The Qanat or Foggara.
Posted on 07/17/2020 1:05:10 AM PDT by texas booster
The Fezzan is an area of approximately 212,000 square miles of unforgiving desert and valleys. Situated in the south west of modern day Libya it’s not an area you’d easily traverse, let alone live in. Yet in the 1st millennium BCE a people did exactly that. They created art, irrigated the baked earth and sustained a culture.
One of the earliest surviving references to the Garamantes is found in Herodotus’ Histories, written in the 5th century BCE[1]. Herodotus’ description was contradictory, they had no weapons, but they hunted a cave dwelling tribe nearby using chariots. He also went on to add other details, which almost border on the absurd. They have cattle which walk backwards due to long horns, farmed using soil laid on top of salt and refused sleep with men. It’s less an exact account and more a rattling of unconnected trivia.
The Garamantes initially inhabited a hilltop capital called Zinchera, which looked out over the Wadi Al-Ajal valley. The earliest dating for this is 900 BCE and up until the 1st century CE it offered a well defended position if needed. Activity in the valley increased with the later capital, Garama, being built in the 4th century BCE and this later became the capital.
The rise of the Garamantes came in the latter few centuries of the first millenium BCE and is linked to a technology which changed everything.
The Qanat or Foggara.
In the early 1st millenium BCE a type of well was developed in Persia called the qanat. This technology spread west and became known by the word ‘foggara’. These were a series of vertical shafts dug in a line (see image). The foggara was a perfect solution for the Garamantes who could now access the vast amounts of fossilised water in the bedrock below.
It was hard work and required large amounts of manpower. Here we might link in with Herodotus’ comment on the cave dweller peoples who were hunted. Perhaps these weren’t caught to sell as slaves but were used to dig the foggara complex which grew and grew. Aerial photography across a 106 km stretch of land revealed approximately 530 foggaras (100 of these had tributary branches)[2]. It was a huge engineering feat. The dating of the foggaras is debated, it’s certain that they were in use by 400 CE. The earliest date of their construction is thought to be around the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE[3] Farming and trade.
The availability of water had obvious bonuses; it allowed the Garamante settlements in the valley to increase. Crops such as dates, olives and wheat were grown and these didn’t just support the local population, they offered a cash crop which could be exported. The location of the Garamantes sat on the vibrant commercial trade route. Indeed, Herodotus’ reference to the Garamantes was couched within a description of the various peoples and settlements which had grown up along the network of trading routes.
Though the Garamantes were isolated in one sense they were by no means detached from accessing goods and providing a place for traders to stop and refresh. Trade was a two way process, and though not as common as in later years, Roman pottery finds support this. Finds at Aghram Nadharif dated to as early as the 3rd century BCE[4] (though the majority date to the later centuries). As interesting was the presence of Hellenistic materials.
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With Roman influence growing in North Africa it almost seemed inevitable that the Garamantes would come into direct contact with them at some point. In the 19 CE Augustus ordered Cornelius Balbus to subdue the Garamantes. Balbus led a force and took Garama, the more recent capital of the Garamantes.
Pliny is the main source for this event and he wrote that this earned Balbus a triumph, uniquely so as Balbus was the first foreigner to win one (he had been born in modern day Cadiz)[6]. From Pliny’s description it can be concluded that this had been some time in the making. Garamantes had offered previous resistance, the main trick being to fill in wells as they retreated which made pursuit of them impossible.
The Roman view may have been that the Garamantes were brought to heel, yet they were still capable of providing Rome with a problem it had no easy answer to. During the reign of Tiberius (14-37 CE) an individual called Tacfarinas led a guerrilla style campaign against Roman in Northern Africa.
Avoiding open conflict Tacfarinas led lighting attacks against Roman villages and infrastructure. This type of raiding was almost impossible to repel. By the time a Roman force arrived Tacfarinas was long gone. In one instance this style was dropped for a siege on a Roman fort which led to its capture and defeat.
The involvement of the Garamantes was subtle, Tacitus noted how they acted with a form of plausible deniability though they were offering men and support[7]. It’s difficult to imagine their expertise and networks not supporting Tacfarinas in some way. Their response to the defeat of Tacfarinas was to send dignitaries to Rome in order to confirm their friendship.
To what extent Tacfarinas offered a genuine threat to Rome is difficult to assess. Tacitus never held back from criticising Tiberius, so we are left to wonder whether this was given more weight in order to offer another criticism of Tiberius as an Emperor unable to control his empire.
The Garamantes are mentioned later that century. In 69 CE a war broke out between Leptis Magna and Oea, two cities on the coast. Oea recruited Garamantes and came close to winning, which would have been a disaster given the importance of Leptis to Rome.
Rome’s response came in the form of a force led by Valerius Festus and the Garamantian capital was once again captured. The outset wasn’t a sack or desolation but a treaty, presumably one which kept them from any military support or assistance. The existence of a treaty supports the argument that Rome appreciated the importance of the Garamantes. Rather than trodden into the sand, the Garamantes needed to be brought into the Roman fold.
Pinging folks from an older history thread.
The Qanat or Foggara.
Locating the fezzan in Southern Libya.
Amazing stuff.
To go so far technologically but only really take off in the past century...it’s odd.
All of these intelligent people and groups throughout history and yet technological advances were stopped or stalled due to war or natural disaster...
If Rome had traveled on a straight line up to now, how far advanced would they have been?
Or even further back, Egypt.
fossilised water
really?
A water source later accessed by Gadaffi's Greaty Man Made River project across the traditional Garamantes area of Libya,, the 8th wonder of the world, destroyed by the Liberal Fascist idiots Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the first war of the modern era based exclusively on liberal fasfcist political correctness and virtue signaling, a horrible scam against NATO, and the Obama creation of millions of Arab Spring refugees aimed at the soft underbelly of so called white privileged Europe.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-is-fossil-water.html
If Rome had traveled on a straight line up to now, how far advanced would they have been?
Or even further back, Egypt.”
Rome had all the time in the world to advance, the better part of a millenia. They had a working steam engine. It was considered a toy. Great civilizations rose, ruled, dominated and fell without building upon what they knew.
The trick to advancement was learned when Anno Domine came along, AD, the year of Our Lord. (You know, the designation that “science” today is trying to replace with “CE”).
The church gathered existing knowledge and created the scientific method as a means of advancing man’s understanding of God’s Creation. The church required clergy to be educated to the highest levels possible.
It was the Church bringing knowledge thru the Dark Ages and figuring out a way to reliably build upon it and advance it that put men on the moon in 2000, or rather, one thousand nine hundred and sixty-nine years.
“The trick to advancement was learned when Anno Domine came along, AD, the year of Our Lord. (You know, the designation that “science” today is trying to replace with “CE”).”
Thank you. I really object to the cabal promoting the replacement of “BC” and AD” with “BCE” and “CE”
Fossilized water is the general term for water that has not been in meteoric contact for at least 10000 years. This is determined by the O18 isotopic ratio. Water that has been in the atmosphere recently due to cosmic rays creating radioactive isotopes of oxygen in the upper atmosphere has a distinctive signature.
That portion of North Africa would have been green and wet during the last ice age as the climate bands moved South so did the zone of high pressure that creates the Sahara today. There’s vast amounts of ice age water under the Sahara that fell as rain 16000 to 12000 years ago stored in porous rock. More than all the water currently stored in the great Lakes by some hydrologists accounts. I did one of my master’s degrees in hydrogeology fascinating stuff. My research was on salt water injection induced seismisity in the Midland basin.
Thanks for the very interesting info and link...much appreciated.
The efforts the Garamantes went to so they could sustain agriculture reminds me of the Sabaeans in modern day Yemen and their great dam at Marib and extensive irrigation. Tough places to eek out a living.
Intersting
...who should be hung and drawn and quartered for their crimes, the result of which flooded Europe with refugees which were mostly the law abiding Libyans and the African foreign workers. NATO had no business destroying a productive, modern nation.
In a country like Libya, where more than 95% of the country consists of the near-waterless Sahara, this type of agriculture is not cheap, and is only possible by being able to tap underground fossil water deposits from a large underground aquifer like they’ve done in the Great Man Made River project. Each circular plot is about 1 km in diameter, and is able to grow a number of different crops include grains, fruits and vegetables, and crops for animal fodder.
NATO BOMBS THE GREAT MANMADE RIVER PROJECT
In August 1984, Muammar Al Qadhafi laid the foundation stone for the pipe production plant at Brega. The Great Man-Made River Project had begun. Adam Kuwairi, a senior figure in the Great Man-Made River Authority (GMRA), vividly remembers the impact the fresh water had on him and his family: “
The water changed lives. For the first time in our history, there was water in the tap for washing, shaving and showering. The quality of life is better now, and it’s impacting on the whole country.”
Applicable humanitarian law The Laws of War were designed to prevent attacks on targets indispensible to the civilian population, so attacking a civilian infrastructure target such as this plant is a war crime.
From a cost and energy per cubic meter of delivered fresh water there’s a break over point where it becomes cheaper and less energy intensive to desalination of seawater and put it inland vs pump it up from an aquifer and transfer that water via an aquaduct. From a pure energy stand point for water used at the wellhead vs at the gate of a desal plant the breaking point is about 1500 meters of depth using multistage submersible lift pumps vs reverse osmosis pumps and membranes. California is in this position they have massive amounts of deep ground water but they have the Pacific ocean down the whole length of that state for the cities on the coast its almost twice as energy efficient to desal vs pump up from 1000+ M and transport that water over a hundred kilometers or more. For an oil rich nation like the middle east it comes down to access to technology and how much oil you are willing to burn to get water.
attacking a civilian infrastructure target such as this plant is a war crime. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
“• extensive destruction or appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly;”
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v1_rul_rule156
They have found similar wells in the desert region of Nasca in Peru. I don’t know that the wells were in series, but it wuld make sense if they were hitting the same water tables.
It is clear!
We need to establish the Nerksonian Institute for Global Affairs right here on Free republic! It can be like Gods, Graves and Glyphs ping list.
Much that we write on various international subjects needs to be more widely read.
Libya is but one of many.
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