David Mattingly
speaker
188 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 11 Jun
David Mattingly’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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.
Well, exactly.
Water is the key for any oasis cultivation.
In the initial stages, the Garamantes are perhaps using one or two relic spring lines, still active from that wet phase, but gradually drying out, probably in the course of the first millennium BCE.
But around 400 CE, 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 foggerer.
Now, the foggerer... Can you tell us about the foggerer?
Yes.
The foggerer is the North African version of a technology that we also know in Iran and in Arabia, where it's known as the kanat or the falaj.
And this is an underground irrigation channel that leads running water out to the area of gardens in the centre of the valley.
Well, there's a mother well 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 foggerer 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 tunnelled sections.
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