ش;حات (Shahhat)

شحات (Shahhat) is the modern town built on one of the two hills that constituted the city of Κυρήνη (Kurene), also spelled Cyrene and Kyrene. The Greek city was the chief of five cities on or near the coast named after the city, and, in 430 BCE, had about 35 thousand residents and was the largest city in what is now eastern Libiya (Libya)¹. In 200 BCE, when part of the Ptolemaike Basileia it still had 30 thousand residents², but it declined during the Roman³ period, with the great eastern Mediterranean quake of 365 CE supplying the coup de grace. The modern town was built an uncertain amount of time later, perhaps only within the last century or so.

External References

Victory Stele of Naram-Sin, King of Akkad and Grandson of Sargon of Akkad. At the Louvre.

Footnotes

1. Tables of the World's Largest Cities, "430 B.C." table, in Tertius Chandler, Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth, 2nd ed. (The Edwin Mellen Press, 1987).
2. Tables of the World's Largest Cities, "200 B.C." table, in ibid.
3. During the early Roman period it was under the Senatus Romanus Publusque (now called the Roman Republic for the period before Augustus and the Roman Empire from Augustus on). After the empire divided it was under Rhomania (in transliteration from the Greek, or Romania in Latin, or what we now call the Byzantine Empire).