Leptis Magna is the ruined Roman city on Libya's Mediterranean coast at the mouth of the Wadi Lebda, inside the modern town of Al-Khums about 130 km east of Tripoli. Founded as a Punic port, it became one of the great cities of Roman Africa, and it was rebuilt in marble by a son of the city, Lucius Septimius Severus, who was born here in 145 CE and ruled as emperor from 193 to 211. Abandoned after the Arab conquest of the 7th century and buried under sand dunes, it was dug out by Italian archaeologists from the 1920s and is now among the best-preserved Roman cities in the Mediterranean. UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1982 and added it to its in-danger register in 2016.
Lpqy: a Punic Port at the Mouth of Wadi Lebda
The town began as a Punic settlement, founded in the second half of the 7th century BCE, more than 2,600 years ago. Its Punic name was written lpq or lpqy, possibly from a Semitic root meaning "to build". Greeks turned this into Leptis, and the Romans added Magna, "Greater", to tell it apart from a smaller Leptis near Carthage in what is now Tunisia. The Arabic name is Labdah.
Little is known of the early town, but around 515 BCE it was strong enough to see off the Spartan prince Dorieus, who tried to found a Greek colony nearby. Leptis then sat within Carthage's sphere until Rome defeated Carthage in the Punic Wars. In 111 BCE, during the war against the Numidian king Jugurtha, the city sent envoys to the Roman Senate asking for friendship and alliance, and from then on it drifted into Rome's orbit while keeping much of its autonomy. Its wealth came from the olive groves of its hinterland: by 46 BCE it could pay Julius Caesar a tax of three million pounds of oil a year. Under Tiberius the city was formally absorbed into the province of Africa, becoming a municipium in 64 or 65 CE and a colonia under Trajan.
Before Severus: the Theatre and Hadrian's Baths
Several of the city's best-known buildings predate its imperial son. The theatre dates from the first years of the 1st century CE; inscriptions record that it was paid for by wealthy local citizens. Italian excavators later found a Punic necropolis of the 4th to 3rd centuries BCE underneath it. It could seat around 15,000 spectators, and the columns of its stage building still frame a view straight out to the Mediterranean.
The Hadrianic Baths, commissioned by Hadrian early in the 2nd century, followed once an aqueduct brought a steady water supply and marble was being imported on a large scale. The complex was inaugurated in 137 CE, although some archaeologists believe it opened ten years earlier. Visitors moved from an exercise yard to an open-air pool and on into the frigidarium, the cold hall, which measured 30 by 15 m and had a vaulted ceiling carried on eight columns of cipollino marble nearly 9 m high. Niches along its walls held about 40 statues, some now in the museums at Leptis and Tripoli. A second, smaller complex, the Hunting Baths, is a run of barrel-vaulted rooms that was used for almost three centuries and takes its name from a fresco of hunting scenes set in the amphitheatre.
Septimius Severus, Born Here on 11 April 145
Lucius Septimius Severus was born in Leptis Magna on 11 April 145, into a wealthy family of equestrian rank, Libyan-Punic on his father's side and Italian on his mother's. His grandfather had been a leading local magistrate. After a conventional career under Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, Severus seized the throne in 193, the Year of the Five Emperors, defeated his rivals Pescennius Niger and Clodius Albinus, and in his Parthian war of 197 and 198 his legions sacked the royal city of Ctesiphon.
He did not forget home. From late 202 his forces pushed the frontier zone known as the Limes Tripolitanus deep into the desert, capturing the Garamantes' capital Garama more than 600 km south of Leptis and making the coast safe from raids. In 205 he and the imperial family visited the city. He gave it the ius Italicum, which exempted it from many taxes, and its people began calling themselves Septimiani. Under the Severans, Leptis became the third largest port in the Mediterranean and reached a population of about 100,000 in the early 3rd century, fed partly by trans-Saharan trade in ivory, gold dust, ebony, ostrich feathers and wild animals for the arena.
The Arch of Septimius Severus at the Crossroads
The best-known monument is the four-way arch, or tetrapylon, that marks the crossing of the city's two main streets, the north-south cardo and the east-west Decumanus Maximus. It is generally dated to the emperor's African tour of about 203, although scholars disagree on the exact year. A limestone core was faced with marble and framed by eight Corinthian columns carrying broken pediments, a feature borrowed from eastern rather than Roman tradition. Four large frieze panels showed the imperial family in scenes of triumph, procession, sacrifice and concord. On the north-east side, facing the rival city of Oea (modern Tripoli), Severus rides in a four-horse chariot with his sons Caracalla and Geta, a public statement of the dynasty he meant to found.
The arch had collapsed by the 5th century, and Justinian's builders later reused some of its sculpture. Archaeologists rediscovered it in 1928 and rebuilt it by anastylosis, reassembling the original blocks in place.
Severan Forum, Basilica and the Rebuilt Harbour
Severus moved the civic heart of the city away from the old forum by the sea, laid out in the time of Augustus, to a new forum named after his dynasty. A temple to the Severan family stood on its south-west side; only its steps, podium and an underground storeroom survive, with shafts of pink granite columns scattered around the square.
On the north-east side rises the Severan Basilica, about 92 m long and 40 m wide, entered from the forum along its long side and closed by an apse at each end. Its three aisles were divided by columns of pink granite. In the 6th century Justinian turned it into a church by placing an altar in the south-eastern apse.
From a monumental fountain, the nymphaeum, beside the Hadrianic Baths, a colonnaded avenue more than 20 m wide ran about 410 m down to the waterfront. There Severus rebuilt the harbour and added a lighthouse more than 35 m tall, which ancient writers compared to the Pharos of Alexandria; only its foundations remain. Of the harbour itself, the eastern mole, warehouses, the ruins of a watchtower and part of the quays used for loading goods still survive, along with the steps of a temple to Jupiter Dolichenus nearby.
Sand, Italian Excavators and the 2016 In Danger Listing
The boom did not last. Trade fell away in the crisis of the 3rd century, and after the legion stationed in the region was disbanded in 238 the city was more exposed to raids. Large parts were already empty before a tsunami struck in 365. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus records that a corrupt governor, Romanus, demanded bribes to defend the city and then had its envoys punished when they complained to Emperor Valentinian I. The Vandal king Gaiseric took Leptis in 439 and pulled down its walls; Berber raiders sacked it in 523. Belisarius won it back for the Eastern Roman Empire in 533, but it never recovered. When Arab armies arrived around 647 only a garrison and fewer than 1,000 people remained, and by the 10th century the town of Al-Khums had absorbed what was left; the old city lay buried under the dunes.
The sand that ended it also preserved it. In 1816 part of a temple was shipped to the British Museum; ten years later it was re-erected near Virginia Water, where it still stands in Windsor Great Park. Systematic work began after Italy occupied Libya. Renato Bartoccini excavated in 1925 and 1926, and by the early 1930s Italian teams had exposed nearly the whole city. Discoveries continue: in 2005 archaeologists from the University of Hamburg revealed five 1st- or 2nd-century mosaics from a villa bath on the Wadi Lebda, including a resting gladiator now in the Leptis Magna Museum.
UNESCO inscribed the Archaeological Site of Leptis Magna in 1982, among Libya's first three World Heritage Sites. During the 2011 civil war rebels reported that forces loyal to Gaddafi were hiding military vehicles at the ruins, but afterwards the Libyan archaeologist Hafed Walda reported no visible loss at the site. In 2016 UNESCO placed all five of Libya's World Heritage Sites on the In Danger list because of the instability caused by the civil war; in 2025 Ghadames became the first of the five to be taken off it. With official support reduced, local residents have organised to guard and maintain the ruins. A longer-term threat is the sea: the IPCC's 2022 report listed the coastal site among African heritage places exposed to flooding and erosion under a high-emissions scenario.
Leptis Magna is best read alongside the Punic city that once overshadowed it, so compare it with Carthage in Tunisia, follow the empire's African frontier in our guide to the geography of the Roman Empire, and see how the coast and desert shaped the country around it in Libya's geography.