To my shame I had never come across The Garamantes.
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| Ruins of the ancient city of Garma02, 2010 |
"Misha Glenny and guests discuss an ancient civilisation who lived over 2000 years ago in the southwest of modern-day Libya. During prehistoric times, the Sahara Desert was greener and even had large lakes, but for the last 5000 years it has been a hyperarid environment.
Extreme swings of temperature and limited surface water might make the Sahara seem like an inhospitable place to live, but an ancient people in North Africa known to us as the Garamantes thrived there.
Following descriptions of the Garamantes in Roman and Greek texts, the Garamantes have often been seen as pastoral nomads, or as tribal barbarians on the periphery of the Mediterranean world. But the work of archaeologists in recent decades has revealed something different.
Evidence suggests a society with flourishing towns and cities, complex underground irrigation systems, a key role in trade routes across the Sahara – and may give us a broader view of ancient history.
With David Mattingly, Emeritus Professor of Roman Archaeology at the University of Leicester, Farès 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, University of Cambridge
Producer: Martha Owen"
Location; In Our Time, BBC Radio 4
Picture; Ruins of the ancient city of Garma02, November 2010, Franzfoto, I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following licenses: GNU head Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.
