The Caravan Trade in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The caravan trade, a strong chain binding Barbary, the Sahara, and the Negro territories together, was of very remote antiquity. Mauny and Lhote have convincingly shown that as early 1000 B.C. chariots were being drawn across the Sahara along two main routes: a western route from Morocco through Zemmour and Adrar to the banks of the Senegal and the Niger, and a central route from Tripoli through Cydamus (Ghadames), Ghat, and Hoggar to Gao on the Niger. By the fifth century B.C., the desert traffic—mainly in animals such as monkeys, lions, panthers, and elephants, in precious stones like carbuncles, emeralds and chalcedony, and in slaves— had become so important that ‘the Carthaginians began their great Sahara expeditions in an effort to cut out all intermediaries and to get into direct contact with the source of the riches in which they traded’. Three centuries later the Saharan trade was centred on the Tripoli-Fezzan-Bornu route (the Garamantian route) and constituted one of the main sources of the riches of Carthage. The phenomenal development of this desert traffic did not take place, however, until the introduction of the camel into Tripolitania by the Romans probably in the first century A.D. The rapid spread of the camel throughout Barbary and into the Sahara and beyond was begun by the Arabs and the Berbers. The process seemed to have gathered momentum and reached its climax during the Hilalian invasions in the middle of the eleventh century.