Sabratha

Name: Sabratha
Address: Libya

Africa Proconsularis · Roman province·Libya·Founded 5th c. BCE

One of the three cities of Tripolitania. Its theatre is one of the largest surviving anywhere in North Africa.

An uninhabited UNESCO World Heritage site on Libya's coast, placed on UNESCO's List of World Heritage in Danger in 2016 due to conflict-related damage and neglect.

Excavation history

1921-1929

Italian Antiquities Service (colonial Libya) — Began exploration and excavation of the Roman coastal city under Italian colonial administration.

1923-1928

Renato Bartoccini — Began excavating and restoring the amphitheatre (1924-1926) and started clearing the theatre, then just a mound of sand and masonry, in 1927.

1948-1951

Kathleen Kenyon and John Bryan Ward-Perkins (for the British School at Rome) — Carried out three seasons of British excavation at Sabratha, adding to the earlier Italian work.

Notable finds

Marble Head of Flavia Domitilla

Vespasian's daughter was born here to Italic colonist parents before her father took the purple, and this marble head of her stood on display until thieves snapped it from its statue in a 1990 museum break-in — Christie's later auctioned it, unaware it was stolen, before Italy tracked it down and returned it to Libya in 2012.

Sabratha Museum

Mosaic of the Three Graces

Lifted from a house behind the Temple of Antoninus, this 3rd-century floor mosaic sets the three daughters of Zeus in the same close, interlaced pose familiar from the Pompeii fresco and Raphael's later painting of the same scene.

Sabratha Museum

Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne Mosaic

Recovered from the Temple of Liber Pater — Sabratha's own name for Bacchus, worshipped here as the city's patron god — this mosaic shows the wine god's triumphal procession with Ariadne at his side.

Sabratha Museum

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