The Garamantes

Misha Glenny and guests discuss an ancient civilisation who lived over 2000 years ago in the southwest of modern-day Libya. During prehistoric times, the Sahara Desert was greener and even had large lakes, but for the last 5000 years it has been a hyperarid environment. Extreme swings of temperature and limited surface water might make the Sahara seem like an inhospitable place to live, but an ancient people in North Africa known to us as the Garamantes thrived there. Following descriptions of the Garamantes in Roman and Greek texts, the Garamantes have often been seen as pastoral nomads, or as tribal barbarians on the periphery of the Mediterranean world. But the work of archaeologists in recent decades has revealed something different. Evidence suggests a society with flourishing towns and cities, complex underground irrigation systems, a key role in trade routes across the Sahara – and may give us a broader view of ancient history. With David Mattingly Emeritus Professor of Roman Archaeology at the University of Leicester Farès Moussa Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton and Cultural Heritage Consultant And Josephine Quinn Professor of Ancient History and Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge Producer: Martha Owen Reading list: C. M. Daniels, The Garamantes of Southern Libya (Oleander Press, 1970) C. Duckworth, A. Cuénod and D. J. Mattingly (eds), Mobile Technologies in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond (Trans-Saharan Archaeology Volume 4, Cambridge University Press, 2020) M. C. Gatto, D. J. Mattingly, N. Ray and M. Sterry (eds), Burials, Migration and Identity in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond (Trans-Saharan Archaeology Volume 2, Cambridge University Press, 2019) R. B. Hitchner (ed.), A Companion to North Africa in Antiquity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), especially ‘Beyond barbarians: the Garamantes of the Libyan Sahara’ by D. J. Mattingly D. J. Mattingly, Between Sahara and Sea: Africa in the Roman Empire (Michigan University Press, 2023) D. J. Mattingly (ed.), The Archaeology of Fazzan, Volume 1, Synthesis (Society for Libyan Studies, 2003) D. J. Mattingly (ed.), The Archaeology of Fazzan, Volume 2, Site Gazetteer, Pottery and other Survey Finds (Society for Libyan Studies, 2007) D. J. Mattingly (ed.), The Archaeology of Fazzan, Volume 3, Excavations Carried out by C. M. Daniels (Society for Libyan Studies, 2010) D. J. Mattingly (ed.), The Archaeology of Fazzan, Volume 4, Survey and Excavations at Old Jarma (Ancient Garama) Carried out by C. M. Daniels (1962–69) and the Fazzan Project (1997–2001) (Society for Libyan Studies, 2013) D. J. Mattingly, V. Leitch, C. N. Duckworth, A. Cuénod, M. Sterry and F. Cole (eds), Trade in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond (Trans-Saharan Archaeology Volume 1, Cambridge University Press, 2017) D. Mattingly, S. McLaren, E. Savage, Y. Fasatwi and K. Gadgood (eds), The Libyan Desert: Natural Resources and Cultural Heritage (Society for Libyan Studies, 2006), especially ‘The Garamantes: The First Libyan state’ by D. Mattingly P. Mitchell and P. Lane (eds), The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology (Oxford University Press, 2013), especially ‘Roman Africa and the Sahara’ by A. Leone and F. Moussa M. Sterry and D. J. Mattingly (eds), State Formation and Urbanisation in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2020) Some of these books are available for free from Open Access Books: British Institute for Libyan & Northern African Studies In Our Time is a BBC Studios production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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  This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. The Sahara Desert might not seem like the most hospitable place to live, with extreme swings of temperature and limited water on the surface. Though around 2,000 years ago, an ancient people were thriving there, known to us as the Garamantes. The Garamantes are mentioned by Roman and Greek authors. Since then, they've often been seen as little more than tribal barbarians on the periphery

• 2:24Speaker 05

  of the Mediterranean world. But in recent decades, archaeology has revealed something rather different. A society with flourishing towns and cities, complex underground irrigation systems, and a key role in trade routes across the Sahara. Well, with me to discuss the Garamantes are David Mattingly, Emeritus Professor of Roman Archaeology at the University of Leicester, Faris Moussa, Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton and Cultural Heritage Consultant, and Josephine Quinn, Professor of Ancient History and Fellow of St John's College at the University of Cambridge. Welcome to all of you. But Josephine, I'd like to come to you first.

• 3:07Speaker 05

  Can you situate the Garamantes for us? When are we talking about and where exactly?

• 3:14Speaker 06

  So, yes, as you say, about 2,000 years ago, more specifically from about 1,000 B.C. to about 600 or so C.E., so over a long period of time, we're looking at a very large area across the Sahara from what's now southern Libya across to southern Algeria. And we're looking at this network of oasis settlements. And the people who live there have learned to farm the desert. They are also traders who've made a kind of crossroads of the Sahara between north and south, east and west.

• 3:58Speaker 06

  But this is a very complex society. So these are people who have cities and temples, they forge metals, they make glass, they have monumental tombs for their dead. And we're talking about a really vast scale here as well. So there are hundreds of sites that we should at least call, say, village-sized in modern terms. Some of them are a lot larger than that. And there are hundreds of thousands of tombs.

• 4:31Speaker 05

  So why are they called the Garamantes and is that what they call themselves?

• 4:36Speaker 06

  That's a good question. So the meaning of the word seems to change over time. So all of our testimonies of this word are external. You start off with Greek authors who seem to use the word to refer to a single oasis, a single, large, powerful oasis. Later you get Roman authors who explain that by their period at least, there's a Garamantian kingdom based in a sort of capital oasis of Garama. But then other authors just sort of use the word in a fairly general way to talk about the peoples of the central Sahara in their era.

• 5:16Speaker 06

  And that's really how it's also used in a lot of modern scholarship. But the truth of the matter is that we don't know what any of these people called themselves. We don't know how big that Garamantian kingdom was or how much that changed over time. And we don't know whether the people who seem to us to be living in similar kinds of places, in similar kinds of ways, over this really vast area, actually considered themselves a single people on any level.

• 5:50Speaker 05

  But fundamentally, the name derives from Garama, the settlement, the town.

• 5:55Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 5:56Speaker 05

  Faris Moussa, let me go on to you. The Sahara, obviously, a pretty hostile environment. How did the Garamantes end up living there?

• 6:06Speaker 07

  Yes, good question. And I think we probably need to rewind about 12,000 years to get a bit of context. Don't worry, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna go through it step by step. But so we need to go to the end of the last Ice Age. Okay. At that point, what seems to happen is that the Sahara Desert becomes this very, very fertile savanna-like environment. So you have to imagine lots of flora and fauna, and it's very abundant with springs and rivers and lakes. A very abundant place where people also gathered.

• 6:41Speaker 07

  Following the flora and the fauna. From about six thousand five hundred years ago, you start to get this aridification, a gradual process, which brings us to about three thousand years ago, when it brings us more or less to the kind of, almost, the level of hyperaridity that we now know in the Sahara Desert. And so during that process, during that time, people shrink from the various zones of the Sahara into those sorts of pockets, which still remain relatively humid, like the Fesan area or the Wadi Al Jal, as we call it, this area where the Garamantes ended up. Kind of a broad, sort of dried out riverbed. To the north of that, you have a large sand sea, and to the south of that, you have this

• 7:26Speaker 07

  high escarpment, sandstone escarpment, which rises quickly about three hundred metres. So i- it's a kind of a process of, if you like, refugia, or people getting condensed into niches throughout the Sahara region. And the Garamantes end up in this particular zone, about two hundred kilometres in length, east to west.

• 7:48Speaker 05

  So you and David Mattingly have, you've both done a lot of archaeological work on the Garamantes. Can you tell us what type of work that is and, and what sort of evidence you are turning up?

• 8:00Speaker 07

  Well, as you can imagine, doing archaeology in such a hostile environment, even today, is, presents its own challenges. Once we're there, we normally have an idea about areas we want to target, and after having done some, um, remote sensing, using satellite images or whatever, about areas we want to target, we will normally do surveys on the ground. And that, it's a pretty basic and straightforward activity insofar as that you're essentially walking through specified zones that you want to target, and you're looking for stuff, right? So whether you're looking for, uh, rock art along the base of this escarpment I described

• 8:42Speaker 07

  to you, or whether you're looking for burials, or whether you're looking for irrigation systems, you first have to walk, literally walk through and do systematic records. Because there is so much of it, you stop every, every few minutes to record something and then you make a systematic record. You take photographs, you make drawings, you take GPS coordinates. So that's one level. If you want to go in a bit more detail, for example, if you want to go in and have a look at a burial and the contents of the burial, then you'll conduct systematic excavations. And you asked, what did we find? Lots of stuff and, and of course, um, different levels of preservation. A lot of burials were, um,

• 9:25Speaker 07

  looted in antiquity. So soon after the burials were made, somebody has come along and taken stuff out of them. So obviously they knew there were valuables in there. So they beat us to it essentially. But, um, depending on the level of preservation, we find, um, of, obviously skeletal remains, in some cases desiccated bodies, so bodies which were quite well preserved, ceramics, cloth, leather. We've even found in, in the most recent excavations, we found a, a bronze bell. We found some fragments of gold leaf.

• 9:59Speaker 05

  So really very sophisticated society this, this reveals. David Mattingly, they're living in the Sahara Desert. Can you tell us a bit more about what kind of settlements have been found there? And, and indeed, how many? How extensive was this community?

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Well, we've heard that there were hundreds of thousands of Garamantian burials known, but up to the 1990s, there were very few settlement sites that had been identified. Uh, and in a way, this played into the, the older view that the Garamantes must be nomadic because we had all these burials and nowhere for them to live. Well, subsequently, the survey work that we and, and others have done, there was a, an earlier British archaeologist called Charles Daniels, who did some pioneering work. We've now started to identify, uh, in, in vast numbers, the settlement sites that go with those, uh, cemetery's. Uh, in the early Garamantian period, that's round about a thousand BCE, they're living in effectively.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  What are hillforts, fortified sites up on the escarpment that marks the southern edge of the valley? From about four hundred BCE, they seem to move down en masse into the plain, the centre of this valley where the oasis grows, and there they're living in open village settlements, which they constructed in mud brick.

• 11:23Speaker 05

  But the houses there, they're multi-roomed, rectilinear, quite complex architecture. At Garama, the Garamantian capital, we get some even more sophisticated aspects, including stone architecture for some monumental buildings. And then, from about three hundred CE, we see increasingly the introduction of defensive architecture at their settlement sites, with the appearance of castle-like buildings with projecting towers on their outer walls. So, a very different sort of picture emerged about the nature of Garamantian society, and from the beginning, it's clearly tied to the oasis cultivation.

• 12:07Speaker 05

  Before we get into the details of Garamantian society, let's try and understand what the Greeks and Romans, who I believe are first sources about the Garamantes, what do the Greeks and Romans say about them? Well, I think it's important to understand the sort of conventions in which Greek and Roman sources wrote about peoples on the periphery, or beyond the periphery of the Mediterranean world. And I have an idea, which I call progressive barbarisation, and that is, you know, that Mediterranean peoples, Greek and Roman, took a very Mediterranean-centric view of the

• 12:48Speaker 05

  world, in which everything about the Mediterranean was civilised, and everything that lay beyond was very primitive, and it's a deliberately schematic way of looking at the world. So, Greek and Roman sources, when they write about these neighbouring peoples, they're not writing in an anthropological or ethnographic way, they're, as much as anything, bringing out these sort of stereotypes that...

• 13:15Speaker 05

  Are designed to demonstrate the primitiveness and otherness of of these outlined peoples. So just to give you an example, peoples that lived close to the Mediterranean, both in North Africa and in Europe, you know, they're generally recognised as being agricultural, urban living, state level organisation of society. Societies with complex rules and conducts of behaviour that mark out their civility. But if you move out of that Mediterranean zone, they're pastoral or nomadic. They're living in huts and tents. Even further out than that, then you find people whose lifestyle is essentially a hunter gatherer lifestyle. They're, you know, they speak unintelligible languages.

• 13:59Speaker 05

  They're living and sleeping in the open or in caves. And then even beyond that, we get into, you know, an imagined world. A sort of mythical. A mythical world where there are people with no heads and eyes on their chests. And interestingly, those are still appearing on early modern maps of Africa, echoing the this sort of schematic view. Joe, let me take that on with you about the Garamantes themselves. Are they seen as barbarians or how are they depicted?

• 14:31Speaker 06

  What's so interesting, so picking up from what David's saying about progressive barbarisation. What you see with the Garamantes is not only quite a bit of this idea that the further away people are, the stranger they are. You also get a progressive barbarisation or primitivisation over time. So the very first references to the Garamantes are in the fifth century B C E. So in the era of the Persian Wars, classical Athens, that kind of thing. And a historian called Herodotus, who's writing in Greek in this period, describes a trade route across the Sahara from the Nile to the Niger. And he talks about the different peoples who who live in oases every 10 days.

• 15:15Speaker 06

  So basically the caravan stops on this oasis route.

• 15:19Speaker 05

  Is this in his book, The Histories?

• 15:20Speaker 06

  Exactly, in his book, The Histories, yes. And he picks out the Oasis of Garam. The Garamantes, he says they are a great and mighty people. He says that they farm, which obviously it's very difficult to farm, you know, often even an oasis, but he says they do it by layering earth on top of the salty grounds, because it's very kind of salty water that. And he also says that they herd animals, but they herd these, not just kind of normal animals, they herd these very special cows who have horns that are so long that the cows have to walk backwards. And I think this is sometimes seen as being kind of a very primitive idea and so on, but actually I think it's not, these are very fancy cows.

• 16:03Speaker 06

  These are cows so cool that, that, that they have to look after them specially.

• 16:07Speaker 05

  But that's also sort of drifting into the mythologisation that David was referring to.

• 16:12Speaker 06

  Exactly, exactly. But then what happens is that, so you get this picture in Herodotus of quite a sophisticated people who are farming, who are herding, who are also quite high up in the local hierarchy, because he also says that they are hunting the Ethiopians, the cave dwelling Ethiopians, he says. And these Garamantes are hunting with chariots, they've got horses and chariots, they're hunting the Ethiopians to enslave them essentially. So you've got this kind of strange picture, but other people who are quite complex and quite high up, and who are also involved in trade. And then by the Roman period, so 500 years later, the Roman Empire, and this is a period

• 16:53Speaker 06

  when there is regular trade in contact between Rome and the Garamantes, there are Roman generals go down there, they even go on expeditions with the king of the Garamantes. This is really quite a well-known place to real-life Romans. What you get in the descriptive sources of the Garamantes are two things. Either people just copy what Herodotus had said 500 years earlier, when no one had gone there, it's basically literally copy it out word for word, or you get sources that make them even stranger, that say, you know, they live in tents, they only hunt. Even the very sober Roman historian Tacitus calls them wild.

• 17:35Speaker 06

  But I mean, this is in a period when plenty of people that Tacitus is writing about in Rome have been to Garamata, had seen the city, had seen the stone temples.

• 17:44Speaker 05

  And they're trading all the time with them.

• 17:45Speaker 06

  They're trading all the time. So it's the most peculiar, yeah, progressive barbarisation in time as well as space.

• 17:51Speaker 05

  Ferris, can you tell us about the Garamantes's religious beliefs? What do we know about that?

• 17:58Speaker 07

  I mean, the most frequent motif, I suppose, which occurs in the text is reference to an association of the Garamantes's with a god called Ammon. Most people will be aware of in relation to Egyptian Ammon, who then becomes Ammon Ra and Ammon Min in later forms. And Ammon is perceived as this invisible god who protects people in their travels. One of the attributes of the Ammon god is the ram's horns. He manifests in the wind. So you can sort of see if indeed Ammon is associated with the Garamantes's,

• 18:39Speaker 07

  how it could fit in with that world of the Sahara Desert, where they are indeed moving around a lot. And so they need protection presumably in their travels in such a hostile environment. In terms of how the archaeology backs that up, it's very little.

• 18:57Speaker 07

  A very, you know.

• 18:58Speaker 05

  Any temples?

• 18:59Speaker 07

  There was a temple-type structure which was excavated early on in the centre of Garamata. And a bronze mask or head of Selinus was discovered. Now, there's a sort of a tenuous connection there with Dionysus, because of course in Greece, Ammon became associated with Zeus and Dionysus. So there is a very, again, very tenuous link. But we do, of course, have burials, which is, of course, one of the best ways that we can understand something about their ideas and beliefs. And there's been a lot of survey and excavation of those cemeteries and burials.

• 19:38Speaker 07

  You have many different types of burial. You have mud-brick-built small pyramid structures, you have.

• 19:45Speaker 07

  Corbeled cairns and they are organised in discreet cemeteries, normally at the base of the escarpment. They are adorned with funerary furniture, so they have stelae, which are carved in a kind of a four finger sort of motif. They have offering tables, you know, with, if you can imagine your airplane food tray and all the slots in it, it's a little bit like that, the the funerary table. And the evidence or possible animal remains that have been deposited in those. Inside the burials, we have crouch burials, so the deceased have been laid on their side in the fetal position.

• 20:27Speaker 07

  They're normally wrapped in in cloth and we we found in recently in some cases in leather. Doused in some cases in this really dark red ochre, completely doused in red ochre. Um, which is fascinating is what is that? Is that about fertility? Is that about life, the the colour of blood and life? So continuity in the afterlife, there's all sorts of ideas that you can extrapolate from that.

• 20:55Speaker 06

  And just to say, you get a lot of that in in further north in Africa as well, which is really interesting. So it's suggesting there's sort of some kind of shared beliefs or ideas about death. So in Tunisia, Algeria, in further north in Algeria, the same kind of red ochre.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, Herodotus mentions ancestor worship in relation to Saharan peoples. And, you know, I think when Pharaoh is describing these burials with these offering structures outside them, it does emphasise how important the dead are to the living. There is an element of daily interaction or regular interaction between living connections and the ancestors, the ancestors sort of there in the guise of minor gods, really.

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• 24:48Speaker 05

  I wanted to carry on, David, with something which is more specifically associated with the Garamantes, which is the Garamantes as oasis cultivators. What does oasis cultivators actually mean in practice? So, our best evidence for this comes from the botanical analyses that we've done on samples from our various excavations. And we can say pretty conclusively that agriculture arise with our first sense of Garamantian settlements around about 1,000 BCE. And there's an established package, which is the date palm, it's wheat and barley, the grapevine and the fig tree.

• 25:29Speaker 05

  That's what they start growing, and it's clearly come from somewhere, probably originating from the oases that are first emerge in the Western Egyptian desert. And that package of crops gradually gets passed along as oases get established out into the central Saharan region. Around about 400 B.C., we get some interesting changes, though. There are three additional crops appear: cotton, sorghum, and pearl millet. Now, those are sub-Saharan crops, so some additional crops are being brought in from a different direction. But something like cotton, if I remember rightly, uses a lot of water. So, how are they growing cotton in the Sahara? Well, exactly.

• 26:12Speaker 05

  Water is the key for any oasis cultivation. In the initial stages, the Garamantes are perhaps using one or two relic spring lines, still active from that wet phase, but gradually drying out.

• 26:28Speaker 07

  Probably in the course of the first millennium B C E, but around four hundred C E, exactly at the same time that those subsaharan crops arrive. We've got a dated adoption of a new irrigation technology, and this is the fogra. Now, the fogra.

• 26:44Speaker 05

  Can you tell us about the fogra?

• 26:46Speaker 07

  Uh, the fogra is the North African version of a technology that we also know in Iran and in Arabia, where it's known as the Kanat or the Falaj. Uh, and this is a, an underground irrigation channel that leads running water out to the area of, of gardens in the centre of the valley.

• 27:09Speaker 05

  So, hold it, let me just get this straight about how this is constructed. You have a sort of central well.

• 27:14Speaker 07

  Well, there's a mother well at the distant end of these underground canals, and these may be forty metres deep. And they're dug generally into the, the foot of the escarpment at the southern end of the valley. So you dig down till you hit water, and as long as that water is at a level above the level of your gardens in the centre of the valley, then you can construct a fogra using that water. And so you dig a series, a long series of shafts. They're spaced only every, every five or ten metres, so it's an awful lot of shafts that you have to dig. But gradually getting nearer to the surface until the water actually emerges at the surface, because you connect the shafts at the bottom with short tunneled sections. It's obviously a lot easier to tunnel if you're

• 27:59Speaker 07

  only tunneling five metres to the, the bottom of the next shaft.

• 28:03Speaker 05

  Even so, Joe Quinn, that's, that sounds like an incredible amount of work. So the sheer scale of the fogra, how did they? How did they build it?

• 28:12Speaker 06

  It, it's, it's terrifying to think about. I mean, these shafts that David's been describing. Yeah, some of these are forty metres deep, they're very narrow, um, they are being dug down in in a world where, you know, the daytime temperatures can reach fifty five degrees. You know, there's less than a centimetre of rain a day, and there are thousands of these things, and each one of them has these access shafts every five or ten metres, as, as David says, so.

• 28:44Speaker 05

  Can I just jump in? We did an estimate of the labour needs to construct the fogusa systems that we know about in the Garamantian heartlands, and it's seventy two thousand man years. I mean, to put that another way, to put that another way, if you had a team of a hundred people doing nothing apart from all their lives apart constructing fogusa, it would take them seven hundred and twenty years to create that system. But this is, this is quite, I mean, they didn't have diggers, industrial diggers or anything like that. It's all done by hand.

• 29:18Speaker 06

  It's all done by, so one thing that I think it must mean is they have iron there because you can't dig this with, literally by hand or by stone. So they've already using some kind of iron. But this is all human labour, essentially. There is no way that people are going to volunteer to do this kind of work. That I can't imagine a king so powerful that he could require his subjects to do this for seven hundred and twenty man years.

• 29:46Speaker 05

  Seven hundred and twenty years.

• 29:48Speaker 06

  An extraordinary amount of time. And, and so what we, we must be looking at enslaved labour here, right? And we know that there are, or at least we were told by Greek sources that these Garamantes are slavers. It's an obvious trade for the salt that they're also producing with this water irrigation. So, so on the one hand, I think what we learn from this is that it's very likely that there's a significant use of enslaved labour in these OACs from further south.

• 30:19Speaker 05

  And you mentioned, you also mentioned earlier about the Ethiopians.

• 30:23Speaker 06

  Exactly. There's these stories about them hunting in chariots, these cave dwelling Ethiopians who Herodotus says, and this is another of this progressive barbarisation, these are people who are even further south than the Garamantes, and Herodotus says they squeak instead of speaking. So they're kind of in this mythical world. But he does, you know, there's a story there you also get, and this is, I think, extraordinary. There are cave art from these regions where the, the people would be hunting, and they show

• 30:54Speaker 06

  People with horses and chariots. So these are perhaps the victims showing these people who come after them. But there's also going to be certainly by the Roman period, a lot of slave trading as well as um just kind of catching uh uh other people. And so that's that's one major factor in what's going on here, what's happening with the Garamantese. Both using a lot of enslaved people, but also trading them perhaps to the Roman provinces.

• 31:19Speaker 05

  I want to come on to the trading, Ferris. Um from what we've heard so far, it sounds as though the Garamantites were very sophisticated traders. What do we know about their trade?

• 31:30Speaker 07

  So, you know, around the same time, so around one thousand B C that we start to see this formation of a Garamantian proto kind of state. You also get in the coast of North Africa, the arrival of Phoenician trading colonies. You get in eight one four B C, the foundation of Carthage. Now, as far as we can tell, they were traders and they were not expansionists or colonists per se. So they needed to be able to establish connections with other entities in the hinterland of of the coast to be able to move goods around. So in many ways, you can sort of see this picture of these traders on the coast

• 32:15Speaker 07

  wanting stuff that is in the central Sahara or even in sub Sahara in Africa that the Garamantese can provide. And it's not a kind of passive situation where the Carthaginians are coming to them and they're just acting as a middleman. They're clearly moving uh distances to to trade. You also have this incredible opportunity at the end of the Second Punic War when Carthage's influence in North Africa is diminished a lot.

• 32:50Speaker 05

  Remind me when the Second Punic War is?

• 32:52Speaker 07

  Yes, it was two, what, eight two oh two B C, between the Romans and the Carthaginians. And at the end of that, with Hannibal's infamous defeat at the Battle of Zama. You have this moment of about two hundred years where Carthage's influence is diminished. And at this time, you see this kind of explosion, if you like, of these various indigenous kingdoms, including others like the Numidians, presumably also the Garamantites, where they are filling this this this kind of void, if you like, this vacuum, and no doubt are doing so through trade.

• 33:32Speaker 05

  So David Mattingly, do we know what they were were trading? Was it just agricultural product or was it manufactured product as well?

• 33:40Speaker 02

  In traditional Trans-Saharan trading, the key commodities of trade have been gold, enslaved people and salt. And at one level, the Garamantites plug into that sort of network. Gold is being sourced in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in West Africa. Enslaved people obviously can be taken at various points within the Sahara, but from the Sub-Saharan lands lands as well. Onto that, of course, the Garamantites are producing Oasis products. Dates, for instance, have a market in in the Mediterranean world for sure. But, and I think this is this is the crucial thing about the Garamantites,

• 34:22Speaker 02

  because sometimes they've they've been perceived as rather passive middlemen in trade that's dominated from the Mediterranean end. But what we actually see from the archaeological evidence is that the Garamantites are quite discerning consumers. They have a penchant for Roman tableware and glassware, particularly really large, open forms of bowls which are incredibly fragile. So you can imagine how overjoyed the merchants are to have to carry those sort of goods on these Saharan trails. We've got lots and lots of amphorae that transport jars for wine and olive oil and fish sauce. I mean, what's interesting is we've got evidence of masses of that material being consumed in the Garamantian heartlands, but it barely moves south and southwest of the Garamantian heartlands.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  In other words, The Garamantes preferentially consume those Mediterranean goods in their own society. And, you know, we can estimate there are hundreds of thousands of amphory and hundreds of thousands of tableware vessels imported into the Garamante land. So this isn't a small scale trade. This is large scale trade. But the Garamantes are also manufacturing. They build up capacity for metalwork, producing little metal barring gots which are perfect for carrying on Saharan trade caravans. We know there are expert textile producers and garment producers and cotton is a very new crop in the Sahara, in the Mediterranean world at this time. That has to have a high

• 35:52Speaker 02

  value in trade. They're producing masses of beads in glass, in semi-precious stones, in ostrich eggshell. And again, beads historically have been currency in Saharan trade.

• 36:06Speaker 05

  Thank you very much, David. Joe, why does the city of Garama in particular become the centre of this trading operation? Do we know?

• 36:16Speaker 06

  Well, I think one of the things that's really interesting about looking at the growth of cities in general is that very often what seems to produce that kind of scale and density that we call cities in different periods is when lines of communication or trade cross through them. So I think what we're getting with the Garamantes that's so interesting is you have this early sort of trade route that's going from the Nile to the Niger, where there are all these oases along it. I would see those oasis settlements as a kind of secondary phenomenon. That's not necessarily passive, absolutely people

• 36:57Speaker 06

  who are coming to profit from the existence of a trade route. But the actual push factors are kind of coming from one end or the other or both. But when you get these north-south connections, so Faris has talked about potentially connections with the Carthaginians, we have

• 37:18Speaker 06

  Lots of evidence for connections north with Rome later on. And then there's this amazing thing where the cotton and so on is arriving from further south. So it's when you get this north-south routes that that cross that east-west route. That, I think, is when everything kind of entangles and knots up and becomes the city. So that's, I would say, where you get the city of Garama really becoming important and powerful. That may be the origins of the kingdom we later hear about. But it's also, it really turbocharges the trade in the Sahara, putting those two directions together.

• 37:54Speaker 05

  Ferris, what sort of relationship do the Garamantes have with other polities in North Africa?

• 38:00Speaker 07

  So among them, so for example, I mentioned earlier the Numidians, they do have a kingdom and they have a very clear lineage and that's been well attested. And so, yes, the relationship with them is is very interesting because I suppose the texts that we have suggest that, you know, the the Garamantes are not actually as far away from the coast as we think or know they are. We know that their heartland was that far away, what is now southwest Libya, central Sahara. But you get often references to, for example, King Massanisa, who was a king of the Numidians at one point.

• 38:39Speaker 06

  The Numidia is closer to, it's it's just sort of on the edge of the south of the Roman border in North Africa. So it's a kind of north of the Sahara.

• 38:49Speaker 07

  Exactly. And at some point he seeks refuge.

• 38:52Speaker 05

  Would that be modern-day Tunisia, or is it still?

• 38:55Speaker 06

  Tunisia, Algeria, yeah.

• 38:57Speaker 07

  Yeah. So he seeks refuge in the first century B.C. in an area within or close to the Garamantian territory. So if he if that's what he's doing, then he's you're not having to go too far to get into what is perceived as Garamantian territory. So what that suggests is that the Garamantes somehow have territories or have influence.

• 39:21Speaker 07

  North of their centre, quite far and quite near to the Mediterranean. But also, what's interesting about that is you don't, they don't feature in a lot of dramas, do they? You don't, you don't see a lot of texts kind of talking about them getting into big kind of conflicts with various entities, which is interesting in itself.

• 39:44Speaker 06

  Yet, there is one thing I can think of that might be relevant to this, which is that there are some revolts against Rome. In North Africa, there's a guy called Tacfarinas, who's a rebel, North African, who's rebelling against Rome in their provinces in North Africa, the Mediterranean provinces, across Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and so on. And just a couple of times, there are references to the king of the Garamantes helping these rebels, even coming up to the coast once, you're like going a really long way to the coast of Libya to help the rebels against the Romans. So there is again, that sort of sense that they're, that they're kind of just one remove from the kingdoms that are in very regular

• 40:29Speaker 06

  political and military kind of contact and conflict with Rome.

• 40:32Speaker 07

  But nonetheless, with a military capacity of sorts, as far as we understand.

• 40:36Speaker 06

  Some kind of military capacity.

• 40:37Speaker 07

  David Mattingly, this community, this kingdom, this people, lived for a very long time, as far as we can see. When and why did they start to decline as a civilisation?

• 40:52Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's no surprise that a long-established kingdom will eventually start to run out of steam. So perhaps, you know, almost the more important question is, how is it they endure so long? And I think, you know, the key to that is that they are clearly early adopters of Oasis agriculture, they are early adopters of the horse, which is a transformative technology in the Sahara in the first millennium BCE. And through those two things, they build a powerful society. And then through that, they establish control over far-flung regions and a monopolised monopoly position on, in this Saharan trade. That's a very powerful position, but of course, it's not going to

• 41:35Speaker 02

  go unchallenged. And firstly, you might think about challenges from inside.

• 41:40Speaker 07

  Garamantian society. So is that kingly power always, you know, unchallenged by other groups to rise in defensive architecture at Garamantian settlements in late times? That might suggest that actually that sort of competition within Garamantian society is growing. Another factor, those incredible fogrova systems that are so key to the success of the Garamantes, you know, it's like having a million taps turned on permanently on a non-manuible water table. So maybe the very success of the Garamantes through their irrigation systems is also part of their downfall.

• 42:18Speaker 05

  And they simply ran out of water.

• 42:19Speaker 07

  You start to reduce the level of the water table.

• 42:22Speaker 05

  Ferris, let me just ask you as we come to a close, the Garamantes, are they seen as the predecessors of a particular people? I mean, are they, are they part of a historical culture today? Does anyone hark back to the Garamantes?

• 42:39Speaker 07

  Well, that's interesting. I think you can quite safely say that there's a disconnect between those people that we're talking about in the past and people who live in the region now. But I think as we have started to learn a bit more about the Garamantes, people have started to obviously take an interest in that heritage specifically within that region. I think though what that kind of feeds into is a broader phenomenon, which I think that we are beginning to witness in, in North Africa. And this has all arisen with the ability

• 43:19Speaker 07

  to have genetic tests and to know your mitochondrial DNA kind of profile, which, which we haven't had in the past. And people now are beginning to realise, who live in North Africa, that they are not necessarily Arab genetically, right? In, in the way that people in, in the Arabia region might be identified. And so that's for some people, and it's certainly a phenomenon with, among some young people in countries like Tunisia and Algeria, there was a revision about.

• 43:50Speaker 07

  What their identity is, and there's a much more of a reversion, or if you like, an adoption of an identity which is more indigenous. And so people are now actively looking for those connections. And, you know, there are various tribal entities throughout the ancient, you know, North Africa, and the Garamantes are one of those. And I suspect that they are going to become more and more relevant as this phenomenon that's kind of fermenting is going to grow.

• 44:24Speaker 05

  Quick fire round at the end. How do the Garamantes, and I want you to keep this snappy. How do the Garamantes change our understanding of this period of history overall? Joe?

• 44:35Speaker 06

  Okay, so number one, it's not all about Rome. There are other places to talk about, not just Rome and China either. Number two, deserts are really interesting and deserts are experienced very differently by the people inside them who know how to get around, how to exploit them from the people outside who see them as terrifying and dangerous places, quite rightly. And three, that that trade and travel and exchange are a driving force in ancient history, and these, the connections extend much further than people normally realise.

• 45:14Speaker 05

  David, your take on how it's transformed our understanding of this period?

• 45:20Speaker 07

  Well, I think we are just at the beginning of proper knowledge about these people. Uh, you know, before thirty years ago, as we say, we had a very different view about the Garamantes. There are hundreds of other pre-Islamic Iron Age populations across North Africa and the Sahara who we know virtually nothing about in archaeological terms. And we desperately need, and I hope very much, that in the next generation, many archaeologists will emulate the sort of

• 45:48Speaker 05

  The work we've done on the Garamantes, on those other peoples. Ferris, final word?

• 45:53Speaker 07

  Yes, well, I think, you know, really we'd want to echo what Joe and David already said, but I think it is really important for scholarship and then how that impacts beyond scholarship in terms of our perceptions, which have been for a long time, perhaps quite Eurocentric, about the flow of influence and the flow of power and culture in ancient times up to the present day. And we start to realise when you start to uncover these civilizations that actually there's a lot going on around Europe and close to Europe, which is pretty powerful, pretty significant, and actually would have been very, very influential in the wider polity.

• 46:34Speaker 05

  My thanks to Ferris Moussa, David Mattingly and Josephine Quinn. Next week, do not doff your hat and do not kneel. We'll be discussing some of the radical politics that emerged during the English Civil War. That's the Levelers. Thank you for listening.

• 46:52Speaker 04

  And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.

• 46:59Speaker 05

  Great. So now the podcast extra. Before I ask, what did we miss out? Let me ask the question, how come none of us have ever heard of the Garamantes? I just, I'm astonished by this to see the depth of the work that you've done and the sophistication of this society. And we don't know about it. Why is that? I don't know. I've done my best.

• 47:31Speaker 05

  I don't doubt it for a minute, David. I don't doubt it for a minute.

• 47:36Speaker 07

  I suspect it's a sort of a drip down process, isn't it, with research? That, you know, it takes a long time because of course the first time that we're really properly researching the Garamantes would have been, what, in the 1960s, a little bit earlier. And so that's not, it's not a long time that people have been studying it. And it does take a long time for that to.

• 47:58Speaker 05

  Feed through into broader literature and popular culture.

• 48:02Speaker 07

  I think we still have a version of my progressive barbarization model operating in our own minds today.

• 48:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:10Speaker 07

  Uh about desert peoples and there's a tendency to default to that kind of negative. Even, you know, people who've read my work and are writing, let's say primarily from a, the, the point of view of the literary sources. They tend to immediately slip back into describing them as kind of pastoral nomadic. Uh, you know, and of course there were pastoralists within that broader Garamantian world. But what's really special about them is the scale of that oasis agriculture alongside pastoral groups that, you know, make this very powerful.

• 48:44Speaker 05

  I was also interested, David, in what you said about cotton and the manufacture of cotton because the products were incredibly sophisticated, comfortable, kind of clothes that we wear today almost.

• 48:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, the textiles that we found, the cotton tends to be not terribly well preserved, but we certainly have it, we can see. And it's incredibly finely woven, you know, finer than the shirt that I'm wearing today. If you look at the thread counts and the fineness of the fibers.

• 49:12Speaker 05

  That must have done a roaring trade with the Romans, I would have thought.

• 49:16Speaker 07

  I personally, I think that textiles was the number one commodity of Saharan trade in terms of bulk. You know, gold, you can carry relatively small amounts, enslave people, walk themselves to the coast, those that survive. Um, you know, salt is mostly going down to Sub-Saharan Africa. Textiles move in every direction in bulk quantities, I'm sure, because everyone needs textiles. And particularly if you're, you know, producing high quality and dyed textiles, which we know the Garamantes are doing.

• 49:50Speaker 05

  They could dye as well.

• 49:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, we've found some brightly colored textiles.

• 49:53Speaker 06

  Textile fragments. So there's a, there's a kind of comparative case in Anatolia in the 19th century BCE. There's an incredible archive of traders who are from Asher, from the capital of Assyria, which is in those days a trading state. And this archive records in incredible detail, the kind of detail we'd love to have for the Garamantes, what they're actually doing, like amounts of metals, textiles, that kind of thing. And one thing that's fascinating is that basically people are bringing from Asher to Anatolia tin and textiles and they're swapping them for silver coming back down. That's, that's the way that trade works. But the textile, the amount of textiles and the value of the textiles is very similar to that of the tin.

• 50:37Speaker 06

  It's, it's textiles aren't just a kind of extra, you throw a few in on, on top of the metal cargo. It's, they are a really hugely important trade good across antiquity. And, and the textiles are probably the key to how you manage to transport safely in a huge glass bowls. You wrap them in bundles of cloth. Yeah.

• 50:57Speaker 05

  Any evidence of writing?

• 51:00Speaker 06

  Writing is, I mean, in many ways, you know, it's our big gap. We don't have written sources by the Garamantes themselves about their society. We just have these rather brief external views and then often subject to these prejudices and biases and stereotypes. But we know that the Garamantes had a written language because we have found inscriptions.

• 51:25Speaker 05

  Oh, they did have a written language.

• 51:27Speaker 06

  But, but the, the sort of inscriptions we found tend to be very short, you know, single name on a funerary stele. We found a small clay tablet in a stratified layer at Garama, which had a few characters in this Libyan script. So we know that they had writing. What we haven't got is an archive of state documents or something like that, that would really help us get a better view of Garaman's society. Now that's partly because the sites we've excavated, they're

• 51:57Speaker 02

  settlement sites that we've excavated to this point have been in the oasis itself, where the water table is very high beneath the oasis. So broadly, we don't get very good organic preservation in those sites. In the tombs on the edge of the valley, yes, we do find textiles and organics and so on, but that's not where you'd keep your archives. So I live in hope that someday, somebody may find a cache of Garamantian documents that would really blow, blow this open.

• 52:27Speaker 07

  And of course, there is also this extraordinary corpus of texts of what's called proto Tifanak. So Tifanak is the written language of broadly what we might call Amazigh people, what people are often referred to commonly as Berbers. It's problematic because of course, historically and today, they are all different people and they're different entities throughout North Africa. But there is a language in common and various variants of that language across North Africa, and we see early forms of that.

• 52:59Speaker 05

  This is non-Arabic?

• 53:01Speaker 07

  Not Arabic. We see early forms of that in the rock art, which we see along the Wadi Al-Jal. The problem with that is dating it and associating it with the Garamanti. So it's nearby, but exactly how it relates to the Garamantians, if it is directly related to them or not, is the difficulty that we have. Because these are rock engravings rather than rock pictures drawn with paint. So it's a very difficult medium to take.

• 53:29Speaker 05

  Do we know, were they affected by Christianity and the growth of Christianity at all?

• 53:33Speaker 02

  Can I jump in on that? And there are one or two source references that suggest that they accept Christianity. We found no archaeological evidence to confirm that. And I suspect, I mean, that's a sort of a standard clause in every Byzantine peace treaty with so-called barbarian peoples, that you will accept Christianity. One thing I would like to say about the Garamantians is that they don't disappear at any point. They just become less. Significant. In the seventh century, when the first Arab cavalry columns go down into the Sahara, they encounter a king at Garama still, but he's clearly a petty ruler now amongst many other petty rulers.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  And even when we were doing fieldwork down there, as it happens, our, one of our cooks was Mohamed Garamantes. So the name survived right through to modern times.

• 54:23Speaker 05

  How, how difficult has, has it been to research and do archaeological digs since two thousand and eleven? When you had Gaddafi, the overthrow of Gaddafi and then the chaos in Libya.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  Well, I've had a wish for the future. It's just that, well, archaeological research in the Garamantes heartlands could start again. Probably too late for me, but it would be great for, to see that work picked up again because there's so much to do. You know, what we've discussed is a remarkable advance on what was known thirty years ago. But we're still so near the beginning of our understanding of, of this people. There's so many questions. A bit, bit like, you know, writing about the British Iron Age on the basis of the state of knowledge hundred and fifty years ago. A handful of sites excavated and what sort of picture are you going to produce?

• 55:15Speaker 05

  Joe?

• 55:15Speaker 06

  Well, and one thing I'd love to hear from David is that after archaeological work in Libya stopped, he went to work in Morocco and did all this incredible new stuff in this other part of North Africa. And I'd just love to know, what did the, does the work that you've done in the last ten, fifteen years in Morocco? How has that changed your ideas about the Garamantes, if at all?

• 55:36Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's reinforced my sense of how important the Garamantes are. I mean, I think the Garamantes are undoubtedly a powerful state. What we found in southern Morocco is very similar processes, the importance of the horse, the importance of the beginnings of oasis agriculture, more complex societies. But they're not as organised or as far along as the Garamantes, and it's happening a little bit later there as.

• 56:02Speaker 05

  As well, but you know, between those extremes, there are, you know, literally hundreds of Saharan peoples and oasis locations where similar sorts of stories were happening in antiquity. And Ferris, where have you been working since two thousand and eleven on sites anyway?

• 56:21Speaker 07

  Mainly outside North Africa.

• 56:23Speaker 05

  Right.

• 56:24Speaker 07

  Um, yeah, so not, not directly related to, to the work that we've been doing on the Garamantes. Um, I did want to pick up a little bit on what we were talking about earlier with the, with the religion and you started to talk, David, about some of the ancestral worship, which I thought was an area we, we didn't explore enough. There's this really interesting relationship between the, the sites, the location of the cemeteries and then what appear to be um, separate little villages, if you like, within the oasis. So it's almost like the villages are connecting to cemeteries a little bit further south from them in the escarpment. And

• 57:07Speaker 07

  um, you mentioned about um, ancient practices and one of those that we know a lot about with who Herodotus refers to is this idea of incubation where we see this idea that if you can sleep with the ancestors or in the, in a place in an enclosure close to your ancestors at the tomb, then you can divine or solve problems, for example. And these are kinds of enclosures that we do find associated with some of these burials. And, you know, there are these sorts of practices right up until the present day, very much present in, throughout North Africa of sort of holy men shrines,

• 57:51Speaker 07

  ancestral shrines where people go and divine and indeed practice incubation right until the present day.

• 58:00Speaker 05

  Just coming off the back of that, Ferris, we've heard about the exchange with Egypt and with the Romans and the Greeks. You've all mentioned that there was trade with sub-Saharan Africa as well. Is there any evidence of cultural exchange between the Garamantes and sub-Saharan Africa as opposed to the Mediterranean? There are certainly elements.

• 58:23Speaker 02

  In Sub-Saharan Africa that I think we can say are pointing towards trade with Garamantes. So some of the distinctive styles of Carnelian beads that the Garamantes are manufacturing, you know, look extremely close to Carnelian beads that are turning up on Sub-Saharan sites. You know, we need to develop better methods of testing the the provenance of the Carnelian sources, but I'd be very surprised if we can't demonstrate those sort of links as time goes on. But we've also got finds of copper alloys in the Sub-Saharan zone, which are effectively Mediterranean copper alloys. And the only way that they can be reaching

• 59:07Speaker 02

  the Sub-Saharan zone is through Trans-Saharan trade, and that's going to be the Garamantes plus potentially other Oasis peoples as well.

• 59:15Speaker 06

  And I think one of the things that's so interesting about this kind of thing is that, you know, trade, of course, is a very personal thing in antiquity, and especially the exchange of technology. So if you're talking about cotton coming up from the Sub-Saharan zone to the Garamantes and the Sahara, or them transmitting copper technology and alloy recipes and so on, that's not just something somebody writes on the back of an envelope and gives with your packet of seeds. You know, you actually have to learn how to grow and then make cotton. You have to learn how to manufacture copper in this particular way. So that must involve people spending a lot of time together, at least for for certain periods.

• 59:58Speaker 05

  Of course, the transit, I mean, the actual, you know, getting it from, say, Garama to the Mediterranean coast, you must require protection as well, presumably.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  I mean, it's a thousand kilometres, more or less, from Garama up to the Mediterranean. In fact, you know, particularly during the Lockerbie years, when internal flights in Libya were quite a risk, we tended to drive that that route. So I've driven that route many, many times.

• 1:00:25Speaker 07

  It's, it's, it's, and it's today, a really challenging journey still, but doing it, you know, with caravans of camels and donkeys and, and horses, you know, is another level of difficulty where you're dependent on the scattered wells to keep that.

• 1:00:42Speaker 06

  I mean, that's another thing, isn't it, that, um, that we haven't talked about camels. So camels arrive among the Garamantes, or second century C E.

• 1:00:52Speaker 07

  I think they're there before then.

• 1:00:53Speaker 06

  Even before then, but there's a certain point where they sort of, they just have horses to start off with and then the camels arrive and that must change things a lot.

• 1:01:00Speaker 07

  They become more important over time. And, you know, again, that may be one of the factors that changes the balance of power in the desert is that you get specialised camel raising pastoral groups whose power actually grows over time. So in the early modern period, it's, it's the camel raising nomads who are the most powerful people in the Sahara. And a lot of the oasis communities are subservient. The evidence from the Garamantes suggests that the, the balance of power is still with the oasis cultivators. You know, that's where the big tombs are. That's where we can see the big consumption going on, rather than with pastoral groups. But the pastoral groups are always going to be important because

• 1:01:41Speaker 07

  if you're doing trade, if you're conducting raiding and warfare in the Sahara, you need people who are good desert navigators who really know how to survive out there. And that's going to be the pastoral people.

• 1:01:52Speaker 05

  Absolutely. Martha. Tea, coffee.

• 1:01:55Speaker 06

  Coffee, please.

• 1:01:57Speaker 07

  Coffee, coffee, please. I think I'll have tea for a change.

• 1:02:00Speaker 05

  Coffee, coffee, tea.

• 1:02:01Speaker 07

  Tea.

• 1:02:01Speaker 05

  Two teas, two, coming up.

• 1:02:03Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 1:02:04Speaker 05

  In Our Time with Misha Glennie was produced by Martha Owen. It's a BBC Studios

• 1:02:09Speaker 04

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• 1:02:34Speaker 05

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