A painting, thought to show a Garamantes war chariot, found in southern Algeria. Photograph: Robert Estall/Alamy
Posted on 11/06/2011 4:30:31 PM PST by SunkenCiv
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 and spread their culture more widely than previously thought.
The research has confirmed the view of Herodotus... that the Garmantes were a "very great nation".
Inhabiting an area around the busiest of the ancient trans-Saharan crossroads, the Garamantes were settled around three parallel areas of oases known today as the Wadi al-Ajal, the Wadi ash-Shati and the Zuwila-Murzuq-Burjuj depression with its capital at Jarmah.
They were tenacious builders of underground tunnels like Gaddafi. But while Gaddafi dug down to build huge complex bunkers, the Garamantes mined fossil water with which to irrigate their crops.
The Garamantes relied heavily on labour from sub-Saharan Africa, in the shape of slaves, to underpin their civilisation. Indeed, it is believed that they traded slaves as a commodity in exchange for the luxury goods that they imported in return.
Describing the recent finds as "extraordinary" in a paper co-authored for the journal Libyan Studies, Professor David Mattingly of the University of Leicester argues that the discoveries demonstrate that substantial trade across the Sahara long pre-dated the Islamic era.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
A painting, thought to show a Garamantes war chariot, found in southern Algeria. Photograph: Robert Estall/Alamy
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Thanks Renfield, another great update. |
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Shows what I know: I thought Garamantes was an Italian wine.
"peak water" ("peak oil"?) Interesting civilization (never heard of them). The hypothesis of their demise...I dunno. Thanks for posting, SunkenCiv.
History/education BUMP!
GREED OVER LIBYAN SECRET TREASURE: BLUE GOLD excerpt: Gaddafi and the Neighborly issues.
Mubarak spoke at the 1996 Great Man-Made River Inaugural ceremony and stressed the regional importance of the project. Gaddafi called on Egyptian farmers to come and work in Libya, where there are only 4 million inhabitants at the time. Egypt’s population of 55 million is crowded in narrow bands along the Nile River and delta region.
In the 1970s, Qaddafi expelled many Egyptian families from Libya, but over the recent years the two countries have become close once again. There were plans to build a railway line to facilitate the two nations travel back and forth. There was also a standing commission plans between Sudan and Libya for integrating economic activity.
But even with that 1,800 miles of giant hydrological enterprise in operation, Libya still depends on foreign markets for three-quarters of its grain. To make his desert nation self-sufficient in food, Gaddafi made some long-term deals with nearby countries to grow food for Libya.
The Western African state of Mali has become dependent on Libya for aid and investment, funding its government buildings, hotels, and other high-profile infrastructure. Thus, a secret deal was struck between Mali’s president, Amadou Toumani Toure, and Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi became the solution to enhance Libyan food security by receiving 50 years worth of undisclosed rights, paid by the Libya Africa Portfolio Fund for Investment. Libyan-controlled organization called Malibya oversees the Libyan enterprise: A canal stretching 25 miles north from the River Niger to 250,000 acres of proposed irrigated land at the edge of the marshes, to divert large amounts of Niger River water for extensive irrigation upstream. It was dug in 2010 by Chinese contractors, who are now preparing the first 15,000 acres of fields.
The scale of the project is astounding. The director general of Malibya, Abdalilah Youssef, boasted in 2008 that the canal could supply up to 4 cubic kilometers of water a year to the enterprise’s fields of rice, tomatoes, and fodder crops for cattle. The current take for all other existing irrigation projects is 2.7 cubic kilometers a year, it grabs as much as 210 cubic meters a second, potentially more than doubling the amount of water taken from the river for irrigation.
Larger than Belgium, it is Africa’s second-largest floodplain and one of its most unique wetlands. Seen from space, it is an immense smudge of green and blue on the edge of the Sahara.
The Great Man-Made River of Libya.
The world’s biggest effort to reclaim deposits of fossil water is the Great Man-Made River in Libya, for which Gaddafi has spent $30 billion over the past three decades building for his people and given as a gift to the Third World without any financial or help from the USA, World Bank or IMF.
Fascinating! Thanks for posting.
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...
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15 hundred years ago...sounds like islam came.
...The most famous of the Berber groups in Fezzan may be the Garamantes, who formed a vital link between Roman civilisation and sub-Saharan Africa. It is believed the Garamantes had lived in the region for thousands of years dating back to when the Sahara still had rivers and lakes, and hosted large mammals such as elephants and hippopotamuses, as evidenced by rock art dating back 7 000 years. These same paintings also show war being waged on enemies using Egyptian-style chariots. Known definitively as Garamantes by 1000 BC, by the 5th century BC a Garamantian Empire had arisen in Fezzan, one that would last until about 700 AD. A culture of farmers and merchants that employed slave labour and created its own alphabet, the Garamantes controlled trade between the Greek and Romans in North Africa with the various empires of the Sahel. As the Sahara continued to dry over the years, the Garamantes constructed an elaborate thousand-mile network of wells, pipes and underground canals to water their crops and feed their cities (eight major planned cities have been identified; three of these have been studied). This agricultural boom led to the rise of the empire and a population explosion (approximately 100 000 people lived there at its height), which enabled the Garamantes to conquer neighbouring lands, raid Roman settlements, and acquire more slaves to fuel their economy. Over time, though, the empire depleted it water supplies to such an extent that it was no longer able to sustain itself, and declined between the 4th and 7th centuries, fragmenting back into semi-nomadism and fading so far into myth that most locals believe the Romans, not the Garamantes, constructed the massive irrigation infrastructure. Losing the Romans as a trading partner once that empire collapsed didn’t help, either.
That’s a surprise, I also was under the impression the irrigation throughout the region was the result of the work of the Roman Legion.
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