76 Roman statues would lead a big parade...

...of recent archaeological finds.

CYRENE. An Italian team of archaeologists has discovered 76 intact Roman statues at Cyrene in Libya....

With a nearby coastal port, Apollonia, serving it, Cyrene was once a conurbation equivalent to Alexandria, Carthage and Leptis Magna.... (F)ounded by Greek settlers from the island of Thera in 631 BC, it was later ruled by the Ptolemies and then the Romans....

The latest discovery is the work of Mario Luni, an archaeologist from the University of Urbino.... Speaking to The Art Newspaper, Professor Luni said: “One morning, a collapsed wall in the Roman temple...revealed a marble serpent wrapped around a stone. We could not have known that this was only the first in a series of statues...we would pull from the ground. We just kept discovering them every day, for a month and a half, and found 76 in total.”

...All the statues date from the Severan period in the second century BC.

What a haul. That's the sort of sexy find which you just don't find. Not anymore. Edek Osser has the story in The Art Newspaper.

As for that fine word, conurbation, Merriam-Webster Online has this to say: Etymology: com- + Latin urb-, urbs city: an aggregation or continuous network of urban communities. Sort of like Philadelphia to Boston or Gary-Chicago-Milwaukee.