The Ancients - The Garamantes: Farming the Sahara

Episode Date: December 13, 2020

Greco-Roman historians including Herodotus, Tacitus and Pliny the Elder would have us believe that the Garamantes were simple uncivilized cattle herders, living in sporadic camp dwellings. Until archaeological excavations began in the 1960s, this categorisation remained in place. Luckily, archaeologists like David Mattingly have dedicated years of research to sifting the fact from the fiction in the story of these residents of present day Libya. In this episode, David provides us with the revised version of the Garamantes’ civilisation. This includes masterful innovations in irrigation which allowed the Garamantes to farm two crops a year under the heat of the Saharan sun, as well as evidence of a social hierarchy and engagement in foreign trade. Listen as David turns the stereotype of the Garamantes on its head.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, we are talking about an ancient civilization that thrived in the Sahara Desert, the lords of the ancient Sahara.

They were called the Garamantes, often portrayed in our Greek and Roman sources as these wild men of the desert, this could not be further from the truth. In fact, archaeology is revealing that this civilization was highly sophisticated with advanced irrigation techniques and being at the heart of some amazing trade routes that connected the Mediterranean with inland Africa. Now to tell me more about this ancient Saharan civilisation, I was delighted to be joined by Professor David Mattingly from the University of Leicester. David has spent years of his life researching the archaeology of the Garamantes. He is at the forefront of debunking this Greco-Roman portrayal of them. So it was

great to get David on the show for this enlightening chat about the Garamantes. Here's David. David Mattingly, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. Well, good morning, Tristan. Thank you for inviting me. Good morning and no problem at all, because I've been really looking forward to this one. We are talking about the Garamantes, a highly sophisticated ancient society that thrived in the Sahara. Yeah, they're broadly contemporary with Greek and Roman civilisation, just to sort of orientate listeners chronologically. And if you want to picture them geographically, their heartlands lay about a thousand kilometres or 600 miles south of the modern city of Tripoli in southern Libya. It's

a region known as Fasan, and it's about 100,000 square miles in area, or about 250,000 square kilometres if you think in those terms. That's about the size of Scotland and Wales combined. And Fasan comprises one of the largest clusters of oases lying in a series of linear depressions within an area of quite dramatic Saharan landscapes. Yes, you mentioned Saharan landscapes just there. So David, is it important to picture the scene, this rugged, perhaps sandy landscape, rocky landscape, but also with all these oases dotted around the place. People often ask me, was the desert a desert like it is today, back in the time of the Garamantes? And the simple answer to that is that it was already in a hyper-arid phase. The Sahara, through prehistory, has gone through phases of being wetter and drier. But the last major wet phase ended about 5,000 years ago.

And that's about 2,000 years before the Garamantes come on the scene. So they are living and coping with a hyper-arid desert environment, much like today. Amazing, amazing. Well, let's start with the background then, because you mentioned Greece and Rome just then. And our ancient Greek and Roman writings that survive about the Garamantes, they're not very complementary, are they? Well, it starts really with Herodotus, as so much of written history does, in that he mentions the Garamantes in the 5th century BC,

and he describes them as herders of exotic cattle. These cattle had excessively long horns. He also mentions them hunting Ethiopians, black Africans, in chariots, and that sounds like a reference to early Saharan slaving raids. And then the later sources in the Roman period followed on these sorts of pictures. Pliny the Elder gives us an account of Roman campaigns around 20 BC and a subsequent triumph that was held in Rome. There was further military action in the first century AD before broadly peaceful relations seemed to have been established. They're never incorporated into the Roman Empire, although as I say a number of campaigns went to their territory. But what we find in our sources predominantly are references to them as wild men of the desert. And what we're

dealing with, I think, we need to recognise is a specific discourse in the sources about barbarity. So the sources impose a stereotype, or let's say at any rate that they overemphasize certain aspects of the society to paint a negative or contrasting picture with Mediterranean society and civilization. So if we think about epithets that are used to describe the Garamantes, they're often described as naked, barbarous, lawless, polygamous, savage, tent-dwelling, black. And these are epithets that are being used in a negative sense to point a contrast between civilised Mediterranean and these barbarians of the desert. And your archaeology in the region is debunking this Mediterranean perception. Yes, I started working on the Garamantes in the late 1990s, conducting surveys

and excavation in these extraordinary Saharan landscapes. I mean, I have to say it's been probably the high point of my academic career, my research career. And in many ways, it's every archaeologist's dream that Harrison Ford-like, they're going to go off and discover some long lost civilisation. But I really have been able to do that in the case of the Garamantes, setting out with this literary image of barbaric nomads in the Central Sahara and finding something very different. I should say, perhaps, that my work has been funded by the Society for Libyan Studies and the European Research Foundation primarily,

and a lot of publications arising from this, including some free downloadable books, are on the Society for Libyan Studies website. So if you'll allow me that little plug. I should also stress that the story that we've been able to build up about the Garamantes over the last 20-odd years now that I've been working on them really rests on the fantastic work of a large team of people that have collaborated with me, including many Libyan archaeologists as well as expat archaeologists coming in to work on this area. And the archaeological results certainly allow us to put the Garamantes into a completely different perspective and to demonstrate that

they were an independent ancient civilisation in their own right with a large population and a sophisticated culture. Well, let's have a look at one of the most extraordinary elements of this archaeology, which is the agriculture. And David, I'm guessing, first of all, the agriculture for the ancient Garimantes was absolutely central to their society. for the ancient Garamantes was absolutely central to their society? I think it's probably the single most important thing that we've learned about the Garamantes is that far from being these nomadic pastoralists, the core of their society is built around oasis farming communities. There's no doubt that there were pastoral elements associated with the

Garamantes. Any people living in the middle of the desert are going to depend on were pastoral elements associated with the Garamantes. Any people living in the middle of the desert are going to depend on mobile pastoral groups with good desert navigation skills, the knowledge of where to find water, and how to survive in those wider landscapes. But at the heart of the society, we've got oasis agriculture starting from about 1000 BC, so that's incredibly early for oasis cultivation to have got underway in the central Sahara. And is it just oasis agriculture or do we have evidence of there being farming away from the oases too? The farming is because of the climate. There is virtually zero annual average rainfall that can be relied upon.

To be honest, we work there a lot in the winter months, and periodically we would get the odd little rain shower come in. But you can't rely on that in any way for agriculture. So the cultivation is entirely based on irrigation works within these depressions, within this area of the central Sahara, where either there are springs or there is groundwater table lies fairly close to the surface and can be tapped into by people. But all of these methods of exploiting groundwater rely on very intensive engineering works, really, to make the garden systems. So it tends to be very focused and one

of the great experiences, I don't know if you've ever travelled in the Sahara, but you can come from the wilderness. So you're coming out of a sand sea and you've been in amongst these amazing rolling dunes and suddenly you'll come over the last ridge of dunes onto a burst of green which is an oasis or you might come out of one of the mountainous rocky areas, again, with hardly any vegetation, and you come over that last rise. And again, you suddenly see this incredibly bright burst of verdant colour of an oasis. But that oasis, we just have to remember, it's not really something that's naturally occurring. It's humanly produced because there's enormous work required to create an oasis and indeed to maintain it. Well, you mentioned there the remarkable engineering.

So what do we know about the irrigation techniques of the Garamantes? That irrigation is going to explore a number of different types of sources. Springs are really our best source for irrigating oases, particularly artesian springs which spew out water under pressure at a very considerable rate, so it gives you a very good flow. And if those springs lie above a lower lying area, then you can use gravity simply to lead the water down over systems of gardens. Actually in the Garamantian area there aren't a huge number of springs, there are some, and they seem to have relied initially to a larger extent on shallow wells exploiting a water table that lay just a few metres down beneath the surface of

the basin of these oasis areas. But over time they came to introduce a new type of irrigation technology known as the foggera. And this is a really important moment, I think, in the development of Garamantian civilization. So what is this foggera? Well, they're related to a form of irrigation that was initially developed in Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, where they're known more commonly as Kanats. And the Kanat eventually, we think, is brought to Egypt by the Persians in the period when they're ruling in Egypt around the middle of the first millennium BC. And from there, the technology gets transferred into the Sahara to the Garamantes. Now, essentially, to construct a foggerer you first dig a mother well generally on rising ground at the edge of the oasis depression hoping to locate a perched water table that lies at a height above

the floor of the oasis. Once you've found that you then dig a series of wells leading away from that mother well towards the centre of the valley, and you connect the bottom of all those shafts with a gently sloping channel that's going to allow you to lead water, flowing water, from that higher water table until the channel emerges at the centre towards the centre of the oasis depression, and then you've got a spring source effectively that can irrigate an area of fields. It's an enormous investment of labour up front to construct these. Some of the foggeras are several kilometres in length and they comprise hundreds of individual shafts,

the deepest of which can be up to 40 metres deep. Obviously they get shallower as the channel comes nearer the center as you move towards the center of the valley. But we've estimated from the more than 600 foggerers that we've found in Fasan so far that something over 80,000 person years of labor was needed to construct that irrigation system. And that's not taking account of the maintenance that would have been needed then to follow up on that. One example that we found, we found that one of the shafts had been lined with some mud brick because it was in rather crumbly soil. And we did a radiocarbon dating on some organic fibres that we found as part of the temper of that mud brick. And we obtained a date in the 4th or 3rd century BC. So only perhaps 100 years or so after the fog row first appears in Egypt, it's also being adopted by the Garamantes.

That's absolutely astonishing. Just imagining it, walking over perhaps a knoll or something and into this verdant valley in the Sahara near an oasis. And you see ahead of you this highly sophisticated agricultural landscape dotted with foggerers. Yeah I mean the foggerers can be quite visually striking because if you think about it each one of these shafts will tend to have a kind of donut of spoil around it which is essentially the material that's been extracted during its digging. And if the earth is particularly friable, where a fogger has been sunk,

then it's going to need a lot of maintenance work to keep the shaft open, to keep the channel open at the bottom. So you get these almost conical mounds around the openings of the shafts develop over time. So they look like a line of mini volcanoes running in a straight line from the hills on the side of the valley down into the centre of the valley to where the oasis lies. And by and large, they're running through the part of the valley where there is no vegetation. So they stand out in that landscape. Cultivation in the Sahara, absolutely brilliant and amazing. And David, what do we know

about the crops that they grew in these foggeras? Well, from botanical remains that we've excavated, and we've also dated by radiocarbon means, so we're absolutely certain about the date of introduction, we know that the Garamantes from around 1000 BC were cultivating the date palm, from around 1000 BC were cultivating the date palm, bread wheat, barley, the grapevine, and a number of other types of fruits. And what the introduction of the fogger does is, because it's more mechanically efficient than raising water out of wells, it allows larger areas to be cultivated, but it also allows the area of the gardens to be more intensively irrigated. And that allows you to get a second crop during the year. So as well as barley or wheat, from about 400-300 BC, we find that the Grand Mantez are also growing crops like sorghum or pearl millet, which allow them to take a summer crop. So a more intensive agriculture,

it, which allow them to take a summer crop. So a more intensive agriculture. And that's probably a sign also of a growing population by the time we get to that point in time. Once again, that's amazing. So the Garamantes, they transform this arid landscape, not just into a good agricultural landscape, but by the fact that they have two separate harvests, as it were, into an exceptional one. Yeah, it is a remarkable story. Oasis always seems a bit of a miracle to us, as I said, when we see it first. But actually, making oasis agriculture work economically is always a struggle because of the huge labour inputs that are required. But it's very clear from the evidence that we have that the Garamantes make that enormous investment in labour to create these systems and to maintain them over hundreds of

years. That's remarkable. Now, you mentioned it a bit earlier in passing, this whole deal of the climate and climate change, obviously quite big today. But David, truth or myth, was the climate better then for farming? There's a lot of debate about climate change in the past, and there's certainly a school of thought that in some parts of the ancient world, there is a sort of climatic optimum during the Roman period. What I would say from the perspective of the Sahara is that it's not enough rain to actually do dry cultivation in farming. You're always reliant on the irrigation. You know, slightly more rain might have made a bit of difference to pastoralists within Garamantean society because alongside those oasis communities, for sure there are pastoral groups who would potentially have

slightly more grazing up in the mountainous areas. But by and large, we have to accept that the Garamantes agricultural triumph is achieved despite a highly adverse climate, and it's entirely dependent on irrigation using groundwater. Amazing. So the climates of the Garamantes roughly 2,000 years ago, perhaps a bit before that as well, was by and large quite similar to the climate that you, for instance, were in when you were looking at the archaeology of the Garamantes recently. Yeah, well, mostly I've tried to work during the winter months because in those conditions, actually, it's quite like a good English summer, you know, without the rain on an August bank holiday.

But in the summer months, and well, really from about March through to October, the temperatures in this part of the Sahara are absolutely phenomenal. I have had to do some work down in this region in the middle of July, and the temperatures walking across an area of black rock, which was therefore reflecting the heat, you could feel it through rubber sole boots as unpleasantly hot, over 50 degrees Celsius, quite extraordinary heat. Yeah, my feet get burned whenever I'm walking on a beach more than 30 degrees in temperature. The only good thing about that, those sort of heats in that area, is that you don't have humidity with it because you would simply kill over and die very quickly if we had the humidity behind that as well. It's a dry heat, but you need to have really good

supplies of water when you're out in that sort of climate or not be very far away from where you're living. Very arid indeed and thank goodness for all those oases then and this amazing irrigation system. And you mentioned the amount of manpower, the amount of people needed to work these foggerers. What do we know about the settlements of the Garamantes that were working these foggerers, that were next to these foggerers? Well, when I started my work, although the Garamantes were known about, and some of their cemeteries in particular have been looked at, very few settlement sites have actually been identified. So there were extensive spreads of Garamantian burials and very few settlements. And so that fed an early archaeological view that, yes, this was the Garamantis of our literary sources,

essentially nomadic, with one or two exceptional, more settled settlements. What we found by doing intensive survey work, and particularly thanks to Google Earth, we've got much more high resolution satellite imagery available, is that we can identify huge numbers of Garamantian settlements. And by visiting a good sample of these sites on the ground, and by collecting pottery of Garamantian date, particularly Roman imports, and by carrying out radiocarbon dating, we've been able to establish without doubt that these are of Garamantian date. There was a pioneering British archaeologist called Charles Daniels who worked on the Garamantes in the 1960s and 70s, and he did some early excavations on an early Garamantian hillfort site near to their main centre, which is known as Garama or Olgerma.

And that really showed the early stages of the evolution of Garamantian society, from sort of oval huts into progressively more complex rectilinear buildings, and then starting to use mud bricks or formed bricks as construction materials and so on. But as I say, today we can demonstrate unequivocally that there were hundreds of permanent Garamantian settlements. These were typically of village scale and many of them were fortified in the later Garamantian era. And we can, I think, confidently predict that at its peak Garamantian population was probably in the region of 50,000 to 100,000 plus, which is an enormous population at that period in a relatively small area of the vast Sahara. And these villages, are there any standard elements that we can see throughout these villages

dotted across the Sahara? You mentioned that some of them have walls. Is this quite a common feature? across the Sahara? You mentioned that some of them have walls. Is this quite a common feature? Well, by the later Garamantian period, that's broadly contemporary with the later Roman period, a particular distinctive type of Garamantian village had emerged, and generally it comprised a central fortified castle-like building. These sites were rectangular, they generally had high external walls studded with projecting towers at the corner on either side of gates, sometimes if they're large sites at intervals along the walls. When we first saw these sites we thought they were probably Islamic in date because they were so well preserved and to be frank so unexpected of the Garamantes. But again, radiocarbon dating of mud bricks

in the walls has shown unequivocally that they are of Garamantean date. And some of the sites also had an additional outer wall enclosing a wider area of settlement around the central fortified building. And the largest of those sites we might equate with urban status as well. Well, let's go on to that now. We see all these extraordinary village settlements, as it were, dotted near these foggeras across these oasis landscapes and in these defiles in the Saharan landscape. But you mentioned also, we also see some larger settlements which seem to emphasise urban settlement. settlements which seem to emphasise urban settlement. Yeah, well, just to emphasise on the average Garamantean settlement, these look well-planned, sophisticated, well-laid-out settlements. You know, they are a million miles from the tents and scattered huts that our literary sources mention in relation to the Garamantes. And as I

say, the largest of the sites, both in terms of their size and in terms of the sorts of activities and buildings that we see there, I think merit the appellation towns. Not necessarily judged simply by the standards of Mediterranean urban towns, we have to think about the Saharan context of these. But undoubtedly, these particularly large centres seem to be fulfilling similar sorts of functions of political authority, economic central control, religious authority within the societies that towns do in other parts of the ancient world. So Garama, which is the best example of a Garamantian town, the Garamantian capital. It's quite small, it's about 10 hectares or 25 acres, that's small by Mediterranean standards, but it's surrounded

by a very dense clustering of villages. You know, what we need to bear in mind is in 50 degree summer heat, nobody wants to be very far from their palm groves and gardens, so you tend to get more regularly spaced out smaller scale village settlements as the norm and the larger settlements are not mega large because again people need to have access to their gardens and palm groves relatively readily. The Garama contained monumental buildings with stone footings using some elements of Mediterranean derived architecture, columns and capitals and so on. We found fragments of one of the buildings was certainly a major temple. The site was clearly the base of power of a line of Garamantian kings. It's a focal point

of trade we can tell from the archaeological traces, and of manufacturing and material consumption within Garamantean society. So this was a real hub of Garamantean society, which not just administration but also trade ran through? Yes, we've got a lot of evidence from Garama of trade between the Garamantes and Rome. One of the things that the Garamantes seemed to have particularly liked was Mediterranean pottery and glass vessels and amphorae of wine and olive oil traded down in really quite significant volumes. Given the distances, it's a thousand kilometres from the Mediterranean to the Garamantean heartlands across some really difficult terrain.

So if you think about carrying glass vessels, and they seem to particularly like large open glass bowls and large open pottery bowls as well, and the difficulty of bringing those intact across that sort of desert landscape on the back of a donkey or a camel, the breakage rate must have been catastrophic from the point of view of the merchants. But I think it's pretty clear that these are things that perhaps particularly because of the near impossibility or the unimaginability of being able to bring those things, but having succeeded, these became great prestige items in Garamantian society. So this archaeological evidence really shows that there was this big trade network between the Garamantes and the Romans, which I find amazing, especially seeing as the Romans, they don't give a very good portrayal of the Garamantes, despite them being this prime

trading partner. Yes. One of the big questions, of course, is what's going in the opposite direction? And here we hit a problem of the archaeology of Saharan trade for a period where we don't have literary sources that detail that Saharan trade as we do, say, for the Islamic period. And the problem is essentially that the bulk of the commodities of trade within the Trans-Saharan zone as a whole, are things that are not generally very visible in the archaeological record. They're either things that were composed of organic material, so things like textiles, foodstuffs, and people, slaves, not to put too fine a point on it, or they're very

valuable goods, things like gold or ivory, which are not the sort of things that tend to turn up in large quantities in standard archaeological rubbish deposits. So it's very difficult to detect and to quantify this trade exactly. But again, through the work we've done, we have been able to tease out quite a lot more evidence for the early development of trade, not just between the Garamantes in Rome, but also between the Garamantes and sub-Saharan peoples and other Saharan peoples. So the Garamantes sit at the heart of a web of Saharan trade routes, and they're trading with many different partners in different directions. That's amazing. So Garma is this connecting point between the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan societies, but it also is the hub for the production of precious goods too. Yes, to say a little bit about some of the evidence we have for things coming from the sub-Saharan zone or from other zones of the Sahara, we've got evidence of hippotusk ivory

and elephant ivory, ebony wood beads, But we've also got things that have come from really very considerable distances, and that suggests the early development of trade along the lines that it's going to have more concretely in the Islamic period. So the first appearance of cowrie shells in the Sahara are at Garama. We've got some of the earliest glass beads of Mediterranean and Indian Ocean provenance turning up and they become a staple of later Transaharan trade. We've got some items of gold, although very rare, and the nearest gold sources to Garama are either the Mediterranean or West Africa. And it's very likely that we are seeing the development of West African gold sources feeding gold through to the Garamantis and on towards the Mediterranean in pre-Islamic times.

We've also got evidence that the Garamantis are gathering in natural resources of a wider zone of the Sahara that they essentially control. So we've got a lot of evidence at Garama for the working of semi-precious stones. for the working of semi-precious stones. Carnelian, which is a translucent reddish stone, much beloved of Roman signet ring makers as it happens. You know, it's one of the standard stones. And Pliny the Elder, in fact, tells us that the Garamantes were the second most important source of Carnelian for the Roman Empire after India.

But the source of that Carnelian isn't very close to Garama, it's probably two or three hundred kilometers away within that zone of the central Sahara. So the Garamantes are evidently controlling the mining of this, acquiring of this material. It's brought to Jerma where it's being processed, that we've got a lot of debitage from the rough working of the material on our sites, and then traded on both to the Roman world, but also in the form of really well-fashioned beads as part of what the Garamantes are doing in Saharan trade. One of our challenges is finding what I call the smoking gun

of Trans-Saharan trade in this pre-Islamic period, which is something that connects the Mediterranean through to sub-Saharan Africa, which is something that connects the Mediterranean through to sub-Saharan Africa, because all those Roman trade goods, they don't go on beyond the Garamantis, by and large. They seem to have held those for themselves, and the Garamantis are trading other things with the next partners down the line. So we don't find really much evidence in terms of Roman goods in sub-Saharan Africa to indicate that connection. What we do find through scientific analysis that has been done both in West Africa and in Mediterranean Northern Africa, and now with our work in the Central Sahara, are common compositional signatures in, say, copper alloys.

compositional signatures in, say, copper alloys. So particularly the chemical composition of brass, a form of copper alloy, which isn't known in West Africa otherwise until the modern colonial era, appears there contemporary with the Roman Empire and is almost certainly using imported brass, which has come across the Sahara. So that's a great example of a smoking gun. It does show that there was some connection. It's very hard for us to estimate the scale of that trade, but it gives us an indication that those connections were there. And interestingly, the Garamantean signature for brass is exactly the same as well. So the Garamantes are undoubtedly one of the most likely routes by which those metals were coming across. So we think the Garamantes are importing copper alloy artefacts from the

Mediterranean. We've got evidence on their sites that they're remelting the metal. And we've got some small ingot moulds in which they're pouring copper alloy. We've got traces of copper alloy on the moulds in order to make small barringots, things that are about six, eight inches long and about the thickness of a finger. But that's an ideal size, an ideal way to transport metal on the Trans-Saharan trade route. So we think that's one of the things that the Garamantes are doing. They're recycling metal and trading it on with trading partners to the south and southwest. I mean, David, I know it's to be expected, but I still find it absolutely amazing

the amount of control the Garamantes have on this trade route and to think that they were either altering or deciding which goods from the Mediterranean would go to Western Africa, as it were, and also which goods coming up from there would be going to the Mediterranean too. And of course, their own goods, where they would be going as well. I find that absolutely amazing. In the past, the tendency has been to think about Transaharan trade as very much controlled from its northern end, even when people are writing about the Islamic era. But you know, if we look in detail at the history of Transaharan trade, the intermediate partners in that trade are really important and often more important than the people at the north because the Garamantes

are having to trade with a vast number of different people, all of whom have particular desires and wants and needs that need to be fulfilled. And it's difficult to anticipate all of that from the remote Mediterranean standpoint. So my sense is the Garamantes are much more in control of this trade than has previously been recognised. Just to go back to that comment I made about the big open bowls of glass and pottery that they seem to have preferred. Again, I think that states very much a Garamantean consumer choice, rather than the choice the merchants would have made for themselves. You know, I think the merchants would far rather something that was easier to carry and less breakable with a higher chance of getting more product through.

But once again, that emphasises the wealth and power of the Garamantes and also how highly sophisticated their system was, that they're controlling the trade, etc. their system was, that they're controlling the trade, etc. Yes, and we've got evidence at our settlement sites for a wide array of manufacturing activity that, again, seems to be on quite a large scale and a high standard of sophistication. So they've got good pyrotechnical skills, working metals. We've also got some of the very earliest glassworking evidence from the Sahara. We don't think that they're making raw glass, which is incredibly difficult and fuel-intensive process, but they are re-melting glass and refashioning glass, again probably recycling glass vessels and glass beads that they've imported from the Mediterranean into other forms of glass beads particularly, again almost certainly for onward

trading on those Saharan routes. But they're also a big producer of textiles we believe. We found quite a lot of textile fragments in Garamantian burials and there are technical details of the spinning and weaving of these garments that make it clear that these are not Mediterranean products and we have loom weights on a lot of our Garamantian sites. And indeed, we have evidence of cotton cultivation. Again, it's the earliest cotton cultivation outside of sub-Saharan Africa, within Africa, in the Garamantian zone. So it looks as if they're specializing in really high quality textile production, particularly cotton, which

will have been highly prized both in the Mediterranean zone and in the sub-Saharan zone in this period when its cultivation and the production of cotton garments was relatively rare. Absolutely. It sounds very, very clever if you've got willing buyers not just to the north, but to the south and west as well. Yes. And just again, to backtrack on something I said earlier about oasis farming being a difficult way of living, oasis agriculture economically doesn't really make sense. The upfront investment costs of creating the irrigation schemes, the very high labour demands for artificially watering your land through the growing season, that is very difficult to sustain if you don't have something to sit alongside it and to supplement it. So oasis communities are very often deeply involved in manufacturing of

goods that can be traded and in wider trading relationships, which can allow them to sell on some of the surplus production of the oasis, but also a range of other commodities. And you mentioned earlier power and the prestige of the Garamantes in antiquity, and places like Garma being these crucial urban hubs. I'd like to talk about the upper ends of the social hierarchy of the Garamantes, what we possibly know. David, do we think that they had a royal family? Do we think that they had kings at the top or queens? The Roman sources, for all that they denigrate the Garamantes, they several times refer to Garamantean kings. And I think this is actually a subtle admission within our sources that the Garamantes

are an organized state, which is my conclusion about them, that they are a highly hierarchical society. And at the top of it, they have a ruling family or perhaps a group of families between whom kingship moves around over time. We can see that hierarchy emerging powerfully through the first millennium BC as we see greater and greater differentiation within the tombs of the Garamantes. It's clear that an elite order was emerging. And by the time we get into the sort of early centuries AD, we're starting to see some tombs being so much bigger and so much more impressive and so much more richly furnished than others that it does look as if we are dealing with kingly tombs being so much bigger and so much more impressive and so much more richly furnished than others that it does look as if we are dealing with kingly tombs. And the largest of all the

tombs in the Garamantean region occur right alongside their capital at Jarmah and have been known for quite a while as the Royal Cemetery. They're the largest, most imposing monuments of the Garamanteans. And although the tombs themselves were pillaged long ago, excavation of the surviving fragments in the bottom of those tombs shows that they were really richly furnished and appropriate to a ruling family. I appreciate that. Perhaps they have been looted, so a lot has been lost. But what has the archaeology from these tombs revealed about grave goods? Well, I suppose one of the things we noted when we dug one of those was that everything within it was king size, if you like. So a lot of Garamantian tombs contain a type of pottery vessel used for

burning incense. And the standard incense burner would be the size of a coffee cup, if you like. In the royal tomb, the fragments of the incense burner were the size of a coffee cup, if you like. In the royal tomb, the fragments of the incense burner were the size of one of those great German beer glasses, holds a couple of litres or something. So that was a very telling example. Another example were the carnelian beads that we found from that tomb. Again, a standard carnelian bead, let's say is about no bigger than the size of a small fingernail in sort of overall area. The royal tomb had carnelian beads the size of gobstoppers, just enormous. So those I think are pretty good examples of that differential between a very high end elite and other well-to-do individuals within Garamantian society.

And you mentioned well-to-do individuals within Garamantian society. Does this also emphasise that below perhaps the royalty, we also had a quite high elite that could also be buried with quite a lot of prestigious goods if they wished? Yes, again, this is where a lot of our Mediterranean pottery is turning up. Some elite tombs below that royal level but still at an elite level again close to Jerma you may get 20 or 30 fineware vessels, three or four amphorae, glass vessels, lamps brought in from the Mediterranean occurring within a tomb. But actually one of the interesting things about going into society is that even when we excavate the poorer, the lower status tombs reflected by smaller monuments,

simpler monuments, we still quite often find, you know, one Roman pot coming out from within those tombs. So Roman goods, trade goods, are relatively widely disseminated within this society. Roman goods, trade goods, are relatively widely disseminated within this society. Oh, brilliant. That's interesting in itself. So once again, I guess I must emphasise how trade with the Mediterranean and all that, it wasn't just the high end receiving these goods. It was also those perhaps a bit lower down on the foggerers in those villages who were also able to receive these goods too. Yes, I think there was a view when Roman goods were first found in the Fasan that this was evidence of Roman gifts to the Garamantian kings and rulers, and that it was buying the peace for the Roman Empire to the north, keeping the Garamantian top elite happy

through those sorts of exchanges. You know, a slight suspicion that trade wasn't as properly developed. I think what we've found is something that's definitely on a much larger scale and this dissemination of Roman goods through Garamante society does show that it's a very unequal society but relatively far down that unequal society people still have some access to these trade goods. Now keeping on Garamante society I'd like to quickly talk about another key element of it, religion. First of all, we know slightly to the east we've got that famous oracle of Zeus Amon, that oasis in modern day Libya. Is there anything similar, do we think, with the religion of the Garamantes?

Well, Amon was the great god of the Sahara, and Amon is associated in some of our literary sources with the Garamantes as well as with the oasis of Siwa and with the Nazarmones, who are the intermediate main oasis cluster between Siwa and the Garamantes. The Nazarmones are about a 10-day journey from the Garamantes, and all of these almost certainly had a major temple of Amon, and all of these almost certainly had a major temple of Amon. And it's quite likely that the temple that's been discovered in Jama is in fact a temple of Amon. Although, as well as some artefacts that hint at those associations, we've also found little model figurines of camels and horses

that I think bring through to us the potentially sacred associations of Saharan travel, which Amon was the great protector of. So Amon was probably a chief deity of the Garamantes. Yes, we know that the Garamantes had a written script. We have a number of inscriptions in this script. Unfortunately, like a lot of languages where we have only a few inscriptions and they're relatively short and mostly seemingly funerary in nature, it's very difficult for us to make full sense of these texts. So I think for that reason, we're a long way from knowing all we would like to know about the gods of the Garamantes and many other aspects of their society. But as well as worshipping

gods like Amon, and Amon is a ram-headed god. And if you think about ancient Egypt with all its animal-headed gods, I mean, that's not something that's in fact native to Egypt. That's something that is born in the Sahara. We see a lot of imagery of animal-headed divine figures in the late Neolithic rock art. So these ideas of powerful animal-headed divine beings are very strongly Saharan, I think, and I suspect that the Garamantes had a number of these gods, not just Amun. In addition to that, and Herodotus mentions it and at least one other Roman source. The Garamantes worshipped ancestors. And ancestor worship seems to be very strongly reflected in the architecture of their cemeteries, where we very often have offering tables and stele erected on the east side of tombs.

And sometimes there are special enclosures, which following Herodotus' account, were probably designed for relatives, descendants of powerful ancestors to actually go and sleep alongside the tomb of the ancestors and experience revelatory dreams that were going to help advise the descendants of their best course of action. Going on a spiritual journey as it were david all these gods you mentioned we know about amon and there must have been others i'm guessing perhaps there must have been a war god and you mentioned earlier these huge distances of the garamantes and how long it would have taken just to get to their nasamones to the east in this huge area there's one last thing i'd like

to really ask about and that is the garamantian military. What do we know about the Garamantian military? How did it come to dominate the Sahara? What methods did they use? Our Greco-Roman sources mainly talk about them as raiding bands. So fast moving, mobile, certainly a lot of cavalry, light armed cavalry involved. But from relief carvings within the Garamantian zone, we have images of horse riders, armed horse riders, but also of infantry as well. And I think for me, the most important aspect of Garamantian warfare is manpower. And what distinguishes them from traditional nomadic bands within the Sahara, who are often cavalry forces, is that the Garamantes had that oasis manpower to put rather larger forces into action. So not just fast-moving cavalry forces and raiders,

but also when they needed to, potentially quite large armies that could march across the desert land and physically dominate their neighbours and so on. Some of the rock art imagery also illustrates chariots and as we heard earlier Herodotus directly associated chariots with the Garamantes. Well simple chariots are a uniquely poorly developed vehicle for tackling a lot of Saharan landforms. You couldn't drive a chariot over a sand sea or over the really rocky mountainous terrain that also exists in places. But chariots have the great advantage that you can disassemble them and you can put those elements on the back of a horse or camel, carry them across the difficult terrain and then reassemble them on the flat plain, gravel plains

of parts of the Sahara or indeed in sub-saharan plainlands where they must have been devastatingly effective against groups of mobile peoples caught in the open you know along with the garamantian cavalry so i suspect the chariot is as much a weapon of slaving as a warfare as such once again that's very interesting how it seems to be there are different levels of Garamantean military ability. It had these slaving raids, horrible, but also it had the ability to send these large armies into the field, which I guess must also emphasise the sophisticated structure of the Garamantes in antiquity. Yes, again, I think we ought to reflect on the composition of Garamantean society.

Our ancient sources are ambiguous about this. Some of them seem to imply that they are Mediterranean Africans, what we might call Berbers in a modern sense. Some of them are equally insistent that they were black Africans. The reality is probably a mixture of both of those elements. The reality is probably a mixture of both of those elements. Linguistically, the Garamantes seem to link with the Berber communities, but the skeletal evidence that we've looked at shows that they are made up of a great mixture of people, including both black African types and more Mediterranean types, and a lot of variation in between. more Mediterranean types, and a lot of variation in between. It's pretty clear, we don't have a clear association of, let's say, white Garamantes being dominant over black Garamantes. So it's not

as simple as saying, oh, well, the black Africans are simply being brought in as slaves and exploited by Garamantes. Black Garamantes seem also to be amongst the elite groups. So this is a well-assimilated, multi-ethnic society over time. Well, David, this chat and your archaeological work over recent history has been absolutely remarkable in bringing this ancient civilization to light and explaining that it was not what we should initially believe from the Greco-Roman sources, I find it absolutely extraordinary what this archaeology is telling us about how sophisticated this ancient culture was. Yeah, and just really perhaps to return to those Greco-Roman sources, people do often ask me, why are they so far out? And it's very clear from the evidence we have of close contact over many centuries between Roman traders and the Garamantes, there's no shortage of reports of the reality on the ground getting back to Roman society. So it's very clear, really,

that these stereotypes are the image of the Garamantes that the Romans want to believe in and it reflects a general tendency in imperial societies I think to downplay the cultural achievements of subject peoples and neighbours or rivals beyond. It's a popular image of the world as the Romans wanted to see it or wanted to think of it. It's not a representation of reality. And it's a good reminder, really, of how bringing archaeology and the historical sources together really enriches our picture of the ancient world. David, that's a brilliant way to wrap it up. Not the way the Romans wanted to portray it. You are bringing it to light. You're bringing the reality to light. That's absolutely fascinating and amazing work. What is next on the project for you, David?

Well, my work in Libya, unfortunately, has been at a standstill since the 2011 Civil War, which, as you know, is still ongoing. In the meantime, I have been able to do some new field work in southern Morocco. And one of the great things about that project is I'm starting to put together the same sort of story for another desert people known as the Gaituli who are showing similar sort of signs of precocious oasis development and so on to the Garamantian story. So that's my next desire to get back out there although at the moment I'm stymied by the current COVID pandemic, unfortunately, but as are we all, I think. I see. Oh, that's absolutely brilliant. Oh, the Guy Tooley, another future podcast, I am sure. And David, you mentioned these book plugs earlier,

these free resources. Would you like to mention them again quickly? If people just Google Society for Libyan Studies and follow the link through to their publications page, there are four books that my team published on the Garamantean archaeology available to download freely from that website. David, amazing chat. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for inviting me, Tristan. It's been a great pleasure.