Lost Civilization Discovered in Sahara Desert

Fox News ^ | November 08, 2011 | LiveScience

[Pan_Yan]

New evidence of a lost civilization in an area of the Sahara in Libya has emerged from images taken by satellites.

Using satellites and air photographs to identify the remains in one of the most inhospitable parts of the desert, a team from the University of Leicester in England has discovered more than 100 fortified farms and villages with castle-like structures and several towns, most dating between AD 1 to 500.

"It is like someone coming to England and suddenly discovering all the medieval castles. These settlements had been unremarked and unrecorded under the Gadhafi regime," said project leader David Mattingly, professor of Roman archaeology at the university. The fall of the regime has opened up Libya to more exploration by archaeologists of its pre-Islamic heritage.

These "lost cities" were built by a little-known ancient civilization called the Garamantes, whose lifestyle and culture was far more advanced and historically significant than ancient sources had suggested.

[Ditter]

Interesting, thanks. Wonder what are the black spots on the second picture?

[Pan_Yan]

I think that's the vegetation. The drawing is overlapped on a satellite photo.

[Verginius Rufus]

The word for "German" (person or language) is similar in the other Slavic languages.

The Polish word for Italian (language) is something like wloski (there's a slanted line through the L), and the Polish term for Italy is Wlochy. This is related to words like Wallachia and Walloon and Vlach, and maybe to Wales/Welsh...ultimately derived from the term the German tribes outside the Empire had for the people who were subjects of the Romans. The Poles must have picked the term up from the Germans at some point and applied it to Italy.

[SunkenCiv]

• Fall of Gaddafi opens a new era for the Sahara's lost civilisation [ Garamantes ]

  11/06/2011 4:30:31 PM PST · by SunkenCiv · 8 replies

  Guardian UK ^ | Saturday, November 5, 2011 | Peter Beaumont

  researchers into the Garamantes -- a "lost" Saharan civilisation that flourished long before the Islamic era -- are hoping that Libya's new government can restore the warrior culture, mentioned by Herodotus in his Histories, to its rightful place in Libya's history. For while the impressive Roman ruins at Sabratha and Leptis Magna -- both world heritage sites -- are rightly famous, Libya's other cultural heritage, one that coexisted with its Roman settlers, has been largely forgotten. It has been prompted by new research -- including through the use of satellite imaging -- which suggests that the Garamantes built more extensively...

• Lost Cities of the Sahara

  12/26/2010 9:06:39 PM PST · by SunkenCiv · 53 replies

  University of Leicester ^ | July 26, 2000 | Barbara Whiteman

  ...the Garamantes - a mysterious desert people of Greco-Roman date (broadly 500 BC AD 500)... Inhabiting a region that had already been for several thousand years a hyper-arid desert environment, with negligible rainfall, elevated summer temperatures and blistering expanses of barren sand and rock... have long been an enigma. They were depicted by Roman sources as ungovernable nomadic barbarians, who raided the settled agricultural zone and cities of the Mediterranean littoral. Following up earlier work by Daniels, the current project allows a different picture of the Garamantes to be drawn. Archaeological evidence shows them to have been a complex and...

[SunkenCiv]

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[Cronos]

That's true about the origins of Włochy (włoski is the adjective :)

[GraceG]

So they found it, any survivors?

Joking,.

[chit*chat]

For God’s sake, keep it under raps until we eliminate all the fanatics who want to distroy history because the ruins represent past idol worship.

[Yardstick]

Good grief, has it really been four years since Gary the snail? Seems like only yesterday...

[TheOldLady]

I still have all the HTML and images if I ever want to resurrect Gary and his brood.

Perhaps the next FReepathon will need Gary’s plucky story told again.