the mediterranean and africa 429
these phenomena congruent with relationships and events in and around the
Mediterranean basin or are they specific to these areas?
The late Garamantian period between the third and fifth centuries ce was a time of
crisis when most southern fortifications were abandoned. At the same time, there was
a shift to a camel-based pastoralism; animal husbandry based on cattle, goats, and
sheep was largely abandoned. Other changes were at work. Extended mobile “clans”
of warrior-merchant groups emerged as dominant units in an evolving social-political
organization. Was the social base of these emergent clans the nuclear families of the
“southern gate” and the extended families of the inner and intermediate territories?
Different clan organizations formed rival and competing federations, composed of
dominant and dominated clans, and they assumed control over caravan routes, pas-
tures, hierarchically-organized oases of traders, craftsmen, and servile agricultural
laborers, and sources of salt and other desert resources. Only further research can
establish whether warrior-merchant federations and individual clans formed alliances
with middle Niger cities or became part of the statutory networks of kingdoms like
Ghana, Takrur, and Kawkaw/Gao.
During the same period new settlement patterns appeared in the Fazzan in the
form of village-oases (each with a fort) and walled villages (with towers and gates)
that had to contend with mobile warrior-merchant clans and federations. A falling
water table meant the foggara system ceased to be operational; there was a return to
smaller-scale agriculture, based on wells worked with the shaduf, controlled by each
village-oasis. Shaduf-based agriculture, however, could not support the same urban
settlement and population density as foggara-based agriculture. As a result, parts of
the Fazzan experienced de-urbanization and a substantial population decline. After
the sixth century, as agriculture and salt production declined, Fazzan food and salt
sovereignty were lost to other areas: the agricultural regimes of the middle Niger
and Lake Chad basins and the salt-mining centers in the western Sahara were in the
hands of warrior-merchant federations. Was the Garamatian crisis tied to the collapse
of the Western Roman Empire, on the one hand, and the ascendancy of Byzantium,
on the other?
Social, material, and political changes in parts of the kingdom did not immediately
affect Garama’s trade with Mediterranean emporia. Excavations of elite graves in the
capital’s burial grounds and a Garama merchant’s house produced finds such as glass
vessels, beads of glass and semi-precious stones, textiles, incense burners, artifacts of
gold, silver, iron, brass, and bronze, and Roman and Byzantine pottery. The finds
support a first- to seventh century chronology, indicating continuity in Fazzan–
Mediterranean trade. The commencement of gold coinage at the Alexandria mint in
294 ce and the Carthage mint in 296 ce indicate that gold from middle Niger centers,
principally the Kawkaw/Gao Kingdom was commercially accessible, presumably in
competition with the western Saharan gold route. By the fifth century various taxes
from North Africa were being collected in gold and the Carthage mint struck
Byzantine gold coinage extensively and exclusively from 534 to 695. In 568, a
Garamantian ruler sent envoys to Constantinople in order to conclude a peace treaty
with Byzantium and to join Christendom as Christian, specifically Miaphysite
(Monophysite) converts. These dynastic initiatives suggest an effort to retain author-
ity over Fazzan’s links with the Byzantine world and it still remained a central zone in
terms of material, cultural, and symbolic capital.