Early work

Among the ancient lands of the eastern Mediterranean, the area of modern Libya remained relatively unknown to western travellers until the later nineteenth century. Exploration of Egypt flourished from the time of Napoleon onwards; research in the western Maghreb followed the French occupation. In the Ottoman period some diplomats and traders did travel to Tripoli, and most exploration of Libya was undertaken from there.Footnote ³ Most of the visitors had little interest in inscriptions; an exception was Jean-Raimond Pacho, who visited in 1824–5 and whose drawings were used by Boeckh in CIG. The next serious epigrapher to visit the country was the American Herbert De Cou (Goodchild Reference Goodchild1969, 149–154), who was murdered in 1911 (Dobias-Lalou et al. Reference Dobias-Lalou2017). The first major archaeological projects were undertaken by the Italians, after their occupation of the country in 1911Footnote ⁴; as well as major excavations and reconstruction projects they undertook thorough epigraphic studies, which were lavishly published.Footnote ⁵

The second world war was to turn Libya into a major battleground between external forces, as Axis and Allied forces struggled for control of North Africa and Egypt. At the outbreak of war, in 1939, a young archaeologist, John Ward-Perkins, had just been appointed Professor of Archaeology at the Royal University of Malta; for this and much of what follows see Wilkes (Reference Wilkes1984). He immediately returned to Britain, to enlist in a regiment being assembled by another, older, archaeologist, Mortimer Wheeler. After strenuous training, in 1941 the regiment was sent to join the Eighth Army in North Africa. During 1942 the British advanced westwards across Libya; in early 1943, Wheeler and Ward-Perkins visited the site of Lepcis, and were horrified to find British troops misusing the site. Their concerns were those of professionals; the military administration was also aware of the propaganda being issued by the Italians about the likelihood of damage to antiquities by British forces (Desplat 2016). Ward-Perkins was therefore appointed Acting Adviser in Archaeology to the British Military Administration to organise the protection and management of antiquities. The war was however still raging, and both Wheeler and Ward-Perkins left North Africa later in 1943 as part of the Allied assault on Italy; here too the army deployed Ward-Perkins to assist with the care and protection of monuments. Meanwhile, in Libya, the position of Antiquities Officer was formalised.Footnote ⁶

In 1945 Ward-Perkins was appointed Director of the British School at Rome (BSR); in 1946 Richard Goodchild was appointed Antiquities Officer in Libya, a job which he held until he joined the School as Librarian in 1948. This ensured continuous interest in Libyan archaeology at the School, and regular surveys and work in Libya even before 1953, when Goodchild was appointed Controller of Antiquities of the now independent state.

All of these scholars were first and foremost archaeologists, trained to high standards in British archaeology, with rather less interest in the history and epigraphy. This was in some ways the inverse of the Italian approach; when Alan Rowe, the Egyptian Antiquities Service's Inspector of the Prohibited Military Area, Western Desert, and Conservator of the Graeco-Roman Museum in Alexandria, was sent to inspect the antiquities of Libya in 1943, he visited the Italian excavations at Tocra and commented ‘the Italians are better philologists than archaeologists’ (National Archives: FO 141/963). In 1946, however, a young woman who had read Greats (classical literature) at Oxford, and then worked in the wartime civil service, Joyce Reynolds, arrived at the British School on a scholarship; she was developing an interest in Roman inscriptions, which, initially, she studied in Italy, but she joined the BSR expeditions to Libya, where she found an abundant harvest of material awaiting study.

The first major British publication on the archaeology of Libya after the war, therefore, was the Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania (Reynolds and Ward-Perkins, Reference Reynolds and Ward-Perkins1952), edited by Ward-Perkins and (principally) Joyce Reynolds, but drawing on work (especially on military data) by Goodchild, and also on the work of Italian archaeologists, with whom the BSR team established cordial relations. There followed a series of surveys and excavations, building an increasingly rich collection of information; and the BSR remained in many ways the flagship for British work in Libya until the foundation of the Society for Libyan Studies, in 1969.

The consequence of this history is that important first-hand information about the cultural heritage of Libya is widely scattered, between countries and between institutions. While those institutions – in Libya and other countries – have a good tradition of friendly communication and interchange, the challenge has been logistical. A further growing challenge has been not the collection of the data, but its publication. The Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania included about 1000 inscriptions, but only 30 pages of plates; the photographs were all held at the British School.

New approaches

Over several decades, Joyce Reynolds continued to visit Libya regularly, and collected increasing numbers of texts, both recording new material, and providing more careful readings of earlier discoveries, with a particular focus on Cyrenaica. She worked with excavation teams from many countries, in particular at the Society's excavations at Sidi Khrebish (Reynolds Reference Reynolds and Lloyd1976, 233–254), at Apollonia (University of Michigan) (Reynolds, Reference Reynolds1977, 293–333), and at Wadi Bel Gadir (University of Pennsylvania) (White and Reynolds Reference White and Reynolds2012). She published many new texts, and published jointly with many colleagues, particularly Libyan and Italian. She recorded inscriptions with her own photographs, and with those taken by her friend and colleague Elizabeth Alföldi-Rosenbaum; she also received many images from the Department of Antiquities in Tripoli, and from other colleagues. In all this her aim was always to publish a complete corpus of the texts of the Roman period. From 1970 she worked frequently with a French colleague, Catherine Dobias-Lalou, of the University of Dijon, who was collecting materials for a corpus of Greek inscriptions of the pre-Roman period, and who had a particular interest in linguistics and in inscribed verse texts.

From the 1990s scholars and archaeologists had been exploring the potential of new digital technologies, and particularly the World Wide Web. In the early 2000s Joyce Reynolds was one of a group of scholars working to develop standards for publishing inscribed texts online. Tom Elliott, then at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, had developed a first version of what he called EpiDoc (Elliott et al. Reference Elliott, Bodard and Cayless2006–2017), a set of protocols for preparing epigraphic texts in XML (Extensible Markup Language) consistent with the protocols for publishing a wider range of texts drawn up by scholars worldwide as the TEI (http://www.tei-c.org/). With the support of the Leverhulme Trust, he worked with Joyce Reynolds, Charlotte Roueché and Gabriel Bodard to test the usefulness of EpiDoc by applying it to real data – the inscriptions which Reynolds and Roueché had been recording, over many years, from the Graeco-Roman site of Aphrodisias in south-west Turkey. With further support from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (UK) the group published two online corpora, in 2004 and 2007 (Roueché Reference Roueché2004; Reynolds et al. Reference Reynolds, Roueché and Bodard2007). After this, the same team decided to apply the same approach to the inscriptions which Joyce Reynolds had collected, over many years, in Libya.

Collaborations I: IRT

The Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania (IRT) had been published in 1952; in 2007 the British School at Rome obtained a grant from the Getty Foundation to catalogue and digitise part of the collection of photographs by John Ward-Perkins. This collection included the very full archive of photographs of almost all the inscriptions in IRT. The BSR had been exploring the possibilities for producing a digital edition of IRT; the techniques which had been developed by the Aphrodisias project offered the solutions. A joint proposal was developed by the scholars at King's College London (Gabriel Bodard and Charlotte Roueché) working with the Librarians of the BSR (Valerie Elliott and Alessandra Giovenco). The further aspect which was to be explored was the presentation of the geographic data for the texts, which were collected and tabulated by Hafed Walda (King's College London); this work was undertaken in partnership with Tom Elliott, now at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (NYU) (http://isaw.nyu.edu/), and the principal scholar responsible for the Pleiades Gazetteer of the ancient world (https://pleiades.stoa.org/). The resultant project, Concordia, was funded by research councils in the US, the UK and Germany (http://concordia.atlantides.org/). The publication, Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania (2009) was further enhanced by the addition, by Joyce Reynolds, of English translations of all the texts (Reynolds and Ward-Perkins Reference Reynolds and Ward-Perkins2009 E-copy).

In a parallel development, the team at King's College proposed to undertake the digital publication of all the inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica recorded and prepared for publication by Joyce Reynolds – some 2,300 texts, with about 3,000 accompanying photographs. In 2007 they received a grant from the Leverhulme Trust to enable this work.

Collaborations 2: IGCyr and GVCyr

Early in the project the London team established contact with scholars in Italy and France working on the archaeology of Cyrenaica. In 2010, they were approached formally by the French team (then headed by the late Professor Laronde) whose epigrapher, Professor Catherine Dobias-Lalou, was responsible for the publication of the pre-Roman Greek inscriptions of Cyrenaica; it was agreed that those materials should also be published online, using the same digital protocols as those of the IRCyr project, for the Inscriptions of Greek Cyrenaica (IGCyr) and the Greek Verse Inscriptions of Cyrenaica (GVCyr). Dobias-Lalou has been studying the inscriptions of Greek Cyrenaica since 1970, and had worked frequently with Joyce Reynolds. In May 2011 a formal agreement was reached to collaborate between Gabriel Bodard and Charlotte Roueché (King's College, London), Catherine Dobias-Lalou (Paris IV Sorbonne) Lucia Criscuolo and Alice Bencivenni (University of Bologna), Simona Antolini (University of Roma Tor Vergata), and Silvia Maria Marengo and Gianfranco Paci (University of Macerata). The two corpora edited by Professor Dobias-Lalou, IGCyr and GVCyr were published on the website of the University of Bologna in 2017 (Dobias-Lalou et al. Reference Dobias-Lalou2017).

The IGCyr corpus includes about 900 inscriptions from Greek Cyrenaica dated to the period between the seventh to first century BC. GVCyr presents about 60 Greek metrical inscriptions from both Greek and Roman Cyrenaica. Although the bulk of the texts had been published previously, these publications assemble them in one place, in important new scholarly editions, richly illustrated. A further benefit of this project lies in providing translations of the original texts into English, French and Italian; some have already also been translated into Arabic, and work on this continues. Presenting these materials online as a series of EpiDoc files allows all researchers, including Libyan colleagues and students interested in the Greek and Roman history of Libya, to access and benefit from the data. This must enhance historical and archaeological understanding of both regions, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, and encourage wider engagement. For example, before the publication of IGCyr, GVCyr and IRCyr, the teams provided Muna Abdelhamed (co-author of this article, then studying for a PhD at Leicester University) with direct access to the materials. The epigraphic data in these projects was one of the essential sources of information of her thesis which is now available online (Abdelhamed Reference Abdelhamed2018). Thus, these digital publications will be a significant academic source for other historical and archaeological studies in the future; the XML can all be downloaded, and it is to be hoped that it will be reconfigured and reused in many ways.

Collaborations 3: HGL

The complex history of scholarship and discovery in Libya scattered many of the research materials in a variety of countries. In the attempt to reassemble these materials online publication is of very great value; but crucial factors are geography and toponymy. For many years detailed maps of Libya were hard to obtain – a problem which has been largely resolved by the arrival of Google Earth and other online sources of geodata. But a particular problem continues to be toponymy. When Goodchild and Reynolds were first working in Libya they often used Italian maps, and Italian toponyms; in some cases, these were entirely new names (such as Breviglieri) and in others – perhaps even more confusingly – they reflected Italian transliterations of what were understood to be the Arabic names. Inconsistent transliterations have continued to be a challenge.

From 2007 it became clear that what was needed was a Gazetteer of heritage sites and monuments in Libya, recording – and searchable by – all known names for a given location. The basic work on the data was undertaken by Dr Hafed Walda; the data were then transformed to provide a web resource by Neil Jakeman (King's College London). Materials were added from the ancient world Gazetteer Pleiades (which drew largely on material gathered by Professor David Mattingly) and from the guidebooks by Philip Kenrick, and their associated geodata (Kenrick Reference Kenrick2009; Reference Kenrick and Buzaian2013). Collecting accurate geodata in Libya over the last decades has not been easy; for each location, therefore, all the available co-ordinates have been provided, with a note of their sources. The resultant Gazetteer was published in autumn 2016, by the Society for Libyan Studies (http://www.slsgazetteer.org/).

The Gazetteer is still a work in progress; some named places have still not been located, and many require more accurate co-ordinates, or more names. Providing consistent names for heritage sites in Cyrenaica in a modern European language is not an easy task for many reasons. In some cases there is no local agreement about the name of the site because it has been changed or modified by different generations over time. The spelling of Arabic names and their transliteration into a modern European language proved to be rather problematic and produced very variable results; the same name may be expressed differently over time, and by Europeans from different language traditions. Some Arabic letters can be transliterated to more than one European letter. The Arabic letter ق, for example, can be represented by K, C, Q or G; its pronunciation in the local Arabic dialect also differs from the pure Arabic. Furthermore, there are no equivalent sounds in the European languages for some of the Arabic letters, such as ض، ظ and ط; The letter ط is usually transliterated to the letter T, but the pronunciation of the two letters is completely different. The letter D seems to be the closest sound to represent the other two Arabic letters, ظ and ض. There is therefore a great need for Libyans, especially those who understand European languages, to contribute their understanding and their local knowledge. Colleagues and members of the Society with more information, especially those in Libya, are encouraged to contribute; those interested in doing so should request the Society for access (http://www.societyforlibyanstudies.org/contact-sls/).

Collaborations 4: IRCyr

The corpus of inscriptions collected by Joyce Reynolds – Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica – is still, at the time of writing, being prepared for publication. There are about 2,300 texts, of which perhaps half have never been published; many more have been improved by careful rereading. All texts are being translated into English: any other available translations are being included, and it is the intention of the team to provide Arabic translations. Most of the 3000 photographs have been identified: those held by Joyce Reynolds include images provided by the Department of Antiquities, and by Elizabeth Alföldi-Rosenbaum. Others were taken by Catherine Dobias-Lalou, Dorothy Thorn and Hafed Walda; some come from archaeological expeditions including those taken in 1910 by Norton. The editors are working in collaboration with the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences; in a project sponsored by the Mellon Foundation we are using the Cyrenaican inscriptions – which include a large quantity of dated texts – to develop a Gazetteer of dates (https://godot.date/home). The corpus will be the first body of EpiDoc texts to be prepared and presented using the new publishing platform, Epidoc Front-End Services (EFES), currently being developed at the School of Advanced Study (University of London), again with the support of the Mellon Foundation (https://github.com/EpiDoc/EFES/wiki). A grant from the Society for Libyan Studies has enabled the draft version of the corpus, in EFES, to be made available online to collaborators, including François Chevrollier (Paris), who is completing the work started by André Laronde on a prosopography of Cyrenaica.