The Garamantes
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. The Sahara Desert might not seem like the most hospitable place to live, with extreme swings of temperature and limited water on the surface. Though around 2,000 years ago, an ancient people were thriving there, known to us as the Garamantes. The Garimentes are mentioned by Roman and Greek authors. Since then, they've often been seen as little more than tribal barbarians on the periphery of the Mediterranean world. But in recent decades, archaeology has revealed something rather different.
A society with flourishing towns and cities, complex underground irrigation systems, and a key role in trade routes across the Sahara. Well, with me to discuss the Garamantes are David Mattingly, Emeritus Professor of Roman Archaeology at the University of Leicester, Fares Moussa, Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton and Cultural Heritage Consultant, and Josephine Quinn, Professor of Ancient History and Fellow of St John's College at the University of Cambridge. Welcome to all of you. But, Josephine, I'd like to come to you first. Can you situate the Garamantes for us? When are we talking about and where exactly?
So yes, as you say, about 2,000 years ago, more specifically from about 1,000 BCE to about 600 or so CE, so over a long period of time, we're looking at a very large area across the Sahara from what's now southern Libya across to southern Algeria. And we're looking at this network of oasis settlements And the people who live there have learned to farm the desert. They are also traders who've made a kind of crossroads of the Sahara between north and south, east and west. But this is a very complex society. So these are people who have cities and temples. They forge metals. They make glass. They have monumental tombs for their dead. And we're talking about a really vast scale here as well. So there are hundreds of sites that we should at least call, say, village-sized in modern terms.
Some of them are a lot larger than that. And there are hundreds of thousands of tombs.
So why are they called the Garamantes? And is that what they call themselves?
That's a good question. So... The meaning of the word seems to change over time. So all of our testimonies of this word are external. You start off with Greek authors who seem to use the word to refer to a single oasis, a single large, powerful oasis. Later, you get Roman authors who explain that by their period, at least, there's a Garamantian kingdom based in a sort of capital Oasis. oasis of Garima. 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.
But fundamentally, the name derives from Garima, the settlement, the town.
Yes.
Faris Musa, let me go on to you. The Sahara, obviously, a pretty hostile environment. How did the Garimantes end up living there?
Yes, good question.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–14:34
2
Where and when did the Garamantes live in the Sahara?
14:34–30:58
3
How did climate change and aridification shape Garamantes settlement patterns?
30:58–41:52
4
What archaeological methods revealed Garamantes towns, tombs and artefacts?
41:52–59:57