The Garamantes ( grc, Γαράμαντες, translit=Garámantes; la, Garamantes) were an ancient civilisation based primarily in present-day

Libya Libya (; ar, ليبيا, Lībiyā), officially the State of Libya ( ar, دولة ليبيا, Dawlat Lībiyā), is a country in the Maghreb region in North Africa. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Suda ...

. They most likely descended from

Iron Age The Iron Age is the final epoch of the three-age division of the prehistory and protohistory of humanity. It was preceded by the Stone Age ( Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic) and the Bronze Age ( Chalcolithic). The concept has been mostl ...

Berber tribes from the Sahara, although the earliest known record of their existence dates to the fifth century BC. Little remains of their civilization, as their epigraphy is nearly indecipherable; much of what is known comes from contemporaneous Greek and Roman foreign accounts and modern archaeological findings. The Garamantes emerged as a major regional power in the mid-second century AD, establishing a kingdom that spanned roughly in the

Fezzan Fezzan ( , ; ber, ⴼⵣⵣⴰⵏ, Fezzan; ar, فزان, Fizzān; la, Phazania) is the southwestern region of modern Libya. It is largely desert, but broken by mountains, uplands, and dry river valleys (wadis) in the north, where oases enable ...

region of southern Libya. Their growth and expansion rested on a complex and extensive

qanat A qanat or kārīz is a system for transporting water from an aquifer or water well to the surface, through an underground aqueduct; the system originated approximately 3,000 BC in what is now Iran. The function is essentially the same across ...

irrigation Irrigation (also referred to as watering) is the practice of applying controlled amounts of water to land to help grow crops, landscape plants, and lawns. Irrigation has been a key aspect of agriculture for over 5,000 years and has been devel ...

system (known as ''foggaras'' in Berber), which supported a strong agricultural economy and large population. They subsequently developed the first urban society in a major desert that was not centered on a river system; their largest town, Garama, had a population of around four thousand, with an additional six thousand living in surrounding suburban areas. At its height, the Garamantian kingdom "... enjoy da standard of living far superior to that of any other ancient Saharan society". The Garamantes annexed and dominated surrounding tribes and relied heavily on enslaved people for their prosperity. The state began to decline in the fifth century as their source of water diminished, causing their kingdom to fragment and ultimately become annexed by surrounding powers. Until the mid-20th century, the Garamantes were believed to be a small and minor desert tribe. Beginning in the 1960s, archaeological excavations have revealed that the Garamantes were "brilliant farmers, resourceful engineers, and enterprising merchants who produced a remarkable civilization".

History

The execution of the Garamantes in the Amphitheater of Lepcis Magna

The Garamantes were probably present as a tribe in the

by 1000 BC. They appear in the written record for the first time in the 5th century BC. According to

Herodotus Herodotus ( ; grc, , }; BC) was an ancient Greek historian and geographer A geographer is a physical scientist, social scientist or humanist whose area of study is geography, the study of Earth's natural environment and human society ...

, they were "a very great nation" who herded cattle, farmed dates, and hunted the Ethiopian cave-dwellers who lived in the desert, from four-horse chariots. Roman depictions describe them as bearing ritual scars and tattoos.

Tacitus Publius Cornelius Tacitus, known simply as Tacitus ( , ; – ), was a Roman historian and politician. Tacitus is widely regarded as one of the greatest Roman historians by modern scholars. The surviving portions of his two major works—the ...

wrote that they assisted the rebel

Tacfarinas Tacfarinas ( Latinised form of Berber Tikfarin or Takfarin; died AD 24) was a Numidian Berber from Thagaste, located in the province of Proconsular Africa (now Souk Ahras, in Algeria), who was a deserter from the Roman army who led his own Mus ...

and raided Roman coastal settlements. According to

Pliny the Elder Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23/2479), called Pliny the Elder (), was a Roman author, naturalist and natural philosopher, and naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and a friend of the emperor Vespasian. He wrote the encyclopedic ' ...

, Romans eventually grew tired of Garamantian raiding and Lucius Cornelius Balbus captured fifteen of their settlements in 19 BC. In 202,

Septimius Severus Lucius Septimius Severus (; 11 April 145 – 4 February 211) was Roman emperor from 193 to 211. He was born in Leptis Magna (present-day Al-Khums, Libya) in the Roman province of Africa. As a young man he advanced through the customary suc ...

captured the capital city of Garama. NE 600ad

By around 150 AD, the Garamantian kingdom (in today's central Libya (Fezzan), principally along the still existing Wadi al-Ajal), covered 180,000 square kilometres in modern-day southern Libya. It lasted from about 400 BC to 600 AD. The decline of the Garamantian culture may have been connected to worsening climatic conditions, or overuse of water resources. What is desert today was once fairly good agricultural land and was enhanced through the Garamantian irrigation system 1,500 years ago. As

fossil water Fossil water or paleowater is an ancient body of water that has been contained in some undisturbed space, typically groundwater in an aquifer, for millennia. Other types of fossil water can include subglacial lakes, such as Antarctica's Lake Vos ...

is a

non-renewable resource A non-renewable resource (also called a finite resource) is a natural resource that cannot be readily replaced by natural means at a pace quick enough to keep up with consumption. An example is carbon-based fossil fuels. The original organic mat ...

, over the six centuries of the Garamantian kingdom, the

ground water Groundwater is the water present beneath Earth's surface in rock and soil pore spaces and in the fractures of rock formations. About 30 percent of all readily available freshwater in the world is groundwater. A unit of rock or an unconsolidate ...

level fell. The kingdom declined and fragmented. The last news about Garamantes dates back to the 6th to 7th century. From Byzantine sources it is known that in 569 their king, probably a client king of the Byzantines, accepted Christianity. Muslim documents later state that in 668, the king of the Garamants was imprisoned and dragged away in chains. Eventually the whole region was absorbed into the area of Islamic influence.

Society

In the 1960s, archaeologists excavated part of the Garamantes' capital at modern

Germa Germa ( ar, جرمة), known in ancient times as Garama, is an archaeological site in Libya. It was the capital of the Garamantian Kingdom. The Garamantes were a Berber people living in the Fezzan in the northeastern Sahara Desert. Garamantian p ...

(situated around 150 km west of modern-day Sabha) and named it ''Garama'' (an earlier capital, Zinchecra, was located not far from the later Garama). Current research indicates that the Garamantes had about eight major towns, three of which have been examined . In addition they had a large number of other settlements. Garama had a population of around four thousand and another six thousand living in villages within a 5 km radius. The Garamantes were farmers and merchants. Their diet consisted of

grape A grape is a fruit, botanically a berry, of the deciduous woody vines of the flowering plant genus '' Vitis''. Grapes are a non- climacteric type of fruit, generally occurring in clusters. The cultivation of grapes began perhaps 8,000 years a ...

fig The fig is the edible fruit of ''Ficus carica'', a species of small tree in the flowering plant family Moraceae. Native to the Mediterranean and western Asia, it has been cultivated since ancient times and is now widely grown throughout the world ...

barley Barley (''Hordeum vulgare''), a member of the grass family, is a major cereal grain grown in temperate climates globally. It was one of the first cultivated grains, particularly in Eurasia as early as 10,000 years ago. Globally 70% of barley p ...

, and

wheat Wheat is a grass widely cultivated for its seed, a cereal grain that is a worldwide staple food. The many species of wheat together make up the genus ''Triticum'' ; the most widely grown is common wheat (''T. aestivum''). The archaeologi ...

. They traded wheat,

salt Salt is a mineral composed primarily of sodium chloride (NaCl), a chemical compound belonging to the larger class of salts; salt in the form of a natural crystalline mineral is known as rock salt or halite. Salt is present in vast quant ...

, and slaves in exchange for imported

wine Wine is an alcoholic drink typically made from fermented grapes. Yeast consumes the sugar in the grapes and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Different varieties of grapes and strains of yeasts are m ...

, olive oil,

oil lamp An oil lamp is a lamp used to produce light continuously for a period of time using an oil-based fuel source. The use of oil lamps began thousands of years ago and continues to this day, although their use is less common in modern times. Th ...

s and Roman

tableware Tableware is any dish or dishware used for setting a table, serving food, and dining. It includes cutlery, glassware, serving dishes, and other items for practical as well as decorative purposes. The quality, nature, variety and number of o ...

. According to Strabo and

Pliny Pliny may refer to: People * Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE), ancient Roman nobleman, scientist, historian, and author of ''Naturalis Historia'' (''Pliny's Natural History'') * Pliny the Younger (died 113), ancient Roman statesman, orator, w ...

, the Garamantes quarried

amazonite Amazonite, also known as Amazonstone, is a green tectosilicate mineral, a variety of the potassium feldspar called microcline. Its chemical formula is KAlSi3O8, which is polymorphic to orthoclase. Its name is taken from that of the Amazon Rive ...

in the

Tibesti Mountains The Tibesti Mountains are a mountain range in the central Sahara, primarily located in the extreme north of Chad, with a small portion located in southern Libya. The highest peak in the range, Emi Koussi, lies to the south at a height of and i ...

. In 2011, Nikita et al. reported that Garamantes skeletons do not suggest regular warfare or strenuous activities. "The Garamantes exhibited low

sexual dimorphism Sexual dimorphism is the condition where the sexes of the same animal and/or plant species exhibit different morphological characteristics, particularly characteristics not directly involved in reproduction. The condition occurs in most an ...

in the upper limbs, which is consistent to the pattern found in agricultural populations and implies that the engagement of males in warfare and construction works was not particularly intense. ..the Garamantes did not appear systematically more robust than other North African populations occupying less harsh environments, indicating that life in the Sahara did not require particularly strenuous daily activities."

Archaeological remains

Archaeological ruins associated with the Garamantian kingdom include numerous tombs, forts, and cemeteries. The Garamantes constructed a network of tunnels, and shafts to mine the

from under the limestone layer under the desert sand. The dating of these

foggara A qanat or kārīz is a system for transporting water from an aquifer or water well to the surface, through an underground aqueduct; the system originated approximately 3,000 BC in what is now Iran. The function is essentially the same across ...

is disputed, they appear between 200 BC to 200 AD but continued to be in use until at least the 7th century and perhaps later. The network of tunnels is known to Berbers as ''Foggaras''. The network allowed agriculture to flourish, and used a system of

slave labor Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perf ...

to keep it maintained.

Marta Mirazón Lahr Dr. Marta Mirazón Lahr (born 1965) is a palaeoanthropologist and Director of the Duckworth Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Academic career Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Mirazon Lahr graduated in Biology from the University of São ...

conducted research on skeletons from

dating to the Roman era and found that the skeletons most closely matched Neolithic Sahelian samples, from Chad,

Mali Mali (; ), officially the Republic of Mali,, , ff, 𞤈𞤫𞤲𞥆𞤣𞤢𞥄𞤲𞤣𞤭 𞤃𞤢𞥄𞤤𞤭, Renndaandi Maali, italics=no, ar, جمهورية مالي, Jumhūriyyāt Mālī is a landlocked country in West Africa. Mal ...

, and

Niger ) , official_languages = , languages_type = National languagesnorthern Africa North Africa, or Northern Africa is a region encompassing the northern portion of the African continent. There is no singularly accepted scope for the region, and it is sometimes defined as stretching from the Atlantic shores of Mauritania in t ...

. In 2011, the biological affinities of the Garamantes were examined using cranial nonmetric traits and the Mean Measure of Divergence and Mahalanobis D(2). They were compared to other North African populations, including the Egyptian, Algerian, Tunisian and Sudanese, roughly contemporary to them. Overall, three clusters were identified: (1) the Garamantes, (2) Gizeh and Kerma, and (3) Soleb, Alexandrians, Algerians and Carthagians. The analysis concluded that the Garamantes were isolated, with the Sahara playing a role as a barrier to geneflow. The distance between the Garamantes and their neighbors was high and the population appeared to be an outlier.

References

Bibliography

* N. Barley (Review). Reviewed work(s): Les chars rupestres sahariens: des syrtes au Niger, par le pays des Garamantes et des Atlantes by Henri Lhote Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies,

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree ...

, Vol. 48, No. 1 (1985), pp. 210–210

External links