The Garamantes, an ancient tribe that were located in south-western Libya, flourished about 3000 years ago. Living at the core of the Sahara desert they seemed to have had control of the trans-Saharan trade route. They appear in the area of Fezzan around 900 BC and continue until around 500 AD. Their culture grew in a hyper-arid environment and developed urbanisation (with around 8 major towns and many other small settlements), complex irrigation, trade routes, and a hierarchical, possibly slave using society.
Tacitus (4.50) describes them as:
“An indomitable tribe and one always engaged in brigandage on their neighbours.”
Rock depictions, made by the Garamantes, show two horse war chariots travelling in lines. Some believe that these represent the routes through the desert which the Garamantes controlled. The trade routes connected to Egypt, the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa. Their contact with other peoples is probably best shown by the number of Roman artefacts found in a Garamantian context, such as glassware, amphorae, bronze statues and architectural motifs. The Garamantes seem to have exported dates, salt, gold, semi precious stones, jewels and natron.
The “stones” which the Garamantes traded are said by Roman writers to have been so precious that even a small one was worth 40 gold staters. The Garamantes traded them to Carthage who, in turn, traded them and this trade helped Carthage become very wealthy. Pliny describes the stone as the “Garmantian carbuncle” which was also called the “Carthaginian carbuncle” because of the stones link to the wealth of Carthage. We don’t actually know what these precious stones actually were.
The Garamantes also seem to have been involved in both the capture and the trading of slaves from sub Saharan Africa.
Herodotus (IV 183-4) says:
“The Garamantes hunt the Troglodyte [cave dwelling] Ethiopians in four-horse chariots: for the Troglodytes are the fastest on their feet of all men that we know … they eat snakes, lizards and such reptiles, and they speak a language unlike any other- they shriek like bats.”
The “troglodytes” are probably the Negroid Tebu of the Tibesti mountains, and they seem to have “hunted” them to be slaves.
They developed similar funerary practices to other Saharan populations, i.e. key-hole monuments and antenna tombs, and they probably learned their irrigation techniques from the Egyptians.
In 21/20 BC the Roman pro-consul of Africa L. Cornelius Balbus launched a punitive and deterrent campaign on the Garamantes in which there capital of Garama (according to Pliny NH v.36) was captured. This is at Djerma today where extensive Roman cemeteries have been found.
The kingdom eventually fell into decline. This may have been caused by the over use, and eventual exhaustion, of water supplies. They relied on fossil water which they mined out of the ground for irrigation. However this was a non renewable source and appears to ran run out after 6 centuries of Garmantian use.
Showing posts tagged herodotus
Herodotus
Herodotus is often referred to as the “father of History” in so far as he seems to be one of the first “historic” writers. However I would be inclined to called him the “grandfather of History”…or maybe the “slighty mad uncle in the corner at parties of History”. Some of the accounts, or stories, in his “Histories” are particularly fanciful. This has led to his other nickname “The father of Lies”. This is unfair. Herodotus’ work literally means “Inquires”, they are him exploring the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars (along the way covering other subjects like geography, anthropology, ethnology, zoology, fables and folklore) where he inquires and reports back all he has heard. Things are worth reporting primarily if they are interesting, not just if they are true or not.
His focus is on the achievements of mankind, not of the gods and heroes like epic poetry, and of great and marvellous deeds (by all peoples and even in nature like the Nile inundation.) He attempts to build a full a picture as possible, using these of the build up to the War and then the War itself.
I want to share some of the brilliant and strange stories which turn up in Herodotus’ work. They are testament to the fantastic imagination of mankind.
All these examples come from Book II (the Egyptian logoi). I’ll probably do some more examples another time.
On the Nile (2.19-27)
He gives to following reasons for the Nile flood:
1. Winds- North winds blow, preventing adequate flow to the sea. (Herodotus argues that this incorrect because it floods even if the winds fail and the winds have no effect on other rivers)
2. It flows from the great Ocean that encircles the world (a more legendary explanation apparently)
3. It’s caused by melting snow (this is apparently just as worthless a theory as the others because the countries the Nile comes from are hotter than Egypt)
4. Displaced water from other rivers because the sun changes his path in different seasons (H’s own theory, I love ancient Greek logic)
On the Egyptians being weird (2.35-8)
1. The women go to market and men stay at home and weave. Women even urinated standing up and men sitting down.
2. They knead bread dough with their feet and clay with their hands and even handle dung (the horror!)
3. They are religious to excess, and make a point of washing cups and clothes (how dare they!), they even circumcise themselves to be clean rather than comely (I love my translation)
On the Hippotamus (2.71)
1. It has 4 legs, cloven hoofs like an ox, a horse’s mane and tail, conspicuous tusks, a voice like a horse’s neigh, and is the size of a very large ox (I am really not sure if he ever saw a hippo from that…)
On the Phoenix (2.73)
1. Visits every 500 years when its parent bird dies. Its gold and red and shaped exactly like an eagle.
2. One story says it carries a lump of myrrh to make into a kind of egg coffin for its dad and then buries it in the temple of the sun (Herodotus doesn’t find this credible surprisingly)
On flying Snakes (2.75-6)
1. Opposite Buto there are loads of skeletons of flying snakes piled up in a mountain pass. The snakes try to migrate into Egypt from Arabia but the ibis greet them at this pass and kill all of them.
2. They have wings like a bat.
Blind Pheros
1. Pheros was a King of Egypt who went blind. He had got angry at the river for flooding too high and thrown a spear at it. (which of course made him blind…)
2. After 10 years the oracle at Buto said he’d served his punishment and would be cured if he washed his eyes out with the urine of a woman who had never slept with any man except her husband. So he tried his wife’s urine…didn’t work (awkward), then many many many other women…eventually one worked and he could see again (huzah!).
3. All those women whose urine failed were collected together and burned. He then married the lady whose pee worked (I wonder what ever happened to her husband…)
The Clever Thief
1. Once there was a very rich king who put all his silver in an elaborate treasury. The builder eventually died, but on his death bed he told his 2 sons about a secret door. The brothers used it and eventually the king noticed. He hid some traps inside the treasury. Next robbery one brother got caught in the trap. He begged his brother to chop off his head so that the king wouldn’t recognise him and the brother could carry on as normal. So the brother did and the king found a headless corpse in the trap.
2. The king hung the body up and had it guarded trying to spot the thief should he come and mourn. The thief’s mum was angry and wanted the body of her son to bury. She nagged the remaining brother. He got the guards very very drunk and stole the body, he even shaved the right cheek of each of the guards.
3. King was very angry. So he order his daughter to join the local brothel and ask every man who came to her what was the cleverest and wickedest thing they had ever done in the hopes of catching the thief. So eventually the thief arrives. But he has heard about the king’s plan and so cuts off the arm of his corpse and goes to see the princess.
4. He tells her about cutting off his brother’s head (wickedest thing) and getting the guards drunk (cleverest thing). She quickly grabs him and calls her father, but she grabs the corpses arm and the thief escapes.
5. The king is impressed. He sends out a message that the thief is forgiven as he is clearly the cleverest man ever. Thief appears and marries the prostituted princess. (Yay for happy endings.)
Cheops and his Pyramid
1. He closed all the temples and made all his people slaves. He made them build his pyramid.
2. He ran of money so made his daughter a prostitute. She charged each punter one stone. These were made into the middle pyramid at Giza.
Well there we go for now, I hope you have enjoyed reading a few of these. The ancient writers tell some really amazing stories and hopefully I’ll get round to writing a few more of these. Like the one-eyed men chasing griffins, or the gold digging ants of India, or the queen who went too far and chopped off the breast of all the women in a town and hung them up on the walls as their husbands were slowly impaled beneath them… but its ok the queen ends up being eaten by worms.
7 Wonders of the Ancient World: The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are considered to be one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. They were purportedly built in the ancient city-state of Babylon, near present-day Al Hillah, Babil province, in Iraq. The Hanging Gardens were not the only World Wonder in Babylon; the city walls and obelisk attributed to Queen Semiramis were also featured in ancient lists of Wonders (though not the list of 7 Ancient ones).
The gardens were attributed to the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, who ruled between 605 and 562 BC. He is reported to have constructed the gardens to please his homesick wife, Amytis of Media, who longed for the plants of her homeland. The gardens were said to have been destroyed by several earthquakes after the 2nd century BC.
Ancient Greek historians, Strabo and Philo, gave us these descriptions of the hanging gardens of Babylon:
Strabo:
“The Garden is quadrangular, and each side is four plethra long. It consists of arched vaults which are located on chequered cube-like foundations.. The ascent of the uppermost terrace-roofs is made by a stairway…”
Philo:
“The Hanging Garden has plants cultivated above ground level, and the roots of the trees are embedded in an upper terrace rather than in the earth. The whole mass is supported on stone columns… Streams of water emerging from elevated sources flow down sloping channels… These waters irrigate the whole garden saturating the roots of plants and keeping the whole area moist. Hence the grass is permanently green and the leaves of trees grow firmly attached to supple branches… This is a work of art of royal luxury and its most striking feature is that the labor of cultivation is suspended above the heads of the spectators.”
However, no cuneiform texts describing the Hanging Gardens have ever been found.
Ancient writers describe the possible use of something similar to an Archimedes screw as a process of irrigating the terraced gardens. Estimates based on descriptions of the gardens in ancient sources say the Hanging Gardens would have required a minimum amount of 8,200 gallons (37,000 liters) of water per day. Nebuchadnezzar II is also reported to have used massive slabs of stone, a technique not otherwise attested in Babylon, to prevent the water from eroding the ground.
There is some controversy as to whether the Hanging Gardens were an actual construction or a poetic creation, owing to the lack of documentation in contemporaneous Babylonian sources. There is also no mention of Nebuchadnezzar’s wife Amyitis (or any other wives), although a political marriage to a Median or Persian would not have been unusual. Herodotus, writing about Babylon closest in time to Nebuchadnezzar II, does not mention the Hanging Gardens in his Histories. However, it is possible that cuneiform texts on the Hanging Gardens may yet be found.
The Garamantes, an ancient tribe that were located in south-western Libya, flourished about 3000 years ago. Living at the core of the Sahara desert they seemed to have had control of the trans-Saharan trade route. They appear in the area of Fezzan around 900 BC and continue until around 500 AD. Their culture grew in a hyper-arid environment and developed urbanisation (with around 8 major towns and many other small settlements), complex irrigation, trade routes, and a hierarchical, possibly slave using society.
Tacitus (4.50) describes them as:
“An indomitable tribe and one always engaged in brigandage on their neighbours.”
Rock depictions, made by the Garamantes, show two horse war chariots travelling in lines. Some believe that these represent the routes through the desert which the Garamantes controlled. The trade routes connected to Egypt, the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa. Their contact with other peoples is probably best shown by the number of Roman artefacts found in a Garamantian context, such as glassware, amphorae, bronze statues and architectural motifs. The Garamantes seem to have exported dates, salt, gold, semi precious stones, jewels and natron.
The “stones” which the Garamantes traded are said by Roman writers to have been so precious that even a small one was worth 40 gold staters. The Garamantes traded them to Carthage who, in turn, traded them and this trade helped Carthage become very wealthy. Pliny describes the stone as the “Garmantian carbuncle” which was also called the “Carthaginian carbuncle” because of the stones link to the wealth of Carthage. We don’t actually know what these precious stones actually were.
The Garamantes also seem to have been involved in both the capture and the trading of slaves from sub Saharan Africa.
Herodotus (IV 183-4) says:
“The Garamantes hunt the Troglodyte [cave dwelling] Ethiopians in four-horse chariots: for the Troglodytes are the fastest on their feet of all men that we know … they eat snakes, lizards and such reptiles, and they speak a language unlike any other- they shriek like bats.”
The “troglodytes” are probably the Negroid Tebu of the Tibesti mountains, and they seem to have “hunted” them to be slaves.
They developed similar funerary practices to other Saharan populations, i.e. key-hole monuments and antenna tombs, and they probably learned their irrigation techniques from the Egyptians.
In 21/20 BC the Roman pro-consul of Africa L. Cornelius Balbus launched a punitive and deterrent campaign on the Garamantes in which there capital of Garama (according to Pliny NH v.36) was captured. This is at Djerma today where extensive Roman cemeteries have been found.
The kingdom eventually fell into decline. This may have been caused by the over use, and eventual exhaustion, of water supplies. They relied on fossil water which they mined out of the ground for irrigation. However this was a non renewable source and appears to ran run out after 6 centuries of Garmantian use.
Herodotus
Herodotus is often referred to as the “father of History” in so far as he seems to be one of the first “historic” writers. However I would be inclined to called him the “grandfather of History”…or maybe the “slighty mad uncle in the corner at parties of History”. Some of the accounts, or stories, in his “Histories” are particularly fanciful. This has led to his other nickname “The father of Lies”. This is unfair. Herodotus’ work literally means “Inquires”, they are him exploring the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars (along the way covering other subjects like geography, anthropology, ethnology, zoology, fables and folklore) where he inquires and reports back all he has heard. Things are worth reporting primarily if they are interesting, not just if they are true or not.
His focus is on the achievements of mankind, not of the gods and heroes like epic poetry, and of great and marvellous deeds (by all peoples and even in nature like the Nile inundation.) He attempts to build a full a picture as possible, using these of the build up to the War and then the War itself.
I want to share some of the brilliant and strange stories which turn up in Herodotus’ work. They are testament to the fantastic imagination of mankind.
All these examples come from Book II (the Egyptian logoi). I’ll probably do some more examples another time.
On the Nile (2.19-27)
He gives to following reasons for the Nile flood:
1. Winds- North winds blow, preventing adequate flow to the sea. (Herodotus argues that this incorrect because it floods even if the winds fail and the winds have no effect on other rivers)
2. It flows from the great Ocean that encircles the world (a more legendary explanation apparently)
3. It’s caused by melting snow (this is apparently just as worthless a theory as the others because the countries the Nile comes from are hotter than Egypt)
4. Displaced water from other rivers because the sun changes his path in different seasons (H’s own theory, I love ancient Greek logic)
On the Egyptians being weird (2.35-8)
1. The women go to market and men stay at home and weave. Women even urinated standing up and men sitting down.
2. They knead bread dough with their feet and clay with their hands and even handle dung (the horror!)
3. They are religious to excess, and make a point of washing cups and clothes (how dare they!), they even circumcise themselves to be clean rather than comely (I love my translation)
On the Hippotamus (2.71)
1. It has 4 legs, cloven hoofs like an ox, a horse’s mane and tail, conspicuous tusks, a voice like a horse’s neigh, and is the size of a very large ox (I am really not sure if he ever saw a hippo from that…)
On the Phoenix (2.73)
1. Visits every 500 years when its parent bird dies. Its gold and red and shaped exactly like an eagle.
2. One story says it carries a lump of myrrh to make into a kind of egg coffin for its dad and then buries it in the temple of the sun (Herodotus doesn’t find this credible surprisingly)
On flying Snakes (2.75-6)
1. Opposite Buto there are loads of skeletons of flying snakes piled up in a mountain pass. The snakes try to migrate into Egypt from Arabia but the ibis greet them at this pass and kill all of them.
2. They have wings like a bat.
Blind Pheros
1. Pheros was a King of Egypt who went blind. He had got angry at the river for flooding too high and thrown a spear at it. (which of course made him blind…)
2. After 10 years the oracle at Buto said he’d served his punishment and would be cured if he washed his eyes out with the urine of a woman who had never slept with any man except her husband. So he tried his wife’s urine…didn’t work (awkward), then many many many other women…eventually one worked and he could see again (huzah!).
3. All those women whose urine failed were collected together and burned. He then married the lady whose pee worked (I wonder what ever happened to her husband…)
The Clever Thief
1. Once there was a very rich king who put all his silver in an elaborate treasury. The builder eventually died, but on his death bed he told his 2 sons about a secret door. The brothers used it and eventually the king noticed. He hid some traps inside the treasury. Next robbery one brother got caught in the trap. He begged his brother to chop off his head so that the king wouldn’t recognise him and the brother could carry on as normal. So the brother did and the king found a headless corpse in the trap.
2. The king hung the body up and had it guarded trying to spot the thief should he come and mourn. The thief’s mum was angry and wanted the body of her son to bury. She nagged the remaining brother. He got the guards very very drunk and stole the body, he even shaved the right cheek of each of the guards.
3. King was very angry. So he order his daughter to join the local brothel and ask every man who came to her what was the cleverest and wickedest thing they had ever done in the hopes of catching the thief. So eventually the thief arrives. But he has heard about the king’s plan and so cuts off the arm of his corpse and goes to see the princess.
4. He tells her about cutting off his brother’s head (wickedest thing) and getting the guards drunk (cleverest thing). She quickly grabs him and calls her father, but she grabs the corpses arm and the thief escapes.
5. The king is impressed. He sends out a message that the thief is forgiven as he is clearly the cleverest man ever. Thief appears and marries the prostituted princess. (Yay for happy endings.)
Cheops and his Pyramid
1. He closed all the temples and made all his people slaves. He made them build his pyramid.
2. He ran of money so made his daughter a prostitute. She charged each punter one stone. These were made into the middle pyramid at Giza.
Well there we go for now, I hope you have enjoyed reading a few of these. The ancient writers tell some really amazing stories and hopefully I’ll get round to writing a few more of these. Like the one-eyed men chasing griffins, or the gold digging ants of India, or the queen who went too far and chopped off the breast of all the women in a town and hung them up on the walls as their husbands were slowly impaled beneath them… but its ok the queen ends up being eaten by worms.
