PicoBlog

The red pin in the Google Maps screenshot above marks the location of Germa, an archaeological site in the Wadi al-Ajal area of the remote Fezzan region of Libya. Two thousand years ago, it was known as Garama, and was the capital city of the great civilization of the Garamantes. Once thought to be mere “desert barbarians” annoying Roman colonies in North Africa, recent evidence from digs at Germa and other sites has shown that the Garamantes were a complex, populous, urbanized state, with large-scale agriculture, continent-spanning trade networks, and extensive public works projects. The Garamantian civilization lasted over one thousand years, from around 900 BCE to about 600-700 CE. At its height, it was a contemporary and local rival of the Roman Empire, sometimes trading with Rome and sometimes fighting wars against their North African provinces.

Astute readers may note that this doesn’t make a lick of sense. Germa is right in the middle of the Sahara Desert, miles from anything that could reasonably be described as “arable land”. If you zoom in on Google Maps, the site today is surrounded by the browns and beiges of sand dunes and rock, with barely a stick of greenery to be found.

True, the Sahara was once much wetter and more hospitable during the “African humid period” about 6,000-5,000 years ago, but this is well before our period of interest: it was well and truly the sandy, rocky waste we know and love by the time the Garamantes were at their height. And ancient civilizations are supposed to form around rivers and fertile river valleys, right? Like Egypt and the Nile, Mesopotamia around the Tigris and Euphrates, India around the Indus and Ganges, China around the Yangtze and Huang He, pre-imperial Rome around the Tiber, or Cahokia around the Mississippi. Or at least a fertile valley with lots of interconnected lakes, like the Valley of Mexico which supported the rise of Teotihuacan and the Mexica, or some really productive wetlands, like the marshes around Angkor or the ancient Amazonian cities in the Xingu River Basin and the Llanos de Moxos? Or maybe even dependent on the sea, like possibly the Norte Chico culture of Peru…but in any case, with water. How could the Garamantes have sustained any kind of large human population in the middle of the Sahara?

The Garamantes managed to build a civilization in the middle of the desert, in a climate with a few centimeters of rain a year (“frequently with none whatever for several years at a stretch”), because they were mining fossil water. This sounds like a needlessly fancy way of saying “using groundwater,” but it’s an important conceptual difference, because groundwater in most places gets regularly replenished by precipitation percolating through the soil. The Garamantes were using groundwater that had been built up during the African Humid Period and wasn’t being meaningfully replenished. They distributed the water through the landscape with a vast network of foggara irrigation canals. Archaeologists have found over 550 foggara canals in the Wadi al-Ajal region alone: there may well have been many, many more.

Now “irrigation canals” is a very imprecise term, so it’s important to clarify here that whatever you’re imagining the foggaras may have been, you probably need to be thinking bigger. These weren’t just “ditches a farming village dug,” but epic monumental construction projects. The foggara canals were underground (presumably because surface canals would have lost vast amounts of water to evaporation), and could be up to 50 meters deep, with most of them stretching for kilometers, gradually becoming more shallow as they went on, from aquifers deep below rock to irrigating surface farm plots. The foggaras even had “regularly spaced vertical shafts” for maintenance. Given the difficulty of doing this in the Sahara (with hand tools! starting before 500 BCE!), this arguably deserves to be remembered as an ancient engineering feat up there with the Pyramids or the Nazca Lines.

It’s estimated that the 550 known foggara canals required at least 72,000 man-years of labor to build, and considerably more to maintain. That’s the equivalent of 7,200 men working exclusively on this for ten years, or 720 men for 100 years, or (although this would be pretty unlikely) 72 men for 1,000 years. And someone had to have been feeding those workers, and making their tools and clothes, and bringing them water, and generally running the kind of civilization that could support this kind of project.

And we see that the Garamantes were indeed an impressive civilization, with substantial material wealth. The Garamantes seem to have just had a lot of stuff, with crops and goods from across Africa and Eurasia finding their way to cities in the middle of the Sahara. After reviewing some of the archaeological literature, here’s a partial list of some of the stuff we know was there in Gerama and some of the over 1,000 Garamantian cities, forts, villages, and other sites found in the region.

• Sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs, and eventually horses, camels, and chickens as well.

• Eurasian crops like wheat, barley, date palms, and grapes. (Grapes! In the middle of the Sahara!)

• Later on, the introduction of crops from Sub-Saharan Africa, like pearl millet, sorghum and cotton

• Mausolea in the Roman transition and mastaba tombs in the Egyptian tradition

• Interesting “mini-pyramid” tombs that seem uniquely Garamantian.

• A Roman-style bath

• A stone-columned temple, possibly to the god Ammon, a deity originally from Egypt but widely popular in many other civilizations.

• Fine ceramics, fine glassware, and amphorae of wine and olive oil, almost certainly trade goods from the Roman Empire.

• A range of items that were likely trade goods from sub-Saharan Africa, including hippo ivory, ebony beads, and cowrie shells

• “Abundant evidence for craft activity…including weaving, metal-working and ostrich eggshell bead production.”

• Human skeletons that seem to resemble those of modern day Berbers/north Africans, human skeletons that seem to resemble those of modern day sub-Saharan Africans, and human skeletons with a mixture of traits from both ethnic groups. (Yes, it seems creepy to this writer too to be classifying ancient humans into ethnic groups by their skeletons, like something out of the 19th century. But that’s what the archaeological literature on the Garamantes says). We don’t know what these peoples’ lives or social status were like, but they seem to have been integrated with Garamantian society. One skeleton in particular, of a young sub-Saharan African woman wearing a lip plug similar to those still used by many African tribes, was buried in a Garamantian cemetery, seeming to indicate some degree of diversity and multiculturalism in the society.

• A study analyzing Garamantian skeletons’ bone rigidity, sexual dimorphism, and other factors found that “the Garamantes did not appear systematically more robust than other North African populations occupying less harsh environments, indicating that life in the Sahara did not require particularly strenuous daily activities.” This may have been a civilization with something akin to a semi-leisured “middle class” like those of classical Greece or Rome, or at least well-organized enough that daily life wasn’t a constant onslaught of punishing manual labor.

However, the Garamantes weren’t some anachronistically progressive utopia: the famed Histories of Herodotus describe them as hunting “Ethiopians” from “four-horse chariots,” possibly for slave-raiding or just for sport. Their desert realm was very possibly a major center for slave trading in addition to goods trading, and perhaps a major conduit selling African slaves to the Roman Empire. It’s entirely possible that the workers building their irrigation canals were slaves as well. We don’t really know for certain.

And then, sometime before North Africa became Muslim in the 600s-700s, the Garamantes were just…gone. There’s no known dramatic event marking the Fall of The Garamantes, no huge invasion or lost war or volcanic eruption: the civilization and their amazing foggara system seem to have just faded out of existence. As one book summarizes, the sequence of events is unclear, but it seems linked to declining access to the vital fossil water.

“The foggara-fed landscape…evidently declined in the second half of the first millennium, although chronological precision is poor, heavily dependent as it is on dating from imported Roman/Byzantine wares, which had become fewer by this period and ceased nearly completely by the seventh century…The foggara-fed landscape of settlement and irrigation was replaced by a system of gardens based around wells, which could support a much smaller population and produce far less in the way of surplus; there are indications that this process began, and may have been completed, before the first Arab incursion into the region in 643…

“The water table [in the region] has indeed been dropping slowly and steadily for thousands of years. This process may have been exacerbated at times by climatic change and human overexploitation, but it may be that the Garamantes were simply able to exploit it during a window of a few centuries before the water table dropped beyond the reach of the available technologies. We can trace this process at work through the manifold efforts to prolong the life of the foggaras by works to deepen them and augment their flow…”

So what can we learn from the Garamantes today?

On one level, their story can be read as a classic 1970s-style environmental parable: they were dependent on a non-renewable resource (fossil water), they (may have) used it all up, or perhaps were just at the mercy of climactic shifts, and they eventually collapsed.

Even if this is true, though, it fundamentally ignores the timescale, and the magnitude of the Garamantes’ success. This writer feels like running an urbanized agriculture-dependent society based entirely on artificial irrigation in the middle of the Sahara Desert for over a thousand years should officially earn a civilization the Good At Water Management merit badge. The circumstances of the fall of the Garamantes are so uncertain that we can’t really make a definitive statement about why it happened. “This civilization fell because of X, therefore we should stop doing X” is a really tempting narrative structure that is wildly overused, often based on contradictory or unclear evidence.

Perhaps paradoxically, learning more about the Garamantes makes this writer feel a lot better about modern-day water use issues. There’s a lot of well-founded concern about managing Earth’s fresh water supplies in the age of climate change and a growing technological human civilization, especially in dry, heavily populated landscapes like the Nile and Colorado river valleys. The story of the Garamantes doesn’t take anything away from how serious that is, but it might perhaps inspire a little more faith in humans’ abilities to solve complex water-management problems.

Modern humans are the same species as the folks that made the desert bloom for a millennium using only Iron Age technology. And today, we have satellite imagery and drip-feed irrigation and mechanical excavators (now available fully electric!) and drought-tolerant genetically modified crops. We have a lot more tools to respond to water scarcity.

And, paradoxically because modern technological civilization’s water demands are so much greater than those of Iron Age agriculturalists, there’s a lot of water use cuts we can make if we have to without getting to the point of “people don’t have enough to drink.” A lot of fat to trim, so to speak. The Garamantes weren’t using their precious fossil water for golf courses in deserts or legions of suburban lawn sprinklers. This writer believes that we can, for example, keep the American West livable even as it enters a “megadrought”—as long as by “livable” you mean, “people get enough to drink and bathe,” not “anyone can do whatever the heck they want with as much water as they want” or “we keep providing subsidies to irrigation-dependent crops woefully unsuited to desert environments.”

Ultimately, an appropriate lesson we can draw from the Garamantes might be one of hope. Compared to “keep a preindustrial civilization alive and relatively prosperous for centuries in the middle of the Sahara,” the complex water-management tasks of the Anthropocene start to look…well, not easy, but certainly more doable. Also, lost ancient civilizations are just inherently pretty interesting! This writer hopes you enjoyed reading about this one.

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