During the Iron Age and Classical antiquity, Libya (from Greek Λιβύη: Libyē, which came from Berber: Libu) referred to the area of North Africa directly west of the Nile River (modern-day Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco). Ancient Libya is not to be confused with the modern country of Libya, which represents the eastern part of the territory at the time. Ancient Libya was one of the three continents of the ancient world (Libya, Asia, and Europa). The territory also had part of the Mediterranean Sea named after it called the Libyan Sea or Mare Libycum (which was the part of the Mediterranean south of Crete, between Cyrene and Alexandria).
Greek and Roman geographers placed the dividing line between Ancient Libya and Asia at the Nile because the entire region south of the Mediterranean and west of the Nile was not only homogeneous linguistically (Berber languages were used throughout North Africa as far as the Atlantic coast) but also racially (with Libyan people or Berbers.)
During Roman times, the area of Ancient Libya was split into four main regions: Mauretania, Numidia, Africa Proconsularis, and Libya (which retained the original name).
Subsequently, the name ‘Africa’ was later extended to the whole continent, named after the Roman province of Africa (which occupied parts of modern-day Tunisia and modern-day Algeria).
Mythology
In Greek mythology, Athena was believed to have been of Libyan origins and was therefore nicknamed Athene Tritogeneia ("born of Trito"),As when Diomedes addresses her in prayer, Iliad x; see also Iliad iv.515, viii.839. from her birth in Lake Tritonis in North Africa (modern-day Algeria and Tunisia) where she is considered native to the land. In this version of the story she is the daughter of Poseidon and Tritonis a Libyan lake nymph. In another version of the story in the same source, they say that she was daughter of Poseidon and Lake Tritonis, and that, being for some reason angry at her father, she gave herself to Zeus, who made her his own daughter, on the other hand some say that she sprang from the forehead of her father Zeus in the same location in North Africa. According to Herodotus, it is the Libyans who taught Greeks how to ride four-horse chariots, this is further shown when Mastanbal the prince of Numidia who is well versed in Greek literature.. A sportsman in his youth, the prince took part in chariot races and the Panathenaic Games which only populations whom the greeks considered equal to them culturally and religiously were allowed to participate. Mastanbal was a sportsman who was passionate about horseback riding. He owned a stud farm of purebred horses. Around 168 BC or 164 BC, he won a gold medal for his people in Numidia at the Athens Hippodrome at the Panathenaic Games in the prestigious horse-drawn chariot racing event..
In Pseudo-Apollodorus, the Greeks proceeded to write of Hyperborea as a place that existed in ancient Libya somewhere within or between the Atlas ranges of North Africa as that was the well-known dwelling place of Atlas as he was enduring punishment by Zeus, he was visited by Herakles as well as Perseus in North Africa. This coincides exactly with North Africans being well known for their worship of their sun god 'Tafukt' or commonly identified by the Greeks as Apollo; they were believed to inhabit a sunny, temperate, and divinely-blessed land. The oldest myths portray them as the favorites of Apollo, and some ancient Greek writers regarded them as the mythical founders of Apollo's shrines at Delos and Delphi. Masinissa received a golden crown from the inhabitants of Delos as he had offered them several shiploads of grain to the temple of Apollo in Delos the famous birthplace of the sun god and his twin sister Artemis.Itineraria Phoenicia - Edward Lipiński
One of the ancient Greek mythological explanations for the origin of the name is Libya, the daughter of Epaphus and Memphis. A different tradition is recorded by Andron of Halicarnassus, who relates that Oceanus had two wives, Pompholyge and Parthenope, and fathered four daughters: Asia and Libya by one wife and Thrace and Europe by the other. In this account, these daughters serve as eponymous ancestors, with their names being bestowed upon the regions they came to represent.Tzetzes, Ad Lycophronem, 894
Inhabitants
Berbers are native to North Africa and have established their culture for thousands of years alongside the Egyptians. Egypt today contains the Siwa Oasis, which borders Libya at the Western Desert. The Siwi language, one of the Berber languages, is still spoken in the area by around 21,000 people. Their ancient Egyptian neighbors referred to the various Libyan groups and tribes as the Tehenu, Temehu, Rebu and Meshwesh.
Homer names Libya, in the Odyssey (IX.95; XXIII.311). Homer used the name in a geographic sense, while he called its inhabitants "Lotus-eaters". After Homer, Aeschylus, Pindar, and other ancient Greek writers used the name. Herodotus (1.46) used Λιβύη Libúē to indicate the African continent; the Líbues proper were the light-skinned North Africans, while those south of Egypt (and Elephantine on the Nile) were known to him as "Aethiopians";The Cambridge History of North Africa and the people between them as the Egyptians, p. 141. this was also the understanding of later Greek geographers such as Diodorus Siculus, Strabo...etc, amongst other writers.
In the Hellenistic period, the native Berbers were known collectively as Libyans to the Greco-Roman world,Oliver, Roland & Fagan, Brian M. (1975) Africa in the Iron Age: c. 500 B.C. to A.D. 1400. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; p. 47 a Greek term for the inhabitants of the Maghreb, they identified the Massylii, the Masaessyli, the Gaetuli, the Phareusiens and the Mauri.
Libyans were known far and wide as glorious warriors with extraordinary physical strength; they were efficient in battle and effective when combined with an army. They were either employed as mercenaries or were made part of an army as was the case with Numidian cavalry. Polybius first mentions Numidian cavalry as part of the Carthaginian army during the First Punic War. In the ranks of both Roman Empire and Ancient Carthage, they completely overturned the tide of battle in Cannae for Hannibal and Battle of Zama for Scipio Africanus. Virgil speaks of the Libyans in this way: "The surrounding lands are Libyan, a race unbeatable in war.""Aeneid", Book I
After the Egyptians, the Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines mentioned various other tribes in Libya. Later tribal names differ from the Egyptian ones, but probably, some tribes were named in the Egyptian sources, as well as the later ones. Scholars believe the Meshwesh are the people called the Mazyes by Hektaios and Maxyes by Herodotus, while it was called "Mazaces" and "Mazax" in Latin sources. All those names are similar to the name used by the Berbers for themselves, such as Imazighen.Mohammed Chafik, Highlights of thirty-three centuries of Imazighen p. 9 .
Late-period sources give more detailed descriptions of Libya and its inhabitants. The ancient historian Herodotus describes Libya and the Libyans in his fourth book, The Libyan Book. Writers such as Pliny the Elder, Diodorus Siculus, and Procopius also contributed to what is now primary source material on ancient Libya and the Libyans.
Name
The name is based on the ethnonym Libu ( Líbyes, ). The name Libya (in use since 1934 for the modern country formerly known as Tripolitania and Barca) was the Latin designation for the region of the Maghreb, from the Ancient Greek ( Libúē, Libúā). In Classical Greece, the term had a broader meaning, encompassing the continent that later (second century BC) became known as Africa, which, in antiquity, was assumed to constitute one third of the world's land mass, Europe and Asia combined making up the other two thirds.
The Libu are attested since the Late Bronze Age as inhabiting the region (Egyptian R'bw, Punic: lby). The oldest known documented references to the Libu date to Ramesses II and his successor Merneptah, pharaohs of the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt, during the 13th century BC. LBW appears as an ethnic name on the Merneptah Stele to designate Libyans.Gardiner, Alan Henderson (1964) Egypt of the Pharaohs: an introduction Oxford University Press, London, p. 273,
Menelaus had travelled there on his way home from Troy; it was a land of wonderful richness, where the lambs have horns as soon as they are born, where ewes lamb three times a year and no shepherd ever goes short of milk, meat or cheese.
When the Ancient Greeks actually settled in Libya, the old name taken from the Egyptians was applied by the Greeks of Cyrenaica, who may have coexisted with the Libu.Fage, J. D. (ed.) (1978) "The Libyans" The Cambridge History of Africa: From c. 500 BC to AD 1050 volume II, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, p. 141, Later, the name appeared in the Hebrew language, written in the Bible as Lehabim and Lubim, indicating the ethnic population and the geographic territory as well. In the neo-Punic inscriptions, it was written as Lby for the masculine noun, and Lbt for the feminine noun of Libyan.
Latin absorbed the name from Greek and the Punic languages. The Romans would have known them before their colonization of North Africa because of the Libyan role in the Punic Wars against the Romans. The Romans used the name Líbues, but only when referring to Barca and the Libyan Desert of Egypt. The other Libyan territories were called "Africa", which were Roman provinces.
Classical Arabic literature called Libya Lubya, Modern Arabic uses Libya. The Lwatae, the tribe of Ibn Battuta,The full name of Ibn Battuta was Abu 'Abd Allah Muhammad ibn 'Abd Allah al-Lawati at-Tanji ibn Battuta as the Arabs called it, was a Berber tribe that mainly was situated in Cyrenaica. This tribe may have ranged from the Atlantic Ocean to modern Libya, however, and was referred to by Corippius as Laguatan; he linked them with the Maures. Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah states Luwa was an ancestor of this tribe. He writes that the Berbers add an "a" and "t" to the name for the plural forms. Subsequently, it became rendered as Lwat.
Conversely, the Arabs adopted the name as a singular form, adding an "h" for the plural form in Arabic. Ibn Khaldun disagrees with Ibn Hazam, who claimed, mostly on the basis of Berber sources, that the Lwatah, in addition to the Sadrata and the Mzata, were from the Qibts (Egyptians). According to Ibn Khaldun, this claim is incorrect because Ibn Hazam had not read the books of the Berber scholars.The History of Ibn Khaldun, third chapter p. 184-258
Oric Bates, a historian, considers that the name Libu or LBW would be derived from the name LuwatahBates, Oric (1914) The Eastern Libyans. London: Macmillan & Co. p. 57 whilst the name Luwatah is a derivation of the name Libu. Furthermore, Bates considered all the Libyan tribes to be a single civilization around 3000 BC united under central Libu and Meshwesh control. Mainly situated around Cyrenaica and Marsa matruh.
The ancient Libu and Meshwesh plundered west into Zawyet Umm El Rakham, which allowed them trade with Mycenaeans, Cyprus, Levant and the Aegean people. The Mycenaean Greek in specific seemed to have clashed with the Libyans.
History
Compared with the history of Egypt, historians know little about the history of Libya, as there are few surviving written records. Information on ancient Libya comes from archaeological evidence and historic sources written by Egyptian scribes, as well as the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines, and later from Arabs of Medieval times.