Urbanization in the Central Sahara in the 1st millennium BCE

The history of the Sahara, which is nowadays the largest hot desert in the world, is still to be written for the most part. Until some decades ago, there had been only little acknowledgement of pristine and early African urbanization before the Islamic period, except for the Mediterranean and Nilotic civilizations. The Sahara was mainly considered as a regional, geographic, and cultural barrier, separating North Africa from the sub-Saharan southern regions. The existence of a distinct network of oases in the Central Sahara as the trading points of an interconnected system developing prior to the Islamic era was substantially denied. However, archaeological excavations in the region of Fazzan, Libyan Sahara, from the early 2000s, have profoundly altered this perspective, showing instead the genesis of an urbanization process related to the oases’ formation already from the 1st mill. BCE. The Garamantes mentioned in the Classical sources and often depicted as desert marauders, have regained a proper place in the African history, as a complex civilization that introduced different subsistence strate- gies in an arid environment, no longer suitable to mobile pastoral societies, shaping the oases landscape into a man-made environment.