Salt from the Garamantes

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It is safe to say that few, if any, readers of Archaeology Odyssey have heard of the Garamantes. For about a thousand years, from about 500 B.C. to 600 A.D., however, they lived in the southwestern part of what is now Libya; then they disappeared from history—not long before the Arab-Islamic invasion. The area they inhabited, known today as Fezzan, is called Phasania in Roman sources. It includes vast areas of desert with large oases, as well as mountain ranges cut by deep wadis.

What first attracted modern investigators to the area was the prehistoric rock art in the Tadrart Akakus mountain range. In the 1950s a team from the University of Rome, under the direction of Italian rock-art specialist Fabrizio Mori, began recording and interpreting these important paintings, which are now included in UNESCO’s list of World Heritage sites. Mori was soon joined by archaeologists who specialized in prehistoric periods. By digging stratified deposits both in the caves and in open-area sites, they were able to place the rock-art sites in their proper environmental and cultural context. In the early 1990s, they were joined by the brilliant geo-archaeologist Mauro Cremaschi, who systematically surveyed and recorded over 1,300 sites.

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The rock paintings were made over thousands of years, and they can now be dated according to content and stylistic features. The late Paleolithic period (40,000–10,000 B.C.) is characterized by paintings in the “wild fauna” style; the Mesolithic period (10,000–6,000 B.C.), by paintings in the “round heads” style; and the Neolithic, or pastoral, period (6,000–5,000 B.C.), by paintings in the “bovidian” style. Interestingly, artists continued to make paintings on rocks into the Garamantian period, but these later creations, done in the “horse” style, are not as technically accomplished or beautiful as the prehistoric drawings. The rock art from the medieval Islamic period, known as the “camel” style, is also lower in quality than are the paintings of prehistoric periods.

The rock paintings, together with the archaeological finds, allow us to trace environmental and social changes that form the background of the Garamantian period. We can now understand the Garamantian civilization in the context of what the 20th-century French historian Fernand Braudel called the longue durée.

From about 8000 to 3000 B.C. Fezzan, as well as the central Sahara in general, was a kind of savanna with plenty of rain that created year-round lakes, substantial pastureland and acacia trees. Late Paleolithic engravings include images of elephants and giraffes, but the most common game animal was the barbary sheep (ammotragus lervia), which was hunted 023and even domesticated. From about 6000 B.C., we find evidence of a well-established pastoral economy, with large herds of cattle bred in extensive pastures around the shores of lakes and ponds. Human occupation was quite diffuse throughout this period.

Gradually the climate became drier, which changed how land was used and where human beings settled. The period from about 3000 to 500 B.C. was characterized by less-abundant pastures, by seasonal and smaller ponds, by goat breeding instead of cattle breeding, and by transhumant (migratory) pastoralism between mountains and lowlands.

The following Garamantian period was even drier. Extensive pastoralism became more difficult and new kinds of human exploitation of the environment became necessary. Oases now became centers for specialized agriculture, especially the cultivation of date palms. The Garamantes also developed an important new technology—an underground irrigation system, known as the foggara system—especially in the area of their capital city at Germa. (For a description of the foggara system, see the accompanying article by David Mattingly.)

Something else happened: Intensive long-distance trade across the Sahara became important. And it was largely controlled by the Garamantes, who introduced the horse to pull light chariots and later the dromedary (a single-humped camel, 024often bred for riding), which became the common pack animal of trans-Saharan caravans.

This long-distance trade was based on salt, which was critical for preserving meat and other foods and for human consumption. Salt was exported from the Saharan and sub-Saharan regions, where it is found in dry lake basins, to tropical Africa, which is almost completely lacking in salt. The Garamantes exchanged salt for gold (in the upper Niger basin), slaves and exotic goods, which were transported to the Mediterranean coast and traded to Egypt for manufactured products—such as the glass and metal artifacts found in the royal tombs at the Garamantian capital, Germa.

When Professor Mori retired, I was asked to assume direction of the expedition to the land of the Garamantes. Although I was by no means an expert in Saharan archaeology (my field of activity until then had been the history and archaeology of the ancient Near East), I saw this new challenge as the only way to save and exploit the enormous amount of material that had already been collected. In addition to continuing the geo-archaeological surveys (under Mauro Cremaschi) and prehistoric excavations (under Savino Di Lernia), I decided to excavate a Garamantian fortress not far from Libya’s Algerian border. The fortress is called, in the Berber language, Aghram Nadharif (the City of Salt), after the commodity that formed the heart of the Garamantian trade from one oasis to another.

Aghram Nadharif served as a Garamantian checkpoint for long-distance trade. Located at the edge of the Barkat oasis, on the Wadi Tanezzuft, the site dominates the passage between the Tadrart Akakus and Tassili mountain ranges, the only accessible route from Fezzan south to the Chad basin and southwest to the Niger bend.

The “City of Salt” was a walled settlement, measuring about 460 feet by 160 feet. The mostly preserved citadel wall, built of stone blocks, is now covered with sand on the western side. It had three entrances with access ramps, along with 025a series of towers; two towers on the eastern side remain fairly well preserved.

Inside the city wall was a labyrinth of streets bordered by houses, now collapsed and partly covered with desert sand. Significantly, there does not seem to have been any large public building at Aghram Nadharif. A typical house had two rooms, enclosing about 200 to 300 square feet of living space, and was built of sandstone blocks, with the inside walls covered with mud plaster containing limestone fragments. The floors were made of compacted sand and mud. Protecting Aghram Nadharif’s ancient inhabitants from the blazing desert sun were flat roofs made of wooden beams and rough plaster.

Our first order of business was to make a topographical survey and to take some soundings. With the help of sophisticated computer programs, we were able to produce two- and three-dimensional maps of the entire site. Then we began to excavate.

The houses, and presumably the entire citadel, had been built on bedrock, which had been smoothed over in places and studded with holes for the wooden poles that supported the buildings and their roofs. For storing food, the inhabitants dug shallow pits and lined them with plaster (we found date stones in the plaster).

So far, we have excavated two houses and a street. To reach the occupation level, we had to dig through an accumulation of sand and collapsed rubble. Some stone blocks from the walls rested in the upper layers of the fill, indicating that the deterioration had occurred gradually over centuries. The remains of pottery and carbonized beams were concentrated near the bottom of the fill, just above the floors. Also at the lowest levels were mudbricks, which had been used for various purposes (perhaps as tables or benches) inside the houses.

The excavated rooms, and presumably the entire citadel, were probably not destroyed by a sudden, violent attack. Rather, they were first abandoned and then, over time, they eventually collapsed. Was Aghram Nadharif abandoned all at 026once, or did it gradually fall into disuse? Further excavations, we hope, will answer these questions. Interestingly, we have not discovered many useful, everyday items—such as amulets, tools or cooking implements. Maybe these items were carried away when the site was abandoned—or maybe they were looted by plunderers in later times. Most of the wooden poles, too, are missing (we found just some carbonized wood in the street), and the houses are empty except for a few sherds.

Numerous pottery fragments, however, were found above the street. The local Garamantian pottery (a late development of what scholars call Late Pastoral ceramics) is not easy to date. But we were lucky enough to find several fragments of imported Roman amphoras of the types Tripolitana 1–3, which date around the third century A.D. and were used to store and transport olive oil. One fragment had a neo-Punic graffito, the southernmost example found so far. The date provided by comparative analysis of the amphoras has been confirmed by two radiocarbon datings. (One test dated the sample to 1,880 years before the present, plus or minus 75 years; the other test dated the sample to 1,769 years before the present, plus or minus 70 years.)

Around the third century A.D., the Garamantes were using this citadel in connection with trans-Saharan trade. The imported Roman pottery we found consists only of commercial amphoras (for transporting olive oil) and not fine tableware (such as bowls, plates or goblets)—suggesting that the Garamantes were involved in long-distance trade. Even more interesting, Aghram Nadharif is not an isolated fortress; instead, it seems to have 027functioned as the central stopping place in a caravan network. About 15 miles to the south, in the direction of the Chad route, we identified another, smaller Garamantian castle; this round structure, about 150 feet in diameter, was built of similar masonry and contained similar pottery fragments. There was possibly another settlement at Fehwet, southwest of Ghat along the general route crossing the Tassili Mountains and leading toward the Niger bend. The Ghat-Barkat oasis was an important stopover in the trans-Saharan trade during Islamic times, and we now believe that it had served this purpose much earlier, at least as far back as the Garamantes.

So this oasis, and the Aghram Nadharif citadel itself, was probably the Garamantes’ “southern gate,” forming the border between the Garamantian kingdom and other sub-Saharan kingdoms. Before this picture can be confirmed, however, we will have to enlarge our excavation and make test soundings at the smaller castle and in Fehwet. Still, the scenario already seems clear.

Aghram Nadharif is important for two reasons. The first is practical: This site offers an unusual opportunity to excavate a well-preserved Garamantian citadel without later occupation levels—making it relatively easy to uncover (although, for obvious logistic reasons, nothing is really easy in the desert). The Garamantian capital at Germa, on the other hand, where an English mission is presently at work, is covered by some 13 feet of medieval occupation layers, so the task of reaching the Garamantian levels requires much hard work.

More importantly, our citadel helps to establish the kinds of relations the 028Garamantian kingdom had with emerging polities in the sub-Saharan (Sahelo-Sudanese) belt, that is, in the Niger bend and the Chad basin. Our study of this southern tier of the Garamantian kingdom suggests that the classical sources do not give an accurate picture of the Garamantes. First, those sources deal only with the north, with relations between Fezzan and the Mediterranean coast; our excavations, however, indicate a thriving Garamantian presence in the south. Second, the ancient sources describe the Garamantes as dangerous and hostile raiders and brigands. But we now know that they carried on a long-distance trade, from the Mediterranean region in the north to tropical Africa in the south. How likely is it that such a complex commercial network was maintained by bands of thieves?

Now the Garamantes have a new suit of clothes: Their kingdom was probably a full-fledged, complex state whose political and economic relevance derived from its key position in controlling the trans-Saharan trade. They were therefore the essential intermediaries—or even the principal players—in the contacts between the Mediterranean and tropical African worlds. It was not by chance that the collapse of the Garamantian state paralleled the collapse of the Roman Empire, eventually leading to a different kind of trans-Saharan trade. After the Arab conquest of north Africa, Saharan trade became based on groups of caravaner peoples moving from oasis to oasis. No longer was it sustained by a rich, complex state in the middle of the Sahara Desert.

It is safe to say that few, if any, readers of Archaeology Odyssey have heard of the Garamantes. For about a thousand years, from about 500 B.C. to 600 A.D., however, they lived in the southwestern part of what is now Libya; then they disappeared from history—not long before the Arab-Islamic invasion. The area they inhabited, known today as Fezzan, is called Phasania in Roman sources. It includes vast areas of desert with large oases, as well as mountain ranges cut by deep wadis. What first attracted modern investigators to the area was the prehistoric rock art in the […]