Why the ancient people of the Sahara were called "great" back in 500 BC: Mysterious Garamant

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Once the territory of the Sahara was a much more prosperous place for life - where now the space was occupied by sand dunes, there were agricultural lands, and instead of small salt water bodies there were large freshwater lakes. Then, thousands of years ago, the Garamants lived in North Africa - a people that even scholars of antiquity called great.

Garamants - the people who inhabited the desert

They were a mysterious people, but still not one of those that appear only in legends. For the first time about the garamants - this is the name of the "great people" who inhabited a large territory of North Africa, wrote Herodotus. It was about 500 BC. In general, the main source of information about this people was the works of ancient authors - Strabo, Gaius Pliny the Elder, Tacitus, Claudius Ptolemy. Garamants are also mentioned in ancient Egyptian sources. In addition, the garamantes left behind interesting samples of rock art - they can be seen in the caves of Libya. The territory where the garamantes lived is a fairly large part of North Africa with access to the Mediterranean coast: the historical regions of Tripolitania, Fezzan (Fezzan), Marmarica. The main city was Garama - nowadays modern Jerma is located nearby. In addition to Garama, in which, according to historians, about four thousand people lived, the Garamantes had seven more large cities, and in addition - other, small settlements.

Garamanty mastered oases and wadis - drying up, temporary river beds; there were arranged irrigation systems, arable land, pastures, orchards. In terms of the level of organization of life, the Garamantes were seriously superior to the African tribes and even, possibly, Egypt, with which they sometimes entered, apparently, in military conflicts. True, the study of the remains of the garamantes, carried out by anthropologists, made it possible to establish that the representatives of this people did not engage in war on an ongoing basis - this is evidenced by the features of the skeleton.

Garamants built adobe houses and even palaces, cultivated grapes, figs, barley, and wheat. Apparently, as in neighboring Egypt, in Garamantida - the country of the Garamantes - slave labor was used. There was active trade with other states - most likely, the functioning of the trans-Saharan caravan route is also one of the merits of this people. To the north, to the Mediterranean countries, they brought slaves, gold, salt, wheat. They bought wine, olive oil, fabrics and dishes, weapons.

Such was the life of this people long before Herodotus; for thousands of years, the garamantes were the masters of vast lands in northern Africa, controlled a significant part of the Mediterranean coast, conducted trade, improved economic activities - until some time nothing threatened the existence of this ancient state.

People of the Sea

Very little is known to modern scientists about the kingdom of the Garamantes. Generally speaking, until the middle of the last century, this people, whose name was found in ancient sources, was considered a small tribe of the desert, and only archaeological excavations, begun in the sixties, showed that we are talking about an extremely developed ancient civilization. It is not easy to find any definite information about the garamant - one has to be content with only theories, because scientists do not yet have data on either the language or the writing of the garamantes, although there are some hypotheses regarding the found rock paintings; there is no information about important historical events for this state, it is not even known about the origin of this people.

It is believed that the garamantes are one of the "peoples of the sea" who arrived on the African continent in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. This happened at a time when the ancient world was seized by a crisis associated with the change of the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. "Sea Peoples" are those who arrived by ship to the coast of Africa, then moving inland. Perhaps it was as a result of such migration that the state of the Garamantes appeared.

At the head of Garamantida was the king, however, until the onset of the era of the Roman conquests, it was not possible to find any specific information about the rulers of this state. With the expansion of Rome in North Africa, the Garamante state lost its independence, but the domination of the Romans was rather unstable. The Garamantes supported the uprisings against the empire, while not entering into direct confrontation with the conquerors. It is known that in 89 the king of the Garamantes, Mrsis, came to Rome to meet with the emperor.

What is known and unknown about garamant

Future generations of archaeologists can only be envied - there are still many discoveries to be made in the wake of the existence of the Garamante state. Something like this might once look like the study of the civilization of Ancient Egypt, mysterious for Europeans. In the meantime, it remains to build theories and make assumptions that are difficult to prove and disprove. Perhaps the Meridovo Lake, which now bears the name Karun and is part of the famous Fayum oasis, was a man-made construction of garamantes, created to provide settlements with fresh water. Now this lake, shallow for unknown reasons, is salty, its water level is below sea level.

In any case, the appearance of underground galleries in this part of Africa, along which water moved, is associated with the garamants. Hidden from the scorching sun, these water streams were protected from drying out, and the length of such communications could be several kilometers. Some of them - and more than two hundred were discovered - operated until the 20th century - so outstanding was the engineering genius of the creators, who calculated everything to the smallest detail, including the level of elevation changes that contributed to the movement of water. dressed in white clothes, they wielded a bow, decorated their hair with ostrich feathers, and wore sandals on their feet. It is interesting that next to the person they depicted not camels, which were tamed later, but other draft animals - donkeys, horses, mules. The beliefs of the Garamantes are considered close to those of the Egyptians.

Roman rule did not destroy Garamantida, and she did not have to fear small African tribes. But several centuries after the fall of the great European empire, when the time of the Arab conquests came, the history of the Garamantes came to an end. In 668, as the chronicles say, Garama was captured by the Arabs without a fight, the last king was shackled and sent to Egypt. The Garamantes disappeared, gradually mixing with other peoples. It is believed that the Tuaregs became the descendants of the Garamantes, blue people of the Sahara, living under matriarchy, but even here there is no single point of view among scientists either.