Petras Minor
Πέτρας ὁ μικρός
Petras Minor (Πέτρας ὁ μικρός, Scyl. l.c.; Ptol. 4.5.2; Stadiasm. § 39), a harbour of Marmarica, half a day's sail from Antipyrgus. It has been identified with Magharab-el-Heabes, where there are a great number of catacombs remarkable for their Graeco-Aegyptian style. These curious excavations, of which plans are given in Pacho (Voyage dans la Marmarique, Planches, pl. v.), are to be identified. according to that traveller (p. 49), with the sinuous caverns of BOMBAEA (Βόμβαια), resembling the Aegyptian hypogaea,
which the Greeks called Syringes,
mentioned by Synesius (Ep. 104); but Barth (Wanderunzgen, p. 512) has shown that the description of the bishop of Ptolemais cannot be applied to these catacombs and their locality. A coin with the epigraph ΠΕ-PA, which Pellerin referred to this port in Marmarica is by Eckhel (4.116) assigned to a Cretan mint [E.B.J]
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.