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Aspects of the Circus at Lepcis Magna

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2015

John Humphrey ,
Frank Sear  and
Michael Vickers
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Extract

By kind permission of the Department of Antiquities and of Professor Antonino Di Vita, Director of the Italian Mission, and with the financial support of the Society for Libyan Studies, the Oxford Craven Committee and the Cambridge Faculty Board of Classics, the authors spent three weeks in the early summer of 1974 studying the circus at Lepcis Magna. During the sixty years in which Italian archaeologists have been working at Lepcis, parts of the circus have been cleared or excavated on several different occasions. Work was begun in 1924-5 by R. Bartoccini at the monumental arch at the eastern end of the arena and on the seating on the north-east curve. He also uncovered the meta prima and the adjacent east end of the spina. Since 1960 a much larger area has been uncovered successively by E. Vergara-Caffarelli, F. Russo and A. Di Vita, as part of the larger project of clearing and restoring the whole of the amphitheatre-circus complex. Although work in most recent years has concentrated upon the complete clearance and restoration of the amphitheatre (which is cut into the hillside immediately south of the circus), two-thirds of the long south side of the circus has been revealed together with about half of the spina and most of the starting gates (carceres) at the west end.

Type
Research Article
Information
Libyan Studies , Volume 5 , 1973 , pp. 4 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Libyan Studies 1973

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References

REFERENCES

1 The authors wish to thank Mr Martin Beddoe of Peterhouse, Cambridge, for his assistance with their project, and the Department of Antiquities of the Libyan Arab Republic, especially Mr M. Nemri, Mr Abdulhamid Abdussaid and Mr Omar Mahjub, for their kind help and hospitality.Google Scholar
2Rivista della Tripolitania, i (1924–1925), p. 315; P. Romanelli, Leptis Magna (Rome, 1925), pp. 153-4.Google Scholar
3Vita-Evrard, G. Di, ‘Les dédicaces de l'amphithéâtre et du cirque de Lepcis’, Libya Antigua, ii (1965), pp. 33–37; Libya Antiqua Supplement, ii (1966), pp. 91-2.Google Scholar
4 Brief descriptions have however appeared of the Circus of Maxentius, by Popoff-Béboutoff, G. in Antike Welt, 1, i (1970), pp. 28–31, and of the hippodrome at Tyre by M. Chehab in Archéologia, No. 55, 1973, pp. 16-20.Google Scholar
5 This survey appears as the endpiece to Romanelli, , op. cit. (n.2).Google Scholar
6 There are two photographs of the meta prima from the 1925 excavation in the Department of Antiquities.Google Scholar
7Vita-Evrard, Di, op. cit. (n.3).Google Scholar
8Circus Pavements, New York University, unpublished dissertation, 1964.Google Scholar
9Harris, H. A., ‘The Starting-Gates for Chariots at Olympia’, Greece and Rome, xv (1968), p. 113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 See further Vickers, M., JRS, lxii (1972), pp. 30–31.Google Scholar
11 By Humphrey, J. in the forthcoming volume on the excavations in the circus at Sirmium.Google Scholar