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The Roman poet Virgil made the Garamantes' lands into a metaphor for the very ends of the earth. In Book Six of the Aeneid, Anchises speaks to Aeneas from the underworld to prophesy the great Romans yet to come: "This is the man you heard so often promised - Augustus Caesar, who will renew a golden age in Latium and stretch his rule beyond the Garamantes,...a land beyond the paths of year and sun, beyond the constellations, where on his shoulders heaven-holding Atlas revolves the axis set with blazing stars."

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Descended from Berbers and Saharan pastoralists, the Garamantes were likely present as a tribal people in the Fezzan by at least 1000 B.C. They first appeared in the historical record in the fifth century B.C., when Herodotus noted the Garamantes were an exceedingly numerous people who herded cattle (that grazed backward!) and who hunted "troglodyte Ethiopians" from four-horse chariots.

The success of the Garamantes was based on their subterranean water-extraction system, a network of tunnels known as foggaras in Berber. It not only allowed their part of the Sahara to bloom again-it also triggered a political and social process that led to population expansion, urbanism, and conquest. But in order to retain and extend their newfound prosperity, they needed above all to maintain and expand the water-extraction tunnel systems-and that necessitated the acquisition of many slaves.

Luckily for the Garamantes-but less so for their neighbors-Garamantian population growth gave the new Saharan power a demographic and military advantage over other peoples in Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, enabling them to expand their territory, conquer other peoples, and acquire vast numbers of slaves.

By around A.D. 150 the slave-based Garamantian kingdom covered 70,000 square miles in present-day southern Libya. It was the first time in history that a nonriverine area of the Sahara (or indeed any other major desert) had produced an urban society. The largest town, Garama (in what is now called the Jarma Oasis), had a population of some four thousand. A further six thousand people probably lived in suburban satellite villages located within a three-mile radius of the urban center.

Thanks to their aggressive mentality and the slaves and water it produced, the Garamantes lived in planned towns and feasted on locally grown grapes, figs, sorghum, pulses, barley, and wheat, as well as on imported luxuries such as wine and olive oil. "The combination of their slave-acquisition activities and their mastery of foggara irrigation technology enabled the Garamantes to enjoy a standard of living far superior to that of any other ancient Saharan society," says archaeologist Andrew Wilson of the University of Oxford, who has been surveying the foggara system. Without slaves, they would not have had a kingdom, let alone even a whiff of the good life. They would have survived-just-in conditions of relative poverty, as most desert dwellers have done before and since.

In the end, depletion of easily mined fossil water sounded the death knell of the Garamantian kingdom. After extracting at least 30 billion gallons of water over some 600 years, the fourth-century A.D. Garamantes discovered that the water was literally running out. To deal with the problem, they would have needed to add more man-made underground tributaries to existing tunnels and dig additional deeper, much longer water-extraction tunnels. For that, they would have needed vastly more slaves than they had. The water difficulties must have led to food shortages, population reductions, and political instability (local defensive structures from this era may be evidence for political fragmentation). Conquering more territories and pulling in more slaves was therefore simply not militarily feasible. The magic equation between population and military and economic power on the one hand and slave-acquisition capability and water extraction on the other no longer balanced.

The desert kingdom declined and fractured into small chiefdoms and was absorbed into the emerging Islamic world. Like its more famous Roman neighbor, the once-great Saharan kingdom became, little by little, simply a thing of myth and memory. Along with the rest of the world, Berbers living in the Fazzan today have all but forgotten their ancestors. The kingdom's legacy has faded so dramatically that local residents believe the vast water-extraction system-the pride of the Garamantes-is the handiwork of Romans.

This abstract was taken from an article in Archaeology magazine, by David Keys, titled "Kingdom of the Sands."

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Britons find ancient empire that made Sahara bloom

An ancient civilisation, lost for 1,500 years in the middle of the Sahara Desert, has been found and investigated by British archaeologists. Research by the Universities of Leicester, Newcastle and Reading is revealing how a long-forgotten Saharan people made the desert bloom, built impressive cities and controlled an empire of 70,000 square miles.

Nearly all scholars had thought this ancient people, known as the Garamantes, had been little more than desert barbarians living in one small town, a couple of villages and scattered, nomadic encampments.

But the researchers, led by David Mattingly, an archaeologist at Leicester University, found the Garamantes had at least three big cities and 20other important settlements in the middle of the world's largest desert.

Their investigations showed how the desert, where rainfall averages only half an inch each year, was successfully cultivated. A 3,000-mile network of underground irrigation canals was built by the Garamantes, which tapped into natural fossil water supplies laid down more than 40,000 years ago when rain last fell plentifully in the area.

The archaeologists believe the Sahara became much more arid after 1200BC and thisforced local populations to move from pastoral stock-rearing to oases-based agriculture.

Oases in large depressions had easier access to fossil groundwater - and in one large depression, now known as the Wadi al-Agial, the inhabitants built underground canals to channel water from the fossil aquifers to irrigate up to 300 square miles of land.

With the subterranean canals, food production rose and the population expanded, so by 500BC the Garamantes were able to create their first towns and to start expanding their area of political control.

The archaeological research, funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, shows that by around 100BC they had become a major political force, and they remained a 50,000-strong state until easily accessible fossil water supplies ran out.


(credit)

When the groundwater level fell below that of the underground canal complex, the irrigation system simply dried up, and the Garamantes had to dig hundreds of wells to reach the lowered water table. This water crisis, as well as a reduction in trade caused by the lesser volume of slavery in the Mediterranean and the decline of the Roman Empire, seems to have reduced the power of the Garamantian civilisation by the sixth century AD.

By the end of the following century, the kingdom had come under Islamic domination.

The Garamantian civilisation reached its peak in the second and third centuries AD, when the new archaeological evidence suggests it became one of the Roman Empire's main trading partners.

Archaeologists believe large quantities of African gold, ivory, salt, semi-precious stones and slaves were supplied to the empire via the Garamantian kingdom.

Professor Mattingly said : "Our research is revealing that, with human ingenuity and against all the odds, the people of the world's largest desert were able to create a prosperous and successful civilisation in one of the driest and hottest wildernesses on earth. The Romans liked to think of the Garamantes as simple barbarians. The new archaeological evidence is now putting the record straight and showing they were brilliant farmers, resourceful engineers and enterprising merchants who produced a remarkable civilisation."

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The Garamantes masters of the Sahara: the Garamantes of Libya have been dismissed by everyone from the Romans to 20th-century scholars as irrelevant desert pastoralists and nomads. But now, new research has revealed that they had a sophisticated civilisation and represented one of the most powerful kingdoms in North Africa

After five years of meticulous digging, uncovering ten layers of buildings in the Saharan town of Garama--which was inhabited between 400 BC and 1937--Professor David Mattingly and his team made a dramatic and unexpected discover)'. 'In the town's extraordinary 2,500-year-history,' Mattingly explains, 'what stands out is that the period of the Garamantian civilisation was the time of greatest material wellbeing; the Garamantes ate better than most subsequent inhabitants and had a wider range of locally manufactured and imported goods.'

The team's findings are at odds with the prevailing picture of the Garamantes as fragmented bands of beleaguered desert dwellers--a picture that goes all the way back to the Romans. Now Mattingly, who is based at the University of Leicester, is seeking to redress the historical injustice by identifying the Garamantes kingdom as 'the first Libyan state'.

'We now have solid evidence to identify the Garamantes as a state and a civilisation,' Mattingly says. 'Past researchers have been cautious about making this evaluation, partly because of negative press by Greco-Roman writers, who depicted the Garamantes as a troublesome tribe of armed brigands, pastoral nomads living in scattered huts and tents, without political and social sophistication. It was more palatable for Romans to believe in the stereotype of the "barbarian other" rather than address the complex reality of a powerful desert kingdom. Yet the evidence we have now shows the Garamantes as skilful agriculturists living in towns and villages and practitioners of advanced technologies such as metallurgy, glassmaking, salt-refining and the production of semi-precious stones. Their society was complex, hierarchical and well organised; they had a written script. In other words, they fulfilled all the criteria that define a "civilisation".'

Climactic changes

The Garamantes lived in the inhospitable and terrain of today's Fezzan region of Libya, and from Garama, the capital they founded in 400 BC, they controlled an area larger than the UK for 1,000 years. Their civilisation arose in response to an environmental catastrophe: the sudden failure of rainfall 5,000 years ago. 'The desert has oscillated between wet and dry epochs five times since the Pleistocene,' explains Libyan archaeologist Giuma Anag. 'During the wet periods, the desert received tropical rains, and a vegetation corridor formed between the Mediterranean coast and sub-Saharan Africa. There were forests of juniper, and animals such as elephants, lions, giraffes and rhinos.'

This lost world is depicted in the rock art that is ubiquitous throughout the desert. Paintings and petroglyphs, created between 2,000 and 10,000 years ago, show animals, hunting scenes, epic battles and human rituals.

When the rains ceased, the pastoral herding communities migrated to the valleys, where water was available in lakes and springs, or in aquifers sitting just below the surface. The wettest of these was Wadi al-Ajal (now known as Wadi al-Hayat, or 'Valley of Life'), a vast valley 200 kilometres long and 30 kilometres across at its widest point, hemmed in by the purple-black ridges of Massak Plateau to the south and the endless sand dunes of the Ubari Sand Sea to the north.

At first, the Garamantes built settlements on the rocky bluffs that jut out over the valley. These were fortified outposts, 13 of which have been documented, including the classic fort at Zinkekra, which had a thick defensive wall built across the peninsula's neck.

It's unclear how old these settlements are, but by 1000 BC, the Garamantes had mastered agriculture and developed an impressive irrigation system known as foggara. This consisted of tunnels that channelled water from the subterranean water table at the base of the escarpment. There were some 600 tunnels (with a combined length of more than 1,000 kilometres), constructed and maintained via 100,000 shafts up to 40 metres deep. The farmers used carts, horses and camels, and cultivated cereals, olives, grapes and dates.

Tombs and treasures

In 400 BC, the Garamantes founded Garama (now Jarma). The first houses were built in mud brick directly on the natural subsoil, with successive phases built over the rubble and rubbish of earlier phases--leading to the progressive raising of the ground surface inside the town. During what's known as the Classic Garamantian Phase (1-300 AD), temples and public buildings were constructed using large stones.

Garama was at the geographical centre of Wadi al-Ajal; another 50 hamlets were scattered throughout the valley, and the Garamantes kingdom counted a population of between 50,000 and 100,000.

'Garama was famous for its salt,' explains Saad Salah Abdul Aziz, head of the Fezzan branch of the Libyan Department of Antiquities. 'There was plenty of salt around, and the Garamantes traded it with people from the coast--Romans particularly--in return for amphorae and other items.'

Aziz and I are walking among the al-Hatiya Pyramids, a cluster of pyramidal mud-brick tombs about 25 kilometres west of Jarma. 'There are about 100 of these tombs,' Aziz says. 'It's where important people were buried.' The commoners were laid to rest in simpler structures, typically located on the slopes and plateaus of nearby mountains. There are about 120,000 such graves scattered throughout the valley, recognisable by the mounds of dug rubble.

Aziz points out the graves in the distance where excavations are currently taking place. These excavations, which are being funded by the British Society for Libyan Studies, are part of a new phase in Garamantian research that began this year and will continue until 2011. Also led by Mattingly--in collaboration with researchers at several universities in the UK--this research will focus primarily on the exploration of tombs. 'I am particularly interested in how the Garamantes defined their identity through material culture and ritual practice in these funerary contexts,' Mattingly explains. 'The cemeteries are an excellent place to investigate these relationships as it's possible to compare the material identity of the cultural package represented by each burial with the ethnic identity implied by palaeo-osteological studies [research into ancient bones].'

The first season of fieldwork has already yielded a trove of promising detritus. 'We've found preserved textiles, leather and other material, all dating from 100 AD to 300 AD,' Mattingly says. 'What we are retrieving will be the largest collection of ancient textiles from the Sahara outside Egypt and Sudan.'

The archaeologists have also found imported objects such as Roman amphorae, fine pottery and oil lamps, as well as an assortment of African relics, including wooden head rests, ochre, incense burners and decorated gourds. 'Many of the burials,' Mattingly continues, 'contained beads in a variety of materials--ostrich eggshell, glass, semi-precious stones such as carnelian (red) or amazonite (turquoise), ebony--and some of the beads appear to have been stitched onto textile garments. We also have fragments of quite elaborate sewn or plaited leatherwork, some dyed red. These finds are going to transform our knowledge of what the Garamantes looked like.'

Lost relics

But Mattingly and his team are also in a race against time--urban sprawl, quarrying and farm expansions are encroaching on the burials. In theory, all of Libya's archaeological relics have legal protection; in practice, Aziz lacks the resources necessary to stop the destruction. 'When the farmers find something, they smash it up, because if they inform us, we would stop them,' Aziz says. 'I had a farmer in my office this morning who wanted to extend his farm towards Zinkekra. We stopped him and compensated him for his loss. Sometimes farmers aren't aware of what they are destroying--they don't recognise the archaeological importance of foggara, for example.'

Aziz takes me to a farm to see a foggara, but instead we find three illegal immigrants from Niger making cement bricks in a yard. They tell us that they've never seen a shaft on the site, and Aziz quickly realises that it has been buried by the brick-making enterprise. 'Our problem,' Aziz laments, 'is that we lack the manpower to protect the sites. It's a large area, and there are graves scattered everywhere, so it's quite impossible for us to keep an eye on everything.'

The expansion of farms and large agricultural projects, which is being encouraged by the government, is also depleting the aquifers. 'The water table has receded from three metres below ground in the 1970s to 120 metres in the '90s,' Aziz says. 'Now they are digging boreholes 200 metres deep in some places before they hit water.'

The drop in the water table has had a dramatic effect around the ancient town of Garama, where the reed-fringed ponds and date palms of yesteryear are now a wasteland of skeletal trunks. 'When I was young, the palms were so dense that it was dark in the midst of the grove,' Aziz says. 'Now I feel great sadness each time I come here.'

This situation mirrors that which brought about the demise of the Garamantes. By 200-300 AD, the scale of agriculture was leading to the depletion of groundwater supplies, and this, coupled with the decline of the Roman Empire (which resulted in diminishing trade), eroded the resourcefulness and prosperity of the Garamantes and exposed their heartland to attack and domination. 'Over-exploitation of the non-renewable water,' Mattingly explains, 'necessitated a switch to a different form of irrigation that was far less efficient, and that resulted in a much smaller area under cultivation. This had knock-on effects for the population base that could defend the kingdom and intimidate its neighbours.'

The modern depletion is sure to have similarly disastrous consequences for the region's inhabitants, who are almost certainly unaware of the historical precedent lying beneath their feet.

The Sahara's changing climate

The Sahara Desert has a long history of dramatic climatic fluctuations. A team of researchers, including Nick Brooks of the University of East Anglia, recently found evidence of a 420,000-year-old lake in the desert's centre. Dubbed Lake Megafezzan, it once had an area of 120,000 square kilometres.

Since then, the desert has experienced numerous dry and wet periods. Between 60,000 and 10,000 years ago, there was an arid phase so extreme that it's believed that human habitation in the central Sahara ceased altogether. This was then followed by the last wet period the desert has known. However, a reduction in the sun's output brought this cycle to an end 5,000 years ago.

'Starting from about 9,000 years ago,' Brooks explains, 'solar radiation became less intense, until this "solar forcing" was too weak to sustain the monsoon. The monsoon then failed, and the collapse is likely to have been sudden--it may have been hastened by a "climate shock" associated with a periodic cooling of the North Atlantic and a collapse of the vegetation systems over North Africa.'

Since 2002, Brooks has led a research project in the Western Sahara that parallels that at Garama. There, the team has found no evidence of a great civilisation; the preliminary picture is of pastoralists who congregated in the wetter valleys as the world around them dried up. 'Today we are often told that pastoralists are among the groups most vulnerable to climate change,' he says. 'In fact, they are among the best equipped to deal with highly variable conditions, provided they aren't marginalised and pushed to unproductive areas, as has happened in recent historical times.

'We also tend to believe that agriculture and civilisation arose from natural human progress, and were made possible by the benign post-glacial climate of the past 10,000 years,' he continues. 'However, when we look at what was happening in the cradles of civilisation, we find that all of the great civilisations of antiquity emerged in areas experiencing desertification. Civilisation was born in times of climatic hardship, and was based on the same sorts of changes that we see in the prehistoric Sahara--more social inequality, more hierarchy and greater competition as people were squeezed into smaller geographical wet areas.'

Now global warming is expected to change the Sahara's climate once more. 'Some researchers believe the present aridity will be partially reversed by global warming,' Brooks explains. 'Some models suggest that up to a quarter of the Sahara could become green, and recent rainfall trends at the desert's southern fringe are consistent with these projections.

However, it's still rather early to celebrate the re-greening of the Sahara. This time around, we don't really have any precise past analogues, so we're entering unfamiliar territory.'

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New research provides further evidence of how Libya's ancient Garamantes people were pioneers of civilizations across the Sahara

Libya, November 24, 2010

Major research has recently been published providing additional evidence of how Libya's ancient Garamantes people were pioneers of civilisation across the Sahara - responsible for the spread of innovative ideas and technologies throughout the region and for a massive expansion in trade and cultural relations between North Africa, the Mediterranean and Sub-Saharan Africa.

In a series of lectures at the newly-refurbished Museum of Libya in Al-Dahra, Tripoli, Professor David Mattingly of Britain's Leicester University described how the Garamantes - who existed in Libya's Fezzan region between 1000 BC and 1000 AD - may represent the first flourishing of a highly sophisticated civilisation in the Sahara, existing independently of the influence of Mediterranean contacts.

The lectures - hosted by Dr. Salah Agab, Chairman of the Department of Antiquities with support from BP Exploration Libya Limited - were based on the third volume of the "Archaeology of the Fazzan" series, a new book recently published by the Department of Antiquities and British Society for Libyan Studies.

This publication (and earlier volumes in the series) presents archaeological research undertaken under the stewardship of the Department of Antiquities and directed by the late Charles Daniels of Britain's Newcastle University and Professor Mattingly. The research began in 1958 and is ongoing.

"Inhabiting a region that had already for several thousand years been an arid desert environment - with negligible rainfall, high summer temperatures and blistering expanses of barren sand and rock - the Garamantes have long been an enigma," explained Professor Mattingly.

"They were depicted by the Romans as ungovernable nomadic barbarians, who raided the agricultural zone and cities along the Mediterranean coast."

"But with over 500 Garamantian sites now recorded - many which are being dated for the first time - a reappraisal of the Garamantes story can now be made on the basis of concrete evidence. The picture that emerges is of a powerful Saharan kingdom, employing a wide range of material culture and architectural styles to reinforce a pronounced social hierarchy. In short, the Garamantes were the first significant state in the central Sahara." The lecture series and publication of the new research is a major contribution to Libyan and global academic knowledge of Libya's ancient history, explained Dr. Agab.

"The research presented will allow people to look at Libya's rich history in a very different way and appreciate that our own history of civilization greatly pre-dates the more popularly known Greek and Roman periods."

"But with this greater understanding of the sophistication of our ancestors, it is incumbent on all of us that as we celebrate the great advances our country is making through the major national infrastructure programme underway, we as Libyans continue to recognise, cherish and protect our ancient history."

Mr. Hugh McDowell, President and General Manager of BP Exploration Libya Limited, commented how proud BP is to be supporting these lectures and publication of the new research.

"Our support for this research is recognition of the great respect BP holds for the identity, traditions and cultural heritage of Libya's desert communities - including those communities within our Ghadames exploration area," commented Mr. McDowell.

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Origin & Etymology of Garama:

It is far from sure to ascertain the etymology of the name Garama or Garamantes, but we do have a few suggestions to explore. As it is often the case, the Greeks preserved a considerable amount of Libyan history in their borrowed mythology, which Roberts Graves (in his Greek Myths) rightly compares to corrupted political cartoons; and therefore one can wade through its chapters in search of forgotten clues. The Greeks knew of the Garamantes' ancestor Garamas as 'the first of men', which is a reference to the antiquity of this legendary people. According to the Greek Olympian creation myth the Earth's first children of semi-human form were the hundred-handed giants Briareus, Gyges and Cottus, but according to Robert Graves the Libyans claim that Garamas was born before the Hundred-handed Ones. Robert Graves further relates that the name Garamantes is derived from the words gara, man, and te, meaning 'Gara's state people'; where Gara is the Goddess Ker or Q're who went on to become the Italian divinatory goddess Carmenta ('Car the Wise').　He also points out that the Garamantian settlement of Amon was joined with the Northern Greek settlement of Dodona in a religious league which, according to Sir Flinders Petrie, may have originated as early as the third millennium BC. The Garamantes connection with Amon is further indicated by the Nasamones, whose ancestor Nasamon himself descended from the legendary Garamas, the ancestor of the Garamantes, who appeared in mythology as the Son of the Sun and who offered Mother Earth a sacrifice of the sweet acorn. This rather obscure history was the source of confusion and hasty conclusions in relation to the origin of the Garaments. For example, Dr. M. S. Ayoub (Fezzan, p.19), in quoting Apolionius of Rhodes, relates a Greek legend which refers to Garama as the grandson of the Cretan King Minos, who was born on the shores of Lake Tritonis in Libya, and concludes that the Garamantes had been living on the shores between present-day Zuwarah in Libya and Gabes in Tunisia [Fezzan, p.45], an area that includes the legendary Lake Tritonis, where Garamas was born, and where Libyan Poseidon allegedly ruled sunken Atlantis, in total agreement, Dr. Ayoub relates [p.45], with lbn Khaldun who stated that Germanah (Germa) was first settled by the Lauta tribe, who also inhabited the coastal regions of Tripolitania; and then he goes on to add that they fled the coastal region and immigrated to Fezzan as a result of the phoenicians arrival. In support of his mistaken supposition Dr. Ayoub says: "On the mountain of Zenkekra in Germa, people are drawn with plumes on their heads which resembles drawings in Egyptian texts showing the maritime peoples." There is no doubt that the plume is a Libyan feature generally agreed on by most scholars and in fact the Egyptians themselves always represented Libyan gods and goddesses with plumes, as in the case of Libyan Amen and Libyan Ament and Libyan Shu. Moreover there are a number of scholars, as we shall see, who argue to the contrary - in that the cretans themselves were a Libyan colony. It has been already stated by a number of scholars that a Libyan settlement was expelled from their homes in the now called Egyptian Delta during the forced unification of Egypt, by Menes or Menas, and subsequently left for Crete between 4000 and 3000 BC, long way before the Minoan or Cretan civilisation was created. The same view was maintained by Robert Graves; by Elinor W. Gadon (The Once & Future Goddess); by Sinclair Hood (The Heroes The Aegean before the Greeks); by Sir Arthur Evans (1901), the discoverer of the Cretan civilisation itself; and by Professor Flinders Petrie who pointed out the similarity of certain Cretan characters to the prehistoric Libyan and Egyptian early forms of writing was not the work of coincidence. Therefore rather than jumping onto the Garamantian wagon and assuming the recent immigrant nature of the Garamantes, like others had done with the Temehu tribes of ancient Libya, what needs to be investigated here is the common origin of all these peoples and the source of their civilisations, which others, based on modern genetic and linguistic results, had conclusively related to the Sahara when it was not a desert but a fertile jungle teaming with life forms and civilisations the world had practically forgotten. [...]

Starbuck

Jun 1 2011, 09:17:53 AM

A curious, perhaps even dubious, find, but I am wondering about that bolded parts