It's the ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes your host and in today's podcast

we are talking about an ancient civilization that thrived in the Sahara desert, the

lords of the ancient Sahara. They were called the Garamantes. Often portrayed in our Greek

and Roman sources as these wild men of the desert, this could not be further from the truth.

In fact, archaeology is revealing that this civilization was highly sophisticated with

advanced irrigation techniques and being at the heart of some amazing trade routes that

connected the Mediterranean with inland Africa. Now to tell me more about this ancient Sahara

and civilization, I was delised to be joined by Professor David Mattingley from the University

of Leicester. David has spent years of his life researching the archaeology of the Garamantes.

He is at the forefront of debunking this Greco-Roman portrayal of them, so it was great to get David

on the show for this enlightening chat about the Garamantes. Here's David.

David Mattingley, it's a pleasure to have you on the show.

Well, good morning Tristan, thank you for inviting me.

Good morning and no problem at all because I've been really looking forward to this one. We are talking

about the Garamantes, a highly sophisticated ancient society that are thrived in the Sahara.

Yeah, they're broadly contemporary with Greco-Roman civilization just to sort of orientate listeners

chronologically and if you want to picture them geographically, their heartlands lay about a thousand

kilometers or 600 miles south of the modern city of Tripoli in southern Libya. It's a region known

as Fazan and it's about a hundred thousand square miles in area or about 250,000 square kilometers

if you think in those terms. That's about the size of Scotland and Wales combined and Fazan comprises

one of the largest clusters of Oasis lying in a series of linear depressions within an area

quite dramatic Saharan landscapes. Yes, you mentioned Saharan landscapes, you said, so David, it is

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