The Garamantes

31:01And you also mentioned earlier about the Ethiopians. 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 in 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 people would be hunting and they show people with horses and chariots. So these are perhaps the victims showing these people who come after them.

31:41But there's also going to be, certainly by the Roman period, a lot of slave trading as well as just kind of catching other people. And so that's one major factor in what's going on here, what's happening with the Garamantes, both using a lot of enslaved people but also trading them perhaps to the Roman provinces. I want to come on to the trading. Faris, from what we've heard so far, it sounds as though the Garamantes were very sophisticated traders. What do we know about their trade? So, you know, around the same time, around 1000 BC, that we start to see this formation of a Garamantian proto kind of state, you also get on the coast of North Africa, the arrival of Phoenician trading colonies.

32:28You get in 814 BC, 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 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 wanting stuff that is in the central Sahara or even in sub-Saharan Africa that the Garamantes 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 distances to trade.

33:20You also have this incredible opportunity at the end of the Second Punic War, when Carthage's influence in North Africa is diminished a lot. Remind me when the Second Punic War is. Yes, it was 18202 BC, 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 200 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 Garamantes where they are filling this kind of void, if you like, this vacuum and no doubt are doing so through trade.

34:14So David Mattingly, do we know what they were trading? Was it just agricultural product or was it manufactured product as well? In traditional trans-Saharan trading, the key commodities of trade have been gold, enslaved people and salt. And at one level, the Garamantes 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 as well. Well, onto that, of course, the Garamantes are producing oasis products. Dates, for instance, have a market in the Mediterranean world, for sure.

35:01But, and I think this is the crucial thing about the Garamantes, because sometimes 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 Garamantes 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 amfrey the 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 in other words the The Garamantes preferentially consume those Mediterranean goods in their own society.

35:55And, you know, we can estimate there are hundreds of thousands of amphorae and hundreds of thousands of tableware vessels imported into the Garamante land. So this isn't small-scale trade. This is large-scale trade. But the Garamantes are also manufacturing. They build up capacity for metalwork, producing little metal bar ingots, 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 value in trade. They're producing masses of beads in glass, in semi-precious stones, in ostrich eggshell.

36:43And again, beads historically have been currency in Saharan trade. Thank you very much, David. Joe, why does the city of Garama in particular become the centre of this trading operation? Do we know? 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.

37:30I would see those oasis settlements as a kind of secondary phenomenon. That's not necessarily passive. Absolutely people 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 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 route that cross that east-west route.

38:14That, I think, is when everything kind of entangles and knots up and becomes this 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. Faris, what sort of relationship do the Garamantes have with other polities in North Africa? So among them, so for example, I mentioned earlier that the Niumilias, 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 very interesting because I suppose the texts that we have suggest that, you know, the Garamantes are not actually as far away from the coast as we think or know they are.

39:08we know that their heartland was that far away, what is now southwest Libya, central Sahara. But you get often references to, for example, King Masinissa, who was the king of the Numidians at one point. And Numidia is closer. 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. Exactly. And at some point he seeks refuge. Would that be modern-day Tunisia? Tunisia, Algeria. Yeah. So he seeks refuge in the first century BC in an area within or close to the Garamantian territory. So if that's what he's doing, then you're not having to go too far to get into what is perceived as Garamantian territory.

39:53So what that suggests is that the Garamantes somehow have territories or have influence north of their centre, quite far and quite near to the Mediterranean. But also what's interesting about that is they don't feature in a lot of dramas, do they? 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. 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 Takfarinas, who's a rebel, a North African, who's rebelling against Rome in their provinces in North Africa, the Mediterranean provinces across Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and so on.

40:48And 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 right, 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 kind of just one remove from the kingdoms that are in very regular political and military kind of contact and conflict. But nonetheless with a military capacity of sorts, as far as we understand. Some kind of military capacity. David Mattingly, this community, this kingdom, this people lived for a very long time as far as we can see.

41:29When and why did they start to decline as a civilisation? 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 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 monopoly position in this Saharan trade.

42:13that's a very powerful position but of course it's not going to go unchallenged and firstly you might think about challenges from inside Garimantian society so is that kingly power always unchallenged by other groups the rise in defensive architecture at Garimantian settlements in the late times that might suggest that actually that competition within Garimantian society is growing another factor, those incredible fogger 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-renewable water table. So maybe the very success of the Garamantes through their irrigation systems is also part of their downfall.

42:59And they simply ran out of water. You start to reduce the level of the water table. 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 part of a historical culture today? Does anyone hark back to the Garamantes? 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.

43:45I think, though, what that kind of feeds into is a broader phenomenon, which I think that we are beginning to witness in North Africa. And this has all arisen with the ability to have genetic tests and to know your mitochondrial DNA kind of profile, which we haven't had in the past. And people now are beginning to realize who live in North Africa that they are not necessarily Arab genetically, right, in the way that people in the Arabia region might be identified. And so that's for some people, and it's certainly a phenomenon among some young people in countries like Tunisia and Algeria, there is a revision about what their identity is.

44:33And 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 there are various tribal entities throughout the ancient North Africa and the Garamentes 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. Quickfire round at the end. How do the Garamentes, and I want you to keep this snappy, how do the Garamentes change our understanding of this period of history overall? Jo? OK, so number one, it's not all about Rome.

45:20There 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 trade and travel and exchange are a driving force in ancient history and the connections extend much further than people normally realise. David, your take on how it's transformed our understanding of this period? Well, I think we're just at the beginning of proper knowledge about these people.

46:05you know, before 30 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 work we've done on the Garamantes, on those other peoples. Fares, final word? 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.

46:58And we start to realise when you start to uncover these civilisations, 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. My thanks to Faris 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 levellers. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.

47:41Great. 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.

48:13I don't doubt it for a minute, David. I don't doubt it for a minute. I suspect it's a sort of a drip-down process, isn't it, with research, that it takes a long time, because, of course, the first time that we're really properly researching the Garamantes would have been the 1960s, a little bit earlier. And so that's not a long time that people have been studying it. And it does take a long time for that to feed through into broader literature and popular culture. I think we still have a version of my progressive barbarisation model operating in our own minds today about desert peoples. And there's a tendency to default to the kind of negative...

48:58Even people who've read my work and are writing, let's say primarily from the point of view of the literary sources, they tend to immediately slip back into describing them as pastoral nomadic. 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 make this very powerful. 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 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 like the shirt that i'm wearing today if you look at the thread counts and the fineness of the fibers but that must have done a roaring trade with the Romans I would have thought.

49:57I 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 enslaved people walk themselves to the coast those that survive 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 and particularly if you're producing high quality and dyed textiles which we know the Garamantes are doing. They could dye as well. Yeah, we found some brightly coloured textile fragments. So there's a kind of comparative case in Anatolia in the 19th century BCE.

50:42There'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 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.

51:19Textiles aren't just a kind of extra. You throw a few in on top of the metal cargo. They are a really hugely important trade good across antiquity. And the textiles are probably the key to how you manage to transport safely. You know, huge glass bowls, you wrap them in bundles of cloth. Any evidence of writing? Writing is, I mean, in many ways, you know, it's our big gap. we don't have written sources by the Garamantists 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 Garamantists had a written language because we have found inscriptions.

52:06Oh, they did have a written language. But the sort of inscriptions we've 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 Garantian society. Now that's partly because the sites we've excavated, the 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.

52:48So 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 this open. And, of course, there is also this extraordinary corpus of texts of what's called proto-Tifanach. So Tifanach 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 different entities throughout North Africa.

53:33But there is a language in common and various variants of that language across North Africa, and we see early forms of that. This is non-Arabic? Not Arabic. We see early forms of that in the rock art, which we see along the Wadi al-Aljal. Well, the problem with that is dating it and associating it with the Garamante. So it's nearby, but exactly how it relates to the Garamantes, 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. Do we know, were they affected by Christianity and the growth of Christianity at all?

54:15Can I jump in on that? 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 Garamans is that they don't disappear at any point. They just become less significant. In the 7th 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.

54:54And even when we were doing fieldwork down there, as it happens, one of our cooks was Mohammed Koromant. So the name survived right through to modern times. How difficult has it been to research and do archaeological digs since 2011, when you had the overthrow of Gaddafi and then the chaos in Libya? Well, if I had a wish for the future, it's just that, well, archaeological research in the Garamantian heartlands could start again. Probably too late for me, but it would be great 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 30 years ago, but we're still so near the beginning of our understanding of this people.

55:41There's so many questions, a bit like, you know, writing about the British Iron Age on the basis of the state of knowledge 150 years ago, a handful of sites excavated. And what sort of picture are you going to produce? Jo? Well, 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 does the work that you've done in the last 10, 15 years in Morocco, how has that changed your ideas about the Garamantes, if at all? Well, I think it's reinforced my sense of how important the Garamantes are.

56:22I mean, I think the Garimantes 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 Garimantes, and it's happening a little bit later there 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 Faris, have you been working since 2011 on sites anywhere? Mainly outside North Africa.

57:04Right. Yes, so not directly related to the work that we've been doing on the Garamantes. I did want to pick up a little bit on what we were talking about earlier with the religion and you started to talk, David, about some of the ancestral worship, which I thought was an area we didn't explore enough. There's this really interesting relationship between the location of the cemeteries and then what appear to be 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 you mentioned about ancient practices, and one of those that we know a lot about, who Herodotus refers to, is this idea of incubation, where we see this idea that if you can sleep with the ancestors or in a place in an enclosure close to your ancestors at the tomb, then you can divine or solve problems, for example.

58:15And 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 throughout North Africa, of sort of holy men shrines, ancestral shrines, where people go and divine and indeed practice incubation right until the present day. Just coming off the back of that, Faris, 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?

59:01There are certainly elements in sub-Saharan Africa that I think we can say are pointing towards trade with Garimantes. So some of the distinctive styles of carnelian beads that the Garimantes are manufacturing look extremely close to carnelian beads that are turning up on sub-Saharan sites. We need to develop better methods of testing 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 the sub-Saharan zone is through trans-Saharan trade.

59:51And that's going to be the Garamantes, plus potentially other Oasis peoples as well. 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 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 actually have to learn how to grow and then make cotton.

1:00:27You 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 certain periods. 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. 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 route. So I've driven that route many, many times. And it's today a really challenging journey still.

1:01:11But doing it with caravans of camels and donkeys and horses is another level of difficulty where you're dependent on the scattered wells to keep that caravan. I mean, that's another thing, isn't it? That we haven't talked about camels. So camels arrive among the Garamantes, what, second century CE? I think they're there before then. Before then. But there's a certain point where they just have horses start off with and then the camels arrive, and that must change things a lot. They become more important over time. And 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.

1:01:56So in the early modern period, 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 balance of power is still with the Oasis cultivators. 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 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.

1:02:32And that's going to be the pastoral people. Absolutely. Martha. Tea, coffee. Coffee, please. Coffee, coffee, please. I think I'll have tea for a change. Coffee, coffee, tea. Thank you. Tea. Two teas, two coffees. Thank you. In Our Time with Misha Glenny was produced by Martha Owen. It's a BBC Studios production for Radio 4. If you've got a scrolling problem, then this is the podcast for you. It's called Top Comet with me, Matt Shea. And me, Marianna Spring. We both investigate social media for a living. Whether it's disinformation, conspiracy theories, internet culture, memes. We're going to be getting behind the stuff that is popping up on your feed on this podcast.

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