In Our Time - The Garamantes

Episode Date: June 11, 2026

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.WithDavid Mattingly Emeritus Professor of Roman Archaeology at the University of LeicesterFarès Moussa Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton and Cultural Heritage ConsultantAndJosephine Quinn Professor of Ancient History and Fellow of St John’s College, University of CambridgeProducer: Martha OwenReading 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. MattinglyD.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 StudiesIn Our Time is a BBC Studios productionSpanning 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.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Step inside the Ranger Rover Sport and experience refinement in every detail. With features like cabin air purification and active noise cancellation, every drive feels composed and considered. Explore more atrangerover.ca. When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want. Like, all the way.

Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet. Track your Chechings from every channel, right in one spot, and turn real-time reporting into big-time opportunities. Take your business to a whole new level. Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today. The Signal Awards recognize the podcast that define culture, and being honored by the Signal Awards sets your production team apart

with recognition from the industry's top experts. and access proof that your work is a standard bearer for podcasting worldwide. By entering, your work is heard by the Signal Awards Judging Academy, an invitation-only body of podcast professionals from acclaimed organizations which include the BBC. Grow your audience, celebrate your team, and stand out. The final entry deadline to submit is the 26th of June. Enter your podcast at signalaward.com. for consideration.

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 program. 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 and 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 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, Fares Musa, 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, can you situate the Garamantes for us? When are we talking about and where exactly? So, yes, as you say, about 2,000 years ago, more specifically from about 1,000 BC to about 600 or so CE, 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. 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. So why are they called the Garamantes? and is that what they call themselves? 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 Garamantean 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. 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 Garamantean 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. But fundamentally, the name derives from Garima, the settlement, the town. Yes. Ferris Musa, let me go on to you. The Sahara, obviously, a pretty hostile environment.

How did the Garameters end up living there? 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 going to go through it step by step. So we need to go to the end of the last Ice Age. At that point, what seems to happen is that the Sahara Desert becomes this very, very fertile, savannah-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 following the flora and the fauna. From about 6,500 years ago, you start to get this aridification, a gradual process which brings us to about 3,000 years ago when it brings us more or less to the kind of almost the level of hyper-aridity 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 Fezanne 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 high escarpment, sandstone escarpment, which rises quickly about 300 metres. So it's a kind of a process of, if you're like, refusial people getting condensed into niches throughout the Sahara region. And the Garamantees end up in this particular zone, about 200 kilometres in length, east to west. So you and David Mattingly have, you've both done a lot of archaeological work on the Garamantees.

Can you tell us what type of work that is and what sort of evidence you were turning up? Well, as you can imagine, doing archaeology in such a hostile environment, even today, is being presents its own challenges. Once we're there, we normally have an idea about areas we want to target. And after having done some remote sensing, using satellite images or whatever, about areas we want to target, we will normally do surveys on the ground. And 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 rock art along the base of this escarpment I described 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 of it. Because there is so much of it, you stop 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 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 do we find lots of stuff, and of course different levels of preservation. A lot of burials were looted in antiquity. So soon after the burial, were made, somebody has come along and taken stuff out them. So obviously they knew there were valuables in there. So they beat us to it, essentially. But depending on the level of preservation,

we find, obviously, skeletal remains, in some cases desiccated bodies, so bodies which were well preserved. Ceramics, cloth, leather. We've even found in the most recent excavations, we found a bronze bell, we found some fragments of gold leaf, So really very sophisticated society 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 indeed, how many? How extensive was this community? Well, we've heard that there were hundreds of thousands of Garamantean burials known, but up to the 1990s, there were very few settlement sites that had been identified. and in a way this played into the older view that the Garamantees must be nomadic

because we had all these burials and nowhere for them to live. Well, subsequently, the survey work that we and others have done, there was an earlier British archaeologist called Charles Daniels who did some pioneering work. We've now started to identify in vast numbers

the settlement sites that go with those cemeteries. In the early Garamantean period, that's round about 1,000 BCE. They're living in effectively what are hill forts, fortified sites, up on the escarpment that marks the southern edge of the valley. From about 400 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're constructed in mud brick. But the houses there, they're multi-roomed, rectilinear, quite complex architecture. At Garama, the Garamantean capital, we get some even more sophisticated aspects, including stone architecture for some monumental buildings. And then from about 300 C.E, 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 Garamantean society.

And from the beginning, it's clearly tied to the oasis cultivation. 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. stand 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 barbarization. And that is, you know, the Mediterranean peoples, Greek and Roman, took a very Mediterranean-centric view of the 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 are designed to demonstrate the primitiveness and otherness of these outlined peoples. So just to give you an example, are 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 they're, that, then you find people whose lifestyle is essentially a hunter-gatherer lifestyle there. You know, they speak unintelligible languages, they're living and sleeping in the open or in caves. And then even beyond that, we get into an imagined world. A sort of mythical. A mythical world where there are people with no heads and eyes on their chest. And interestingly, those are still appearing on early modern maps of Africa, echoing 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? What's so interesting, so picking up from what David's saying about progressive barbarisation, what you see with the Garamante's 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 5th century BCs. We're 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 live in OASES every 10 days. So basically the caravan stops on this Oasis route. Is this in his book The History? Exactly. In his book, the histories, yes. And he picks out the oasis of Garam and the Garamantes.

He says they are a greater 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 there. And he also says that they heard animals, but they heard these not just kind of normal animals. They heard 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 all these are very fancy cows. These are cows so cool that they have to look after them specially. But that's also sort of drifting into the mythologisation that David was referred to. 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 of a 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, I was going to the Roman Empire, and this is a period 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 Herodicus 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. But I mean, this is in a period when plenty of people that Tacitus is writing about in Rome have been to Garama, had seen the city, had seen. the stone temples. And they're trading all the time. They're trading all the time. So it's the most peculiar, yeah, progressive barbarisation in time as well as space. Faris, can you tell us about the Garamante's religious beliefs? What do we know about that? I mean, the most frequent motif, I suppose, which occurs in the text is reference to the association of the Garamantes with

a god called Amon. Most people will be aware of in relation to the Egyptian. Amon, who then becomes Amon Ra and Amon Min in later forms. And Amon is perceived as this invisible God who protects people in their travels. One of the attributes of the Amon God is the ram's horns. He manifests in the wind. So you can sort of see if, indeed, Amon is associated with the Garamantes, 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, and their travels in such a hostile environment. In terms of how the archaeology backs that up, it's very little. There was a temple-type structure, which was excavated early on in the centre of Garama, and a bronze mask or head of Salinas was discovered. Now there's a sort of a tenuous connection there with Dionysus, because of course in Greece, Amon 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. You have many different types of burial. you have mud brick-built small pyramid structures, you have cobaled cairns, and they are organised in discrete cemeteries, normally at the base of the escarpment.

They are dawned with funerary furniture, so they have steely, which are carved in a kind of a four-finger sort of motif. They have offering tables, you know, if you can imagine your airplane food tray and all the slots in it, it's a little bit like that. the funerary table and the evidence of possible animal remains that have been deposited in those.

Inside the burials, we have crouched burials. So the deceased have been laid on their side in the fetal position. They're normally wrapped in cloth and we found in recently in some cases in leather, doused in some cases in this really dark red ochre, completely doused in red ochre. which is fascinating, what is that? Is that about fertility? Is that about life, the colour of blood and life? So continuity in the afterlife,

there's all sorts of ideas that you can extrapolate from that. And just to say, you get a lot of that 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, Alger, in further north in Algeria, the same kind of red ochre. Herodoters mentions ancestor worship in relation to Saharan peoples.

And, you know, I think when Faris 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 their ancestors.

The ancestors are sort of there in the guise of minor gods, really. Mm. On the open road, conditions change. Your composure doesn't have to. But technologies like terrain response to and clear sight ground view, Range Rover Sport brings confidence and control the challenging conditions. Explore more at rangerover.ca.

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Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet. Track your cha-chings from every channel. ride in one spot and turn real-time reporting into big-time opportunities. Take your business to a whole new level. Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today. The Signal Awards recognize the podcast that define culture, and being honored by the Signal Awards sets your production team apart

with recognition from the industry's top experts and access proof that your work is a standard bearer for podcasting worldwide, By entering, your work is heard by the Signal Awards Judging Academy, an invitation-only body of podcast professionals from acclaimed organizations which include the BBC. Grow your audience, celebrate your team, and stand out. The final entry deadline to submit is the 26th of June. Enter your podcast at SignalAward.com for consideration. I wanted to carry on, David, with something which is more special. specifically associated with the Garamantis, which is the Garamantis 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 Garamantean 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. That's what they start growing,

and it's clearly come from somewhere probably from originating from the oases that 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 BC, 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. Water is the key for any oasis cultivation. In the initial stages, the Garamantes are perhaps using one or two relics springlines still active from that wet phase, but gradually drying out probably in the course of the first millennium BC. But around 400 C, exactly at the same time that those sub-Saharan crops arrive,

we've got a dated adoption of a new irrigation technology. And this is the foger. Now the foggerer... Can you tell us about the foggars? The Foggera is the North African version of a technology that we also know in Iran and in Arabia, where it's known as the Kanaat or the Fulaj. And this is an underground irrigation channel that leads running water out to the area of gardens in the centre of the valley. So, Holyette, let me just get this straight about how this is constructed.

You have a sort of central well. Well, there's a motherwell at the distant end of these underground canals, and these may be 40 metres deep, and they're dug generally into the foot of the escarpment at the southern end of the valley. So you dig down until 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 foger using that water. And so you dig a series, a long series of shafts. They're spaced only 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 only tunneling five metres to the bottom of the next shaft. Even so, Joe Quinn, that sounds like an incredible amount of work. So the sheer scale of the foger, how did they build? it. It's terrifying

to think about. I mean, these shafts that David's been describing some of these are 40 metres deep. They're very narrow. They are being dug down in a world where, you know, the daytime temperatures can reach

55 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 David said. So, go on, David.

Can I just jump in. We did an estimate of the labour needs to construct the foger systems that we know about in the Garamantean heartlands. It's 72,000 man years. I mean, put that another way. Put that another way. If you had a team of a hundred people doing

nothing apart from all their lives constructing fogerers, it would take them 720 years to create that system. But this is quite, I mean, they didn't have diggers, industrial diggers or anything like that. It's all done by hand, presumably.

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 720,000 years. 720 years. So an extraordinary amount of time. And so we must be looking at enslaved labour here. We know that there are, or at least we're told by Greek sources, that these garramantes are slavers. It's an obvious trade for the salt that they're also producing

with this water irrigation. 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. And 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 chariot. 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 just kind of catching other people. And so that's one major factor in what's going on here, what's happening with the Garamantees, both using a lot of enslaved people but also trading them, perhaps to the Roman provinces. I want to come on to the trading. Ferris, from what we've heard so far, it sounds as though the Garamanties were very sophisticated traders. What do we know about their trade?

So, you know, around the same time, around 1,000 BC that we start to see this formation of a Garamantean proto. kind of state. You also get in the coast of North Africa, the arrival of Phoenician trading colonies. You 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.

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. Remind me when the Second Punic War is. Yes, it was 2.102 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. So 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 Garamante's 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. On to that, of course, the Garamantees are producing Oasis products. Dates, for instance, have a market in the Mediterranean world for sure.

But, and I think this is the crucial thing about the Garamanses because sometimes they've been perceived as rather passive middlemen in trade that's dominated from the Mediterraneanane. But what we actually see from the archaeological evidence is that the Garamantees are quite discerning consumers. They have a ponchant 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 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 Garamantean heartlands, but it barely moves south and southwest of the Garamantean heartlands. In other words, the Garamantis preferentially consume those Mediterranean goods in their own society.

And, you know, we can estimate there are hundreds of thousands of Amphrey 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 Garamantees are also manufacturing. They build up capacity for metal. work producing little metal barring gotts 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 and 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 Garamantees, it'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 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 routes that cross, that east-west route, that 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 really turbocharges the trade in the Sahara, putting those two directions together. Farras, 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 Numerides, 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. we know that their heartland was that far away, what is the now southwest Libya, central Sahara. But you get often references to, for example, King Massanisa, who was the king of the Numidians at one point.

And New Medea 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 in the first. Would that be modern day Tunisia? Or is it still? Tunisia, Algeria.

Yeah. Yeah. So he seeks refuge in the first century BC in an area within or close to the Garamantean territories. So if that's what he's doing, then you're not having to go too far to get into what is perceived as Garamantean territory. So what that suggests is that the Garamantees 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 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.

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. 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 right going a really long way to the coast of Libya to help the rebels against the Romans. So there is, again, a sort of sense that they're kind of just at 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. 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? 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, over far-flung regions and a monopoly position on in this Saharan trade. That's a very powerful position, but of course it's not going to go unchallenged. And firstly, you might think about challenges from inside Garramantean society.

So is that kingly power always unchallenged by other groups to rise in defensive architecture at Garramanian settlements in the late times? That might suggest that there's actually that competition within Garramanthian society is growing. Another factor, those incredible foger system that are so key to the success of the Garamantees, 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 Garamontes through their irrigation systems is also part of their

downfall. And 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 Garamantees, 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 North Africa.

And this is 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 was a revision about 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 government entities are one of those. And I suspect that they are going to become more and more relevant as this phenomenon that's kind of, you know, fermenting is going to grow. Quick fire 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? Joe. Okay, so number one, it's not all about Rome. There are other places to talk about, not just Roman 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 realize. David, your take on how it's transformed our understanding of this period? Well, I think we were just at the beginning of proper knowledge about these people.

You know, before 30 years ago, as we say, we had a very different view about the Garamante's. 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. Ferris, final word? Yes, well, I think, you know, really would 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'd start to realize when you start to uncover these civilizations, So 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 Musa, 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. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests. 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'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.

I 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? You know, it takes a long time. Because, of course, the first time that we're really properly researching the Garamantees would have been the research. what are 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 from 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 negative. Even people who've read my mind. work and a writing, let's say primarily from the point of view of the literary sources, they tend to immediately slip back into describing them as kind of pastoral nomadic, you know,

and of course there were pastoralists within that broader Garamantean 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. I was also interested, David, in what you said about cotton and the manufacturer. of cotton because the products were incredibly sophisticated, comfortable, kind of clothes that we wear today almost. Yeah, well, the textiles that we've found, the cotton tends to be not terribly well preserved,

but we'd 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 fibres. That must have done a roaring trade with the Romans, I would have thought. 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.

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 textiles. And particularly if you're, you know, producing high quality and dyed taxisels, which we know the Garamantes are doing. They could die as well. Yeah, yeah.

We found some brightly coloured textile fragments. So 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 would 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. It's textiles aren't just a kind of extra you throw a few in on 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 guaranties themselves about their society. We just have these rather brief, external views and then often subject to these prejudice and biases and stereotypes. But we know that the Garamantis had a written language because we have found inscriptions.

Oh, they did have a written language. But the sort of inscriptions we found tend to be very short, you know, single name on a funerie steely. 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 guarantee 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.

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 Garamantean documents. That would really blow this open. And of course there is also this extraordinary corpus of text of what's called proto-Tiffinac. So Tiffinac is the written language of broadly what we might call Amazir 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. But there is a language in common and various variants of that language across North Africa, and we see early forms of that. This is not Arabic. Not Arabic. We see early forms of that in the rock art, which we see along the Wadiah al-Jal.

The problem with that is, dating it and associating it with the Garamantees. So it's nearby, but exactly how it relates to the Garamantees, 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? Can I jump in on that?

I mean, 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 government is 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. And even when we were doing field work down there, as it happens, one of our cooks was Mohamed Coromant. 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 Garamountian 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. There's so many questions. A bit like 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?

Joe. 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. 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 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, where have you been working since 2011 on sites anyway? Mainly outside North Africa. Right. 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 ancestor of worship, which I thought was an area. We didn't explore enough. There's this really interesting relationship between the site, location of the cemeteries, and then what appeared 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.

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 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? There are certainly elements in sub-Saharan Africa that I think we can say are pointing towards trade with Garamantes. So some of the distinctive styles of Cornelian B, beads that the Garamanteza manufacturing look extremely close to Carnalian 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 Transaharan trade, and 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 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 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, 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, but doing it, you know, with caravans of camels and donkeys and horses, you know, is another level of difficulty where you're dependent on the scattered wells to keep that. I mean, that's another thing, isn't it? That we haven't talked about camels. So camels arrive among the Garamante's, what, second century C.E.

I think they're there before then. Before then. But there's a certain point where they sort of, they just have horses start off with and then the camels arrive. And that must change things a lot. 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 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 Garamante suggests that 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 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. Absolutely. And that's going to be the pastoral people. Absolutely. Martha.

Tea, coffee. Coffee, please. Coffee, coffee, please. I think I have tea for a change. Thank you. Tea. Two teas, two comments coming up. Thank you.

In our time with Misha Glennie 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 Comment with me, Matt Shea. And me, Mariana 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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