Free The Sahara by Eamonn Gearon Page A

until it stretched the length of Rome’s southern border, from Mauretania to Tripolitania. In a brilliant piece of soldiering, Balbus crushed the unrest, marching his army four hundred miles into the desert and capturing the cities of Cydamae, modern Ghadames, and Garama, the capital of Phazzania, from which we take the name Fezzan. As a result of this campaign, Balbus was granted Roman citizenship and was honoured with a triumphal parade in Rome, the first time a foreign-born Roman was afforded such an honour. But in spite of Roman claims that the Garamantes were now absorbed into the Roman Empire, intermittent raids continued. Although the Garamantes were from this time nominally under Roman control, without a garrison in Garama, Roman control always had its limits.
    Rome elected to march again on Garama, now employing the latest military advances and attacking for the first time in Roman history with a camel cavalry, which enabled their forces to venture deeper into the desert and faster than previously. The Garamantes knew they were outmanoeuvred, losing the advantage that isolation had once given them.
    Regardless, the Garamantes again launched attacks against Roman coastal settlements, prompting Tacitus in his Annals to write in 70 CE that they were “ungovernable”, adding “the Garamantes [are] a wild race incessantly occupied in robbing their neighbours.” As late as 400 CE, the Numidian rebel Gildo recruited a Garamantean army to join him in a war against Rome.
    Over time, however, Romano-Garamantean relations improved, in part because of growth in trade between the two, which meant there was more to be gained from trading than raiding. Even so, the impermanence of peace between Rome and the Garamantes led to the construction of “limes” - defensive borders that marked the limit of Roman territory in North Africa and across the whole of Europe. The most famous of these is Hadrian’s Wall, or Limes Britannicus, in the north of England, built to keep the marauding Picts in their place, that is, in Scotland.
     

    The ruins of Garama
     
    Looking south across the Sahara, the Limes Tripolitanus acted not just as a defensive wall but also the point at which the Romans collected taxes on goods coming into their territory. Many records, kept on clay ostrakas , have survived, such as those discovered at Gholaia, Libya, stating that there crossed into Roman lands on a certain day “Garamantes bearing barley, four mules and four asses”, while another fragment mentions “Garamantes leading four asses.”
    From the perspective of the Garamantes, the collapse of Roman rule in North Africa marked the end of a valuable trading partner. When the Vandals became the dominant power in the region, their rule did not extend as far as the Fezzan, and while this provided the region with a greater degree of independence than had previously been the case, it also meant economic decline for the Garamantes and other former trading partners of the Romans.
    In modern times, Libya’s leader Colonel Gaddafi drew inspiration from the Garamantes when he inaugurated the so-called Great Man-made River Project. This engineering feat in the desert, which extracts water at a rate of230 million cubic feet per day, should be a source of worry for the country’s future rather than the blessing it was trumpeted as. Today the land that failed to sustain the Garamantes’ water-heavy agricultural economy is green once again, but the underground tunnels lie unused, replaced by the modern means of drilling and pumping water. The ancient city was not finally abandoned untill937. In the new town water levels continue to drop and at least in the short-term future the inhabitants of modern Germa are unlikely to see a return to the glory days when theirs was the capital of the Garamantes Empire.

Camels
     
“The camel has a single hump;
The dromedary, two;
Or else the other way around.
I’m never sure. Are you?”
    Ogden Nash, “The