Germa (Garama)

The Ancient Capital of The Garamantes Protected Archaeological Site).

The Gates to Ancient Jerma: The Capital of The Garamantian Kingdom, Classical Phazania, Southern Libya. The sign on the left reads "Archaeological Department, Archaeological City of Germa"; while the sign on the right carries Gaddafi's name and his recommendations to protect the Garamantes' capital, which he made during his visit to the city of Germa.

The Garamantian Kingdom:

The following notes are prepared by Temehu.com to serve as a general introduction to the world of the ancient Garamantes, including a small bibliography of some of the most important works in the field. Germa, pronounced locally as /Jerma/, is located approximately 160 kilometres South-West of Sabha, Fezzan, Southern Libya. The deserted remains were once the capital city of the ancient Berber Garamantian Kingdom of Fazzan, widely considered as Libya's first indigenous empire. The Garamantes had control over a wide area, spanning the entire region from Tibesti to Acacus including the enigmatic Messaks and Wadi Metkhandoush. The Garamantes were placed by Pliny twelve days journey from the Augilae and ten days by Herodotus in the interior of Libya. They occupied the most habitable region of the Sahara: Wadi al-Hayat (Wadi Al-Agial), Wadi Ashati (Sciati), and the oases from Murzuk to Zuila. They initially run their kingdom from the nearby capital Zinchecra (on the hills of Messak Settafet - a rich site of rock engraving of a very advanced nature), then from Germa or Garama in the first century AD, so named after their eponymous ancestor Garamas.

The Ancient City of Germa

The Garamantes were fierce, powerful and warlike Berber people, who skillfully employed the horse and the chariot, as attested by the various cave paintings and drawings left behind by the ancient inhabitants of Phazania. Herodotus informs us that the Garamantes were a very numerous tribe of people, who spread soil over salt to sow their seeds in, and hunt in four-horse chariots. Archaeological discoveries indicate that the Garamantian cities were thriving urban centres, with markets and public entertainment forums. The city of Germa appears to have six towers and a square market, used as a transit point for caravans and for the horses the Garamantes then exported to Rome. Recent satellite research revealed hundreds of villages and settlements still buried beneath the desert's sea, and therefore the true picture will take decades if not centuries to complete. The capital became so powerful and quickly gained complete control over the lucrative caravan trade routes of the central Sahara, and even carried out successful raids on Berber-Carthaginian Carthage, Berber-Roman Leptis Magna, and on the authority of Herodotus on the troglodyte Ethiopians whom they hunted on four-horse chariots.

From Charles Daniels' The Garamantes Of Southern Libya, 1970.

The History of The Garamantian Kingdom:

Historical data such as that left by Herodotus, Strabo and Pliny does not tell us much, and apart from some geographical information and place names we hardly know anything of value about the Garamantes. The kingdom was shrouded with mystery in the past as it is a mystery today. In terms of modern data, Charles Daniels relates that: "Some years ago Diole wrote: "The name of the Garamantes . . . does little more, really, than designate our ignorance." Even the website of the new NTC failed to mention the Berber connection in their somewhat mashed-up history of Libya.

Herodotus says they lived about ten days journey from the Augilae, while Pliny lists the various tribes and place names between the Libyan coast and the Garamantian territories, including Phazania (Fezzan) and the tribe Phazannii, then the cities of Alele, Cillaba, Cydamae (Ghadames), the Black Mountain, a desert (the Serir ben Afen/Ramlat el-Chebira), and finally the Garamantian towns of Garama, Thelgae and Debris, near which there is a spring with boiling hot water from midday to midnight and freezing cold water from midnight to the following midday. In the 1990s, Daniels' work was resumed by the Fazzan Project, with the approval of the Libyan government, bringing together a number of researchers collecting and analysing data from the Garamantian region, including David Mattingly, the editor of one of the most important books published about the subject: "The Archaeology of Fazzan" (by D. J. Mattingly, Charles M. Daniels, J. N. Dore, D. Edwards, and J. Hawthorne). The two volumes report the results of  the two Anglo-Libyan projects in Fazzan: Charles Daniels led the first expeditions between l958 and l977, and David Mattingly directed the subsequent Fazzan Project from l997 to 2001. 

Acheulean Oval and Pear-Shaped Hand-Axes & Stone Tools; Germa Museum, Fezzan.

The Garamantian civilisation was said to be around 2900 years old. The civilisation was made known to the outside world when it came in contact with the ancient Libyan kingdoms of the north (like those of the Nasamons) and then with the Roman empire in the west around the first and second centuries AD, when the capital city was a bustling trade centre, connecting the coastal ports of Libya with the interior of sub-Saharan Africa. However, archaeological excavations and research strongly indicate a longer continuity in the region. McBurney had documented more than half a century ago the continuous existence of Libyans in Libya for the last 100,000 years (History). To assume that the Garamantes sprung from no where in the 9th century BC does not make sense, since they must have ancestors just like we do. Also the idea of civilisations "appearing advanced all of a sudden", as many had presumed the Ancient Egyptian civilisation, is now widely rejected. Many archaeologists today believe that the Garamantes and their ancestors were responsible for the rock art of Tadrart Acacus, the Messaks and the surrounding areas, most of which spans a continuous period of history going back, at least so far, to 12,000 years. In addition to the archaeological sites and the looted tombs, there are hundreds of thousands of prehistoric cave drawings and rock engravings found across the region, including those of chariots, which are yet to shed their mystery. Archaeological artifacts and stone tools discovered in various sites from Fazzan were definitely dated to the late Acheulean and the Aterian cultures (circa 100,000 - 30,000 BC). As described and illustrated in Germa Museum, local Libyan archaeological studies of prehistoric burial chambers suggest that the Fazzanian graves date from the Late Stone Age (around 50,000 years ago). Acheulean (Acheulian) culture belongs to the Lower Paleolithic era across Africa, particularly the central parts of Africa which now we know as the Sahara. It is characterised by the distinctive pear-shaped hand-axes, just as illustrated in the above poster from Germa Museum in southern Libya. Archaeologists generally agree that the Acheulean culture started in Africa and then spread to West Asia and Europe when waves of homo erectus left Africa to colonise Europe and Asia more than one million years ago.

As often the case with wars and culture, it was reported that wherever the Romans arrived destruction of the native cultures soon followed (for example, some linguists reported that more than 90% of Europe's native languages had gone extinct as a direct result of the Roman invasions), and so the story states that around the year 19 BC the Garamantes were brought under Roman control when the Proconsul of Africa  Lucius Cornelius Balbus reached Fazzan. The Balbus expedition left Sabratha for Ghadames, then across the Red Hamada to Adiri (Idri) and finally across the Ubari sand dunes to the capital Germa. But although the Garamantes were quick to regroup from the surprise attack and eventually succeeded in expelling the Roman forces to beyond their borders, and even later on attacked Leptis Magna itself around the year 70 AD, they somehow never fully recovered; as from there on their empire began to decline and slowly disappear whence it came - into the dark corridors of time. Robert Graves, who relates the Garamantes were of Cushite-Berber stock, argues that they were subdued by the matrilineal Lemta Berbers before they eventually fused with the aboriginals of the south bank of the Upper Niger, where they adopted their language and survive today only in a single village under the name of　Koromantse. While others have connected them with the present town of Djerma in Algeria, and Djerma or Zerma of the western Niger. The Garamantes are widely considered as the direct ancestors of the eastern Tuaregs of the Sahara and Niger.

The Ancient City of Germa.

Origin & Etymology of Garama:

It is far from sure to ascertain the etymology of the name Garama or Garamantes, but  we do have a few suggestions to explore. As it is often the case, the Greeks preserved a considerable amount of Libyan history in their borrowed mythology, which Roberts Graves (in his Greek Myths) rightly compares to corrupted political cartoons; and therefore one can wade through its chapters in search of forgotten clues. The Greeks knew of the Garamantes’ ancestor Garamas as ‘the first of men’, which is a reference to the antiquity of this legendary people. According to the Greek Olympian creation myth the Earth’s first children of semi-human form were the hundred-handed giants Briareus, Gyges and Cottus, but according to Robert Graves the Libyans claim that Garamas was born before the Hundred-handed Ones. Robert Graves further relates that the name Garamantes is derived from the words gara, man, and te, meaning ‘Gara’s state people’; where Gara is the Goddess Ker or Q’re who went on to become the Italian divinatory goddess Carmenta (‘Car the Wise’).　He also points out that the Garamantian settlement of Amon was　joined with the Northern Greek settlement of Dodona in a religious league which, according to Sir Flinders Petrie, may have originated as early as the third millennium BC. The Garamantes connection with Amon is further indicated by the　Nasamones, whose ancestor Nasamon himself descended from the legendary Garamas, the ancestor of the Garamantes, who appeared in mythology as the Son of the Sun and who offered Mother Earth a sacrifice of the sweet acorn.

This obscure history was the source of confusion. Dr. M. S. Ayoub (Fezzan, p.19), in quoting　Apolionius of Rhodes, relates a Greek legend which refers to Garama as the grandson of the Cretan King Minos, who was born on the shores of Lake Tritonis in Libya, and concludes that the Garamantes had been living on the shores between present-day Zuwarah in Libya and Gabes in Tunisia (p. 45), an area that includes the legendary Lake Tritonis, where Libyan Poseidon allegedly ruled Atlantis; in total agreement, Dr. Ayoub relates, with  lbn Khaldun who stated that Germanah (Germa) was first settled by the Laguanten tribe, who also inhabited the coastal regions of Tripolitania; before he went on to add that they fled the coastal region and immigrated to Fezzan as a result of the Phoenicians' arrival. In support of his confused supposition Dr. Ayoub says: "On the mountain of Zenkekra in Germa, people are drawn with plumes on their heads which resembles drawings in Egyptian texts showing the maritime peoples." There is no doubt that the plume is a Libyan feature generally agreed on by most scholars and in fact the Egyptians themselves always  represented Libyan gods and goddesses with plumes, as in the case of Libyan Amen, Libyan Ament and Libyan Shu, long before the arrival of the sea-people. Moreover there are a number of  scholars who argue to the contrary - in that the Cretans themselves were a Libyan colony. It has been already stated that a Libyan settlement was expelled from their homes in the now called Egyptian Delta during the forced unification of Egypt, by Menas, and subsequently left for Crete between 4000 and 3000 BC, long way before the Minoan or Cretan civilisation was created. The same view was maintained by Robert Graves; by Elinor W. Gadon (The Once & Future Goddess); by Sir Arthur Evans (1901), the discoverer of the Cretan civilisation itself; and by Professor Flinders Petrie who pointed out that the similarity between certain Cretan characters and the prehistoric Libyan and Egyptian early forms of writing was not the work of coincidence.

The Garamantes Garments & Features:

Ancient Libyan attire as covered by Bates was scarce by nature. Heat and terrain require scant clothing, and apart from the tunic and the long robe, used as marks of rank and dignity, European writers referred to them as 'lightly clad' and 'naked Garamantes',  in the same way they referred to their northern brothers as 'nude Nasamones'.

From Eastern Libyans, Oric Bates.

"Types of negroid Libyans are shown in Figs 3 and 4 [Above]. The degree of negrism is not high, but it is clearly marked by the platyrhinism and thick lips; the example shown might well be compared with the "Garamantic Type" of Duveyrier." The Eastern Libyan, p. 43.

Garamantian Chariots:

Herodotus in his Histories (IV. 170) states that the four-horse chariot was also known in Cyrenaica, in Eastern Libya, where the Greeks learned the art of chariot-racing from the Libyans.

A selection of drawings illustrating the various prehistoric chariot designs found in the Sahara.

The Garamantian Irrigation System:

Perhaps one of the best achievement of the Garamantians, namely their agricultural genius, was said to have brought their downfall. The hundreds of underground channels, known as foggara, which were used to direct water from underground reserves to their farms, were said to have ultimately drained underground reserves. But, according to other sources, the disappearance of the Garamantes around the fifth century coincides more with the invasions than with the drying up of underground reserves. The foggara tunnels were said to extend thousands of kilometres, with vertical shafts for maintenance at regular intervals. The underground tunnels were recently described in an article appeared in the Guardian.co.uk as follows: "They were tenacious builders of underground tunnels like Gaddafi. But while Gaddafi dug down to build huge complex bunkers, the Garamantes mined fossil water with which to irrigate their crops." The above comparison would have been nearer to the truth if the connection instead was made between the Garamantian Foggara tunnels and the Great Man-Made River -- one of the largest engineering projects in the world, through which deep water is extracted and tunneled across the whole of Libya to irrigate land as well as provide drinking water.

Garamantian Religion & Pyramids

The Garamantes appear to have had an advanced system of religion and mythology, in which sacrificial stones and pyramid-like burial chambers played an important role. Most of the Garamantian architecture is now in ruins, except the royal pyramid tombs of Ahramat al-Hattia, which, like the pyramids of Egypt, were designed to stay (see video below). However, most of these tombs and cemeteries were robbed or destroyed and so we may never know the full story of their religious and mythical beliefs and practices.

The above inscriptions, written in the Berber script Tifinagh, were collected from sites in the vicinity of Germa. According to Charles Daniels, they comprise the first collection of Garamantian inscriptions ever to be attempted. They were found inscribed, or cut or painted on dark grey amphorae, in the tombs of Garamentian cemeteries, such as those of Saniat ben Howedi. The tombs were badly destroyed, but a number of vessels survived in the graves. Despite having been discovered long time ago, no one has yet managed to decipher them. The data collected by the Italian-Libyan Archaeological Mission in the Acacus, which has located more than one hundred Tifinagh and Tifinagh-related sites in Fezzan, is the first archive of Tifinagh rock inscriptions from the Acacus region. Many of Germa's archaeological finds can also be found in Germa Museum, famous for the time-graph, showing the different periods of cave art in the area. A copy of the Tifinagh archive was also given to the head of Germa Museum [The British Library: EAP265: The tifinagh rock inscriptions in the Tadrart Acacus mountains (SW Libya): an unknown endangered heritage].

Garamantian Burial Tombs & Pyramids:

Garamantian Burial Pyramids

Like the fate of most archaeological sites from around the world many of the Garamantian tombs were robbed. The twist is that the ancient Garamantes buried their sacred treasures outside the tombs (altogether), and so it seems certain that they knew very well the nature of tomb raiders from the future, because of which the Ancient Egyptians went to great lengths to hide their tombs in the valley of the kings. The Garamantes buried their dead in graves of simple cairns in which the bodies were crouched. Some of the royal cemeteries found in the area, like the Royal Cemetery of Germa (Caputo's Necropoli Monumentale & Orientale [Scavi, p. 292 & 357]), consisted of several hundred tombs including stepped tombs. In total it was said there are at least 120,000 tombs in the valley. There are also a number of cemeteries, as those of Charaig and el-Hatia, which consist of true pyramids. The four-sided pyramids are made of coarse mud-bricks and built over a grave shaft. 

Garamentian graves from the Late Stone Age

The Garamantian  tombs were divided into four groups: circular tombs or prehistoric tombs, in which the bodies were covered with leather in a vertical hole, then filled with sand, and covered with a flat stone (as those shown above, from Germa Museum) to form a truly prehistoric burial chamber, going back to the stone age (Late Stone Age). The second type is the "square, two step-style tombs", which are plastered and painted with white chalk, and in which the burial chambers are between one and four meters deep, containing pottery, glass, lamps, gold and bracelets of Amazon and Cornelian stones. The third type is the pyramidal tombs, between two and four meters high, constructed of mud-bricks, in which the burial chamber beneath the pyramid is about three meters deep, and most of which were looted and desecrated. The fourth type is the mausoleum type, also used by the Berber Numidians of the north.

Garamantian Stone Altars:

 

The Garamantean Hand Altars

Garamantian Offering Tablets & Hand-Shaped Altars, Germa Museum, Fezzan.

These offering tablets were widely found in Fezzan and belong to the Garamentian civilisation. They were used for sacrificial purposes during worship, probably in honour of the Goddess. Some of the altars and tablets are clearly hand-shaped, recalling the famous Berber Hand, generally found across North Africa.

 

Unnecessary Notes on Colour:

The internet is awash with material debating the true colour of the Garamantes, with many even claiming the entire Berber tribes were white invaders who subjugated and enslaved the local black populations of the Sahara. Without a doubt, speaking of colour in relation to skin is now widely deplored and even embarrassing to make a note of it here. But it may be of interest to those who follow such lines of enquiry to know that the Native Americans have an interesting myth to explain the spectral colours humans came to have. According to this myth, the creator half-baked his or her mud statues and magically ended up with "white people"; then at the second attempt she or he forgot to put the timer on and the clay sculptures came out charred black; but their colour was just ripe at the third attempt, baked at the right temperature.

Mythographers dismissed this myth as "nonsense", but a closer look reveals how the native Americans cleverly connected 'temperature' with the 'colour' of the skin. Science too says colour adjusts with temperature to regulate the melanin production in the body, which acts as a sunscreen to protect the skin from the lethal ultraviolet radiation coming with the scorching heat of the sun; and that some colours are indeed illusionary refraction of wavelength where neither the sky nor the sea is really "blue". The further north you travel the lighter the skin becomes, and vice versa, of course; and hence in other myths the colour of the skin was connected with "light" and "darkness", where the gods fashioned white clay sculptures in the morning, black mud idols at night, and Caucasoid-like statues at midday (the middle way) -- the very same three characters of Noah's story: Japheth, Ham and Sam respectively. Those three branches continued to dominate the later classification of human races and languages, as they were behind a number of controversial theories and ideologies; until genetics clinched the final say and derived man from earlier primates and defined all his branches as of one dynamic type, basically sharing 99.8% of its genetic DNA with chimpanzees and 58% with bananas.

 

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