Trade in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond ed. by D. J. Mattingly et al

Abstract

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 43, 1, 2018 © The Maghreb Review 2018 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS Books reviewed in The Maghreb Review can be ordered from The Maghreb Bookshop. Our catalogue is also available on our website: www.maghrebbookshop.com TRADE IN THE ANCIENT SAHARA AND BEYOND. EDITED BY D. J. MATTINGLY, V. LEITCH, C. N. DUCKWORTH, A. CUÉNOD, M.N.STERRY AND F. COLE. CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2017, HARDBACK, £90.00 The Sahara, the world’s largest hot desert, sub-continental in scale, is a formidable obstacle to travel. But it has never been a closed barrier to human contact, either within the desert itself, or across its full width. As the title of this book suggests, the Sahara has its own settled and nomadic communities who may have long been in regular trading contact with each other, while also trafficking with peoples on the desert fringes, or even further off. For the Sahara lies between three main poles of human attraction and interaction: the Mediterranean World to the north; Egypt, the Red Sea and the Levant to the east; and the Sudan (in the broadest geographical sense) to the south. One of the main incentives to historical human contact both within and across the Sahara was trade; yet the nature, scope, scale and value of such business remains obscure. The fault partly lies with the frustrating dearth of oral and especially written sources for Saharan history in general and trade history in particular. Greek and Latin texts are few and terse. The Arabic literature of medieval geographers and travellers, and the rather later European (including Jewish) portolan charts, all cast but thin beams of light into the general gloom. Even the stores of knowledge revealed by the translation and publication of selected scraps from the Cairo Geniza reveal little of the Sahara and its trading links with the Judaeo-Islamic world of the high Middle Ages. The picture became clearer in the 19th century when the first European explorers of the Great Desert and British Vice Consulates at the mid-Saharan trading oases of Murzuk and Ghadames began to reveal something of the nature, size and value of desert trade, and particularly its mainstay, the trade in black slaves. (By projecting these limited Victorian facts and figures into the past, some historians have drawn their own conclusions about Saharan medieval, Roman and more ancient trade.) Such are some of the practical difficulties that beset the eager student of the Saharan past, and particularly the history of its internal and external trade: a dearth of reasonably reliable and wide ranging texts that are the essential the stock-in-trade of the historian. This is where the archaeologist (often prompted by the written word) comes in. His head is not so much in the clouds but, more likely, in a hole in the BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS 73 ground where the evidence he brings to light may well put the historian to rights, or at least suggest that he might care to reconsider some of his conclusions. Much important new evidence of the existence, nature and extent of ancient Saharan trade has been exposed by archaeological investigations of the Garamantes people of the southern Libyan province of Fezzan, roughly in the middle of the Great Desert. The Garamantes were first mentioned the fifth century BC by the Greek historian Herodotus, with references in later Classical sources. Archaeological research into the Garamantes started in the 1930s and has since the 1990s been pursued with particular vigour by David Mattingly, the lead editor of this volume. This is the first of four volumes to be published by CUP and the Society for Libyan Studies under the Sahara project of 2011-17 which was intended to advance debate on trans-Saharan trade in various specific areas. This book is thus structured to reflect three main issues of Saharan trade. One section is devoted to infrastructural matters and comparisons and contrasts between Islamic and pre-Islamic trade. A second section considers the trade in organic commodities, and particularly textiles. And a third considers how inorganic material (gold in particular) may be chemically analysed...