Clermont-Ganneau's Visit to Cyrenaica in 1895

The official visit to Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, Crete and Tunisia made in 1895 by the French orientalist Charles Clermont-Ganneau (1845–1923) seems to have been quite forgotten, apart from a brief note by F. Chamoux (Cyrène sous la monarchie des Battiades, 1953, 19, n.5) describing the acquisition of certain antiquities by the Museum of the Louvre. Clermont-Ganneau himself produced no report. His references to his journey were brief and scattered (thus CRAI 1901, 42–3; Rec. Arch. Orient. VI, 1905, 53) and his publication was limited to illustrations without comment in his Album d'antiquités orientales, recueil de monuments inédits ou peu connus (Paris, Leroux, 1897), an uncompleted piece of work of which only plates I–II (Neirab), III–VI (Cyrenaica, miscellaneous objects), VII (Crete), and XLIII–L (Syria, Cyprus, Nendjirli, Malta etc.) ever appeared.Thanks to the help of Mr. Bernard Delavault, an unpublished file has now come to light in the office of the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, which fortunately supplements the record. It includes sixteen pages of an unfinished manuscript report of the 1895 journey by Clermont-Ganneau, together with a number of transcriptions and letters which contain interesting information.Clermont-Ganneau left Paris on 17th January and returned on 7th April, having made stops of some duration at Tunis, Malta, Tripoli in Libya (where he collected antiquities, including coins), Benghazi (where he spent a fortnight), Crete (his travels in the island, which lasted for twenty-five days, will be described elsewhere), Alexandria; then Malta and Tripoli both for the second time, Homs (for a visit to Lepcis Magna), Gabès, Sfax, Sousse and Tunis again. Conditions in Cyrenaica made it impossible for him to get to the Cyrene area as he had hoped, and this accounts for the length of his stay at Benghazi where he collected the documents which are the subject of this paper; for while there he bought or was given antiquities which went to the Louvre and acquired from various sources copies of inscriptions.

Tripoli at the Beginning of the Fourteenth Century A. D./Eighth Century AH

In the Seventh Annual Report of the Society I published an account of the journey of the shaykh Al-Tijānī to Tripoli at the beginning of the fourteenth century A. D./eighth century A. H., with particular reference to the Arab tribes and chiefs whom he encountered.What follows is a translation of the passages from the Riḥla in which he describes the city of Tripoli as he saw it during the eighteen months of his residence. Page references are to the 1958 Tunis edition of the work, followed by references to the nineteenth century French translation by Alphonse Rousseau. The latter is incomplete, and not always accurate.221, trans. 1853, 135Our entry into (Tripoli) took place on Saturday, 19th Jumāḍā II (707).237, trans. 1853, 135–6As we approached Tripoli and came upon it, its whiteness almost blinded the eye with the rays of the sun, so that I knew the truth of their name for it, the White City. All the people came out, showing their delight and raising their voices in acclaim. The governor of the city vacated the place of his residence, the citadel of the town, so that we might occupy it. I saw the traces of obvious splendour in the citadel (qaṣba), but ruin had gained sway. The governors had sold most of it, so that the houses which surrounded it were built from its stones. There are two wide courts, and outside is the mosque (masjid), formerly known as the Mosque of the Ten, since ten of the shaykhs of the town used to gather in it to conduct the affairs of the city before the Almohads took possession. When they did so, the custom ceased, and the name was abandoned.

A Roman Legionary Veteran at Teucheira

Among the inscriptions of ancient Teucheira copied by R. Pacho during his visit to Cyrenaica in 1825 is a Latin funerary text for a Roman legionary veteran named M. Aurelius Apollonius. Traditionally his legion has been interpreted as XV Apollinaris – reasonably enough on the basis of Pacho's drawing. W. Rossberg, who was the first to discuss the text, recalled that a veteran might well have come to Cyrenaica as one of the colonists settled there by Hadrian after the Jewish Revolt of A.D.115/7; and when it became known that XV Apollinaris was in fact one of the legions from which those colonists were drawn the idea was, rightly, revived by S. Applebaum. It must, however, be rejected, for rediscovery of the inscription shows that it has been misread, that the legion is II Adiutrix and the veteran probably a Cyrenaican himself.The inscription is to be found in Quarry IX to the east of the ancient city and has been for many years masked by a palm tree. It occupies an approximately rectangular area above the door of a rock-cut tomb in the west wall of the quarry. Its letters are 0.035–0.04 m. high in lines 1–4, 0.05 in line 5, and are very unevenly spaced throughout since the cutter had to avoid holes in the surface of the stone. There are superscript bars above the abbreviations in lines 1, 2 and the figure in line 3.

Aqueduct Capacity and City Population

The authors of a recent article in this journal suggest that ‘water supply arrangements can be interpreted to provide urban population figures’. They offer conclusions constructed on this basis about the population of cities in Roman Cyrenaica. (J. A. Lloyd, P. R. Lewis ‘Water supply and urban population in Roman Cyrenaica’ Eighth Annual Report 1976–7, 35–40, at 36.)Useable information about ancient city population remains perennially elusive. If a valid criterion for deducing population from physical remains could be established, it would be a highly important addition to the tools available to the archaeologist and the ancient historian. But before any such criterion can be achieved, we must escape from faulty methods. Demographic inference from aqueduct capacity should be recognised as a blind alley.Difficulties can be indicated briefly.1. The authors note that the ratios of aqueduct capacity to urban area at Ptolemais and Berenice differ widely. They explain this by noting that the ancients could not measure water flow at all accurately. If that is conceded, the attempt to derive useable population figures from aqueduct capacity fails on its own terms, since we have no means of discovering which ancient hydraulic calculations (if any) were accurate. The authors choose to regard the Berenice figure as accurate and the Ptolemais figure as inaccurate (by a factor of 2). But there is no real reason why one should be preferred to the other, once the likelihood of erroneous calculation has been admitted.