The Republic of Chad is located right in the center of the upper half of Africa.

It's landlocked and surrounded by

Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic and Cameroon to the south,

and Niger and Nigeria to the west. The country gets its name from one of its dominant

geographic features, a large freshwater

lake, Lake Chad, that stradles Chad, Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon, and which is thought

to have once been part of a far larger inland sea, often called Mega Chad.

The lake is quite small by historical standards today though, and in fact

seems to have shrunk by as much as 95% from the mid-1960s through the late 1990s. It's regained

some of its volume in the years since, which is good because Lake Chad provides water to tens of millions of

people in the region, though it's still quite shallow and doesn't encompass nearly as much area

as it did even in recent history, due in part to a modern, warming and drying out of the local

geography. Chad, the country, is thought to have been human occupied since sometime in the early 7th century

BC, because of its geographic position along a popular trade route, one that in those early years was fairly pastoral,

but which today is largely defined by the Sahara Desert, a series of kingdoms,

some of them quite large and powerful, have risen up out of the region, most from around

2000 BC onward, but there are artifacts from smaller settlements before that period as well.

Of the larger empires that emerged later, the Sao and the Kenem are probably the best known, in part because of their scale and because

of how much evidence of their existence they left for future historians to document.

But post-first-century AD, the sultanate of Begirmi and the Wadai Empire,

which hit their stride in the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively, were probably the most

influential regional powers in terms of establishing settlements, building dynastic wealth,

...