That link is interesting in that it goes from "Herodotus to ibn khaldoun" but Cyrene was 200 years old when Herodotus got there so... from an "ancient history" perspective Ibn Khaldoun writing about the berbers founding Libya is kind of the equivalent of Gibbon writing about Rome - I mean, yeah, it's important but he was reliant on sources that weren't entirely reliable at the time and the historical record has pretty much blown everything he had to say away.

Here's the thing: desert societies are always precarious. Ask the Anasazi, ask the Assyrians, ask the Egyptians. Libya exists, as far as I know, because it was Cyrene. The north coast of Africa became less relevant in no small part because everything fell to ruin in the Peloponnesian War, and then when the Romans were busy picking over the Greeks' sloppy seconds they fucked up the African Coast something serious. By the time of the Islamic conquest, anyone with any pull ended up in Spain while anyone whose life sucked ended up in Africa.

So yeah. It never really had a chance. But really, it was never really a place that had much going on anyway.

By the bye, Cyrene is the home of silphium, one of my favorite little bits of folklore. I may have developed a low-budg indie script about some adventuresome botanists who head out to Libya in search of silphium only to find haoma at which point things get extremely altered states slash red one. There was a time when I figured spending a couple days shooting b-roll and key shots on Socotra would have been within the realm of possibility, but that time has passed.

Read the silphium box here. You can read the bit about asafoetida; it's kind of a trip. But the silphium thing is...evocative.