The Garamantes of Fezzan - an Interim Report of Research, 1965-1973

The Garamantes were the inhabitants of Southern Libya. Their capital Garama (‘clarissimum … caput Garamantum’) lies partly under the now deserted mud-brick Arab town of Germa in the Wadi el Agial some hundred miles west of Sebha. The oldest pottery so far recovered from the site dates to the late fifth and fourth centuries B.C., but earlier occupation, stretching back to the ninth century B.C., has been found on the nearby fortified spur-site of Zinchecra. The surrounding escarpment slopes, which form the southern side of the wadi, are dotted with literally thousands of graves, which vary from simple crouch-burials in shallow cists, sometimes covered by a stone cairn, to elaborate stepped ‘chouchet’-type monuments of stone or mud brick, square or circular in shape, mud-brick pyramids 10–15 feet high and even ashlar-built mausolea of which the so-called ‘Germa mausoleum’ is the most complete surviving example. The sedentary agricultural practice of the people is attested by the many hundreds of foggaras (underground water channels with down-shafts, akin to the Qanats of Persia) which tap the aqueous strata against the escarpment side and carry their water into the wadi centre. The foggaras and burials, taken together, show that approximately eighty miles in length of the Wadi el Agial were intensely cultivated and inhabited, and recent work has shown that sites similar to Zinchecra and Garama existed at various points along this eighty-mile length, the Garamanticae Fauces, or Valley of the Garamantes. Work in the Wadi Bergiug, Murzuch-Zuila area of oases to the south has shown that similar remains exist there, while it can reasonably be argued that the third great band of oases, the Wadi Chatti on the north of the el Agial, almost certainly contained similar occupation.