Ancient empire thrived in Sahara Desert using ‘remarkable’ tunnel system, study says
The Sahara Desert, a stretch of sand about the size of the United States, is an extremely forbidding land. With temperatures as high as 136 degrees Fahrenheit, it is one of the hottest places on Earth.
So sizzling and remote is the North African wasteland that weather stations are impractical there, according to NASA. Travelers unfortunate enough to get stranded have slim chances of survival. “The descent from thirst to madness is swift,” according to “The Sahara: A Cultural History.” Many in the book agree that it is “best avoided at any cost.”
Yet, despite the inhospitable conditions, an empire the size of Germany once flourished amongst the windswept dunes. Its survival was made possible by a novel technology: an underground tunnel system.
The ascendancy of the civilization, known as the Garamantian Empire, was “remarkable given a climate comparable to the modern-day Libyan Sahara Desert,” according to new research presented to the Geological Society of America on Oct. 16.
The Garamantians occupied a southern swath of modern-day Libya and Algeria between 400 BC and 400 AD, researchers said.
“The Empire was focused on a main City Germa at the base of a large escarpment,” Frank Schwartz, a professor at The Ohio State University, told McClatchy News.
“Away from the Germa area,” Schwartz said, “ ... there were small outposts. These were stopping places with water along the trade routes through the desert. The land area was perhaps 350,000 km2 with a population of several 10,000s of people.”
The Garamantians, the first urban society to appear in a riverless desert, survived using tunnels known as foggaras. These were hand-dug subterranean channels that, much like aqueducts, used gravity to deliver water from aquifers to agricultural areas.
Using slave labor, the Garamantians constructed about 500 miles worth of 550 foggaras, researchers said.
“Knowledge (of foggaras) came along trade route links from Persia to the east,” Schwartz said. “Eventually, these systems were put in place across North western Africa, the Middle East and Spain.”
It was “surprising” that these desert tunnels were able to carry any water at all given the extremely arid climate, researchers said. This is where serendipity came into play.
The Garamantians happened to be situated near a large sandstone aquifer, which had been leftover from an era when the Sahara was less arid, Schwartz said. (The desert was a wet, lush environment as early as 5,000 years ago, according to a study published in the Nature Journal.)
“There was no recharge, but because that aquifer was so big, it was able to contribute water for at least 800 or 1,000 years during the Garamantian period,” Schwartz said.
This method, though, proved unsustainable as the aquifer’s water levels eventually fell below the foggaras’ intake.
As their water supply gave out, and geopolitical conditions changed, the Garamantians’ luck ran out around 400 AD, researchers said.
“With the power of the Empire sapped by Romans and drying of the foggara (tunnels) people just diffused away,” Schwartz said. Initially there were likely slaves to do digging early on — but these were lost as well. Experience shows that humans will not stay in one place and starve. A large collection of people might fight to acquire other peoples’ wetter lands. Others will just move to more hospitable places.”
As climate change causes the expansion of extreme environments — the Sahara Desert has grown about 10% since 1920 — the fate of the Garamantians should be taken as a cautionary tale, researchers said. Societies surviving off of unsustainable water supplies in extreme environments are at the mercy of the climate, which shifts like the sands in the desert.
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