Libya
Libya (officially State of Libya) is a country in Northern Africa, with its capital at Tripoli, and is home to roughly 7.4M people.
Arabic is the official language; the currency in circulation is Libyan dinar (ل.د); people from here are called Libyan.
- »More than 90% of the country is desert.
- »The Great Man-Made River is one of the largest irrigation projects ever built, drawing fossil water from beneath the Sahara.
Libya straddles the Tropic of Cancer.
Libya touches six neighbours: Algeria to the west, Chad to the south, Egypt to the east, Niger to the southwest, Sudan to the southeast and Tunisia to the northwest. Directions run from one centre to the other. Neighbours in six different compass directions make this one of the better-connected outlines in the set.
Tripoli was founded by the Phoenicians as Oea and takes its modern name from the Greek for 'three cities', the trio of Roman settlements on this coast.
1,626,926 km² (628,159 sq mi), 16th largest of 198 countries and territories on file, almost exactly the size of Iran.
Population 7,381,023, 105th of 198 on file. That averages 4.5 per km² (12 per sq mi).
Restored in 2011 after the fall of Gaddafi, whose plain green flag had been the only single-colour national flag in the world. The star and crescent sit on the black band of the original 1951 design.