Josephine Quinn
speaker
144 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 11 Jun
Josephine Quinn’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
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 Garimantian 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.
What's so interesting, so picking up from what David's saying about progressive barbarisation, what you see with the Garamantes 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 BC.
So 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.
Exactly.
In his book, The Histories, yes.
And he picks out the oasis of Garam and the Garamantes.
He says they are a great and 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 ground, 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 these are very fancy cows.
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