The name Tsabratan appears to be Berber, suggesting a settlement existed before Phoenician ships ever anchored offshore. Around 500 BC, Phoenician traders established the port as an outlet for products from the African interior, part of the network of coastal stations that supported their Mediterranean shipping routes. Greeks knew the place as Abrotonon. After Phoenicia's decline, Sabratha fell under Carthaginian influence, then became part of the short-lived Numidian kingdom of Massinissa following the Punic Wars. By the 1st century BC, Rome had absorbed it into the province of Africa Nova. But the city truly came alive in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, when Romanization transformed it from a modest trading post into one of the three great cities of Tripolis, alongside Oea and Leptis Magna.

Emperor Septimius Severus was born in nearby Leptis Magna in AD 145, and under the Severan dynasty he founded, both cities reached their monumental peak. Sabratha expanded to nearly twice its previous size. The theater, with its extraordinary three-story colonnaded stage wall, was likely completed during this era. Emperor Commodus dedicated a temple in 186 AD honoring Hercules and his father Marcus Aurelius, its walls clad in marble below and painted above. Excavations revealed a scene in the western apse showing Commodus being carried heavenward on an eagle, about to join the gods. Temples to Liber Pater, Serapis, and Isis stood alongside the forum. Mosaic floors enriched the homes of the wealthy, their patterns still legible in the seaward baths that overlook the shore.

The earthquake of AD 365, which devastated cities across the eastern Mediterranean, badly damaged Sabratha. The 4th century brought further seismic shocks. When the Vandals seized control in the 5th century, large portions of the city were abandoned outright. A modest revival under Byzantine rule saw the construction of several churches and a defensive wall, though it enclosed only a fraction of the former city. The town retained a bishopric, a sign that some organized community persisted. But within a hundred years of the Muslim invasion of the Maghreb, trade had shifted to other ports and Sabratha contracted to a village. The grand colonnades and temple porticos disappeared under wind-blown sand, invisible until Italian archaeologists began digging in the 1920s.

In 1943, during the Second World War, archaeologist Max Mallowan was posted to Sabratha as assistant to the Senior Civil Affairs Officer of Tripolitania. His main duty was overseeing grain rations, but his biographer wife Agatha Christie's account reveals the atmosphere: Mallowan lived in an Italian villa with a patio overlooking the sea, dining on fresh tuna and olives. It was, in Christie's biographer's words, a "glorious attachment." Tourism trickled in from the 1990s, growing after Libya's air embargo was lifted in 2003. But the political upheavals following 2011 brought new dangers. In 2016, the entire site was placed on UNESCO's World Heritage in Danger list amid fears of looting and trafficking of archaeological objects, threats that the head of Libya's Antiquities Service compared to the destruction seen in Iraq and Syria.

Sabratha's most relentless enemy is not war but water. The coast here is composed of soft rock and sand, and the calcarenite building stone is acutely vulnerable to salt spray, wind erosion, and biological weathering. Without the protective stucco that originally covered the structures, the exposed stone dissolves year by year. The public baths and olive press near the harbor have already crumbled from storm damage, and the inadequate breakwaters installed nearby offer little defense. Beach surveys show significant changes in coastal layout from year to year as erosion advances. Rising sea levels compound the threat. The Phoenicians chose this site because the sea connected it to the world. Twenty-five centuries later, that same sea is methodically pulling the city apart, building by building, stone by stone.