Road station

Catabathmo

Sollum (Barrington)

Catabathmo takes its name from the Greek word for a descent, and Ptolemy speaks of the Great Descent: at Sollum the rocky coast of Marmarica steps back, the flat coastal plain begins, and a deep, narrow valley once marked the border between Cyrenaica and Egypt. Under the Ptolemies a fort with a harbour guarded this frontier as Egypt's westernmost border post, and the place kept that role in the centuries that followed; the Roman register of routes calls it the boundary of Alexandria. The Roman geographer Pomponius Mela let the province of Cyrene reach as far as here.

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