Three lands and a Saharan power
Libya has always been three places more than one: Tripolitania in the west, Cyrenaica in the east, and the Fezzan in the Saharan south. The Phoenicians and then Rome built the coastal cities — Leptis Magna, the birthplace of the emperor Septimius Severus, is one of the best-preserved Roman cities anywhere. In the east the Greeks founded Cyrene.
The part usually left out is the Fezzan. The Garamantes, a Berber people, ran a sophisticated Saharan state from around 500 BCE, farming the desert with a network of underground irrigation channels and controlling the trans-Saharan trade routes. They were not nomads passing through; they were a civilisation the sand later buried.
Ottomans, corsairs and Italy
Arab armies brought Islam in the seventh century. By the sixteenth Libya was Ottoman, ruled latterly by the Karamanli dynasty in Tripoli, whose corsairs preyed on Mediterranean shipping — the reason the young United States fought the First Barbary War here, and the reason the Marines' hymn still mentions "the shores of Tripoli".
Italy invaded in 1911 and turned colonisation into something closer to extermination. Libyan resistance in Cyrenaica, led by the elderly sheikh Omar Mukhtar, held out for years; the Italians answered with concentration camps that killed tens of thousands, and hanged Mukhtar in 1931 in front of his own people. He is on the banknotes now.
Oil, the king, and the colonel
Libya became independent in 1951, cobbled together by the UN under King Idris — a poor desert kingdom until oil was struck in 1959, after which it was suddenly, enormously rich. In 1969 a 27-year-old army officer, Muammar Gaddafi, overthrew the king and set about building his own kind of state.
His "Jamahiriya" — a system he claimed abolished government in favour of rule by the people — was in practice one of the world's more eccentric and repressive dictatorships. He funded insurgencies and attacks abroad, was blamed for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, spent years as an international pariah, then bought his way back in from the cold in the 2000s. At home he tolerated no rival and left almost no institutions that were not him.
After Gaddafi
In February 2011 the uprising began in Benghazi. A NATO air campaign tipped the balance, and in October Gaddafi was captured and killed near his home town of Sirte. What followed was not a democracy but a vacuum. With no army, no functioning state and a great deal of oil money and weaponry, the country fragmented into militias.
Since around 2014 Libya has had rival governments: an internationally recognised administration in Tripoli in the west, and an eastern camp aligned with the military commander Khalifa Haftar, each backed by different foreign powers. A 2020 ceasefire and a UN-brokered unity government under Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh reduced the fighting without ending the division. Long-promised national elections have repeatedly failed to happen. Migrants crossing the Sahara toward Europe pass through, and too often into detention and abuse, in the space the state used to fill.