a Polish-Libyan mission from the University of Warsaw has continued working on the site.
Read the full history ↓Libya's Greek half: the Pentapolis founded by settlers from Thera, the cradle of the resistance against Italy and the country's greenest plateau, today also the centre of eastern Libya's rival administration.
Read the history of Cyrenaica and the green east →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before it became the great Ptolemais, the place where Tolmeita stands today was a modest Greek settlement whose name is unknown. It was founded in the late 7th century BC, during the first wave of colonisation of Cyrenaica led by Cyrene. For centuries it probably worked as a secondary port, subordinate to the region's major centres (Cyrene, Barca, Apollonia), without the political or urban weight it would gain later.
The decisive change came when Alexander the Great's empire broke up and his territories were divided among the Diadochi. Egypt came under the control of the Ptolemaic dynasty, and Cyrenaica, with its Greek tradition and its farming output (above all the prized silphium), was drawn into Alexandria's sphere of power.
In the 3rd century BC, probably during the reign of Ptolemy III Euergetes (246-221 BC), the small earlier settlement was turned into a new city of extraordinary size: 280 walled hectares, the largest urban area in the whole Cyrenaican Pentapolis, larger even than Cyrene itself. The city's name, Ptolemais, honoured the founding dynasty directly. Hellenistic kings commonly put their names on new cities as a symbol of power and legitimacy.
This was not a city that grew organically. It was a project planned by the central power in Alexandria, with a street layout of imperial ambition. The clearest evidence of that planning is the Square of the Cisterns: seventeen vaulted reservoirs that together held about 7,000 kilolitres of water. Such a feat of hydraulic engineering only makes sense if the city was designed from the start to support a sizeable population in a Mediterranean setting with dry summers.
From then on, Ptolemais was one of the great urban centres of Ptolemaic Cyrenaica. It had what you would expect of an important Hellenistic polis: theatres, a luxurious residential peristyle (the future Palazzo delle Colonne) and a port that linked it to trade routes across the eastern Mediterranean.
In 96 BC, the last Ptolemaic king of Cyrenaica, Ptolemy Apion, left the territory to Rome in his will. The region formally passed into Roman hands, although its final organisation as a province was only completed a few decades later. Under the new order, Ptolemais kept much of its infrastructure and its role as a city, and it added typically Roman buildings: an amphitheatre for gladiator fights, a hippodrome for chariot races and an aqueduct, probably from Hadrian's time, that brought water from springs more than eight kilometres away.
The city reached its greatest political importance with Emperor Diocletian's administrative reform around AD 301, which split the old province of Crete and Cyrenaica into two separate units. Ptolemais was named capital of the new province of Libya Superior (also called Libya Pentapolitana). At other times in the region's history that honour went to Apollonia-Sozusa, which suggests the capital moved more than once between the large coastal cities of Cyrenaica, depending on the politics of each period.
The city came through the great earthquake and tsunami of AD 365, which devastated the Cyrenaican coast, fairly well. Other nearby cities suffered far more serious damage, but the sources describe Ptolemais as being “in relatively good condition” after the disaster.
Ptolemais's good fortune after the earthquake of 365 did not last, though. In AD 411 the city was destroyed by raids from Libyan peoples of the interior, called the Austuriani in sources of the time. This happened as instability grew along the frontiers of the late Roman Empire in North Africa. The blow was so severe that the city lost much of its population and its administrative role.
In the 6th century, Ptolemais was partly rebuilt as part of Emperor Justinian I's ambitious building programme. Justinian also rebuilt many of the defences and Christian churches across the eastern Mediterranean. One of the most unusual projects of this period was the remodelling of a small odeon into a venue for water shows, made by flooding its orchestra in a controlled way. This rare architectural solution shows the cultural refinement the city kept even while in relative decline.
Despite the rebuilding, Ptolemais never regained the political importance it had under Diocletian. It became a second-tier city in the region's Byzantine administrative hierarchy, although urban and religious life went on until the Arab conquest.
The Arab conquest of Cyrenaica, completed during the 7th century AD, brought organised urban life in Ptolemais to a final end, as happened in the other great cities of the ancient Pentapolis. The site was abandoned and left empty for more than a thousand years, partly covered by sand and vegetation, until modern archaeologists rediscovered it in the 20th century.
The first systematic excavations began in the 1930s under Italian colonial rule. They recorded the true scale of the site for the first time: its 280 walled hectares, three theatres, hippodrome and amphitheatre. Above all, they uncovered the exceptional Palazzo delle Colonne, a Hellenistic mansion with a marble peristyle and mosaics that became the most famous building on the site.
Since 2001, a joint archaeological mission of the University of Warsaw and the Libyan antiquities authorities has resumed excavation and conservation work at the site and offered new readings of its town planning and chronology. That work was interrupted when the Libyan conflict broke out in 2011. The same year, a set of objects excavated at Ptolemais in 1937 was stolen from a bank vault in Benghazi where it was being kept for safety. It was one of many losses of heritage the country suffered during the civil war.
