Silbury Hill Found to be "Sterile"

"The dank chill tunnel slopes down through 4,400 years of history into the heart of a mystery. The ground is slippery underfoot with sodden chalk dug as the pyramids were rising in Egypt. Archaeologists have reached the core of Silbury Hill in Wiltshire - and still have no idea what the most enigmatic prehistoric monument in Europe was for.

They know now there is no burial chamber for a Celtic king, no treasure hoard, nothing but a shallow bed of gravel, over which three ever larger mounds were raised until 35m baskets of chalk later, the monument stood 40 metres high, dominating the surrounding landscape, the largest artificial hill in Europe...

What they have found is treasure only to archaeologists: blades of grass still green after almost 5,000 years from the turf sods which covered the original mound, evidence of a pit which may have been the earliest ritual activity on the site, the chalk boulders used to strengthen the heaps of chalk rubble, and a huge ditch which was carefully filled before the final phase was built. The most enigmatic find is sarsen stones, the same stone as in nearby Avebury and Stonehenge, carefully incorporated in every stage, some which would have taken two men to drag up to the very top of the mound.

The distinctive flat top of the hill has led to some of the wildest theories, that it was an observatory or a platform for ritual sacrifice. In fact it now appears to be comparatively modern, carved flat to take a massive timber Saxon or Norman building - one posthole was a metre in diameter - presumed to be a military lookout." If you enjoyed this post, never miss out on future posts by following me by email!

Garamentes tunnel system watered early Libya

"Sometime before 1000 BCE, a group of nomads looked south of the narrow coastal strip and decided that if no one else was going to claim the desert, they would. They recognized that the sands and sun would kill anyone who deviated from a proscribed path of oases, and so determined that there was no need to use their resources in trying to defend a desert border; all they need to do was garrison the watering holes. In this manner – along a string of oases about 400 km long – the Garamentes were able to control the routes between Sudan and the Mediterranean coast, west to Mauritania, south to the Niger River, and eastward as far as Egypt.

Recent archaeology has shown the Garamentes from being far more than Herodotus' description of a tribe of numerous barbarians who were good at raising cattle; indeed, they became the Sahara's first culture to develop an urban civilization absent a perennial river – by 150 BCE, their capitol, Gerna (the modern Jarma Oasis) had a population or perhaps 4000, with another 6000 living in the immediate vicinity. Eight more major towns and numerous smaller settlements dotted their realm, and a decidedly city-based culture developed to exploit transiting caravans. According to some estimates, over 50,000 of their pyramidical stone tombs dot the landscape of their former territory.

Weird Historical Sidenote: For a glimpse into what the territory of the Garamedes looks like nowadays, check out this guy's photologue of a trip to Tassili National Park in Algeria. See if you can spot the petrified elephant.

They were able to accomplish all this by means of an ingenious system of more than 1600 kilometers of foggares (tunnels), dug down to subterranean aquifers and used to supply irrigation systems on the surface, and through an effective means of written communication. The Garamendes' Phoenecian-based alphabet is still in use by some Tarureg tribes today, have largely been preserved through the good offices of multiple generations of desert-dwelling women.

Their elaborate tunnel system made the Garamedes overly reliant upon slaves, which led to the old conquer-or-perish motif that we see played out so often through history. They warred for control of trade (and for profit) with the kingdoms surrounding them, be they Nubian, Egyptian, Carthaginian, Greek, or Roman. These latter sent several punitive expeditions into the lands of the Garamedes, but the desert proved unconquerable; finally, the Romans gave up and signed a lasting commercial and military agreement with them at the end of the 1st century CE." If you enjoyed this post, never miss out on future posts by following me by email!