What of Africa between the coast and the desert? According to Fliny the Elder, in the first century ad there were 463 separate nationes in Numidia and Africa (Fliny, HN 5.29), but they seem for most of the previous millennium to have kept themselves to themselves. On the minimal evidence so far available, there were for a long time few cities and little evidence of trade and exchange beyond the very local. This is not surprising: land can be much harder to cross than sea and desert, and mountains can be a more formidable barrier than water or sand. Local economic growth, agriculture and urbanization inland seem to have begun in the fourth century (Camps 1961: 59-91, Brett and Fentress 1996: 32-34, de Vos 2000: 59), at the same time as political networks of tribes began to emerge. Farticularly important were the “Numidian” confederations of the Massyli and Massaesyli who played important roles in the Hannibalic war as Carthage and Rome vied for the support of the famous Numidian cavalry. After the war Massinissa, the leader of the Massyli, was crowned as king by the Romans (Livy 30.15.11-12, 17.12). State and network formation inland thus coincided neatly with intensive growth in the sea and desert networks to the north and south as well as with the Funic wars, and the Numidians consolidated their networks of power as mercenaries, just as the Garamantes and Carthaginians had done as merchants. This seems to be a classic case of a “secondary” empire, one which grew up as a result of Carthaginian and Roman imperialism, and whose emergence was prompted at least in part by new levels of connectivity within and beyond its borders.
Finds of Campanian A pottery and Italian amphorae at Bulla Regia (Broise and Thebert 1993, 217-18), and Italian and Rhodian amphorae in the mausoleum at El Khroub (Ruger 1979), confirm that the Numidians were trading with Italy and the eastern Mediterranean by the second century bc. It is striking, however, that Numid-ian political and commercial involvement with Rome did not translate into other kinds of networks between the two powers. Instead, Massinissa linked his kingdom into broader international diplomatic and cultural networks, sending gifts of wheat all over the Mediterranean, cultivating relationships with Hellenistic monarchs and cities in the East as well as with the Romans, sending offerings to the temple of Apollo at Delos and erecting a statue there, and sending his son to take part in the Panathenaic games (Brett and Fentress 1996: 27).
As well as asserting their involvement in the Hellenistic Mediterranean, the kings and elites of Numidia were naturally also interested in exploiting more local connections and associations in Africa, and their coins illustrate the flamboyant cultural melange that resulted (fig. 24.1). Usually inscribed in Punic, they often feature on one side portraits of the kings with diadems (an attribute of Hellenistic kingship), and on the other galloping horses with or without riders. These latter recall not only the cavalry strength on which the kingdom depended but also the series of small stelae of the same period, mostly from the Kabylie region of Algeria, which
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24.1 A bronze coin issued by the Numidian king Syphax, inscribed in Punic, featuring the king wearing a diadem (obv.), and a galloping horse and rider (rev.). Twice actual size. (Copyright Trustees of the British Museum.)
24.2 A “chieftain stele” from the Kabylie, Hellenistic period
Feature local chiefs on horseback (fig. 24.2; Laporte 1992 for the dating). In sum, the Numidian kings were reaching in every direction to reinforce their local power by creating networks of local and international identity.
Such networks of identity offer an extra dimension in which to think through the connectivity of North Africa. Although we have seen in the Fazzan that cultural mobility often maps onto trading contacts, we have also seen in Numidia that networks of power and culture can extend in quite different geographical directions. A final example from inland North Africa, this time from an urban rather than a royal context, may show that networks of cultural identity could extend in different directions from political networks in time as well as space. An inscription from Dougga dated to 139 bc, i. e. after the destruction of Carthage, shows us that the local magistracies had Libyan titles at this time (RIL 2). But by the first century ad, they are Punic: the town’s chief magistrates are suffetes (CIL VIn.26517 with Khanoussi and Maurin 2000: 137-42). And Dougga is by no means a unique case: the evidence for the widespread use of Punic titles for magistracies in inland African cities (by no means all of Punic origin) derives from the first century bc at the earliest (Belkahia and Di Vita-Evrard 1995). The perceptible shift at Dougga suggests that this was in fact a development of the Roman period, not that we simply lack earlier evidence (cf. Ferchiou 1987: 66). While there were of course still Punic towns after the destruction of Carthage, Punic domination was long gone, and Carthage has arguably become a virtual node in a network of (false) memory. These cities turn to an older source of power and authority in the region in the face of the new threat of Rome. This is also a nice example of socio-political localization, even archaizing, in the face of increasing and perhaps enforced economic globalization.
So it is possible to see the people and places of North Africa in the first millennium BC in a perspective very different from that of Mela, as centers of fluctuating economic, political, technological and cultural networks, extending in different directions, but all intensifying in the Hellenistic period. A network approach to North Africa also reveals the similarities and interconnections between very different African peoples. But just because there was connectivity does not mean that it applied to all peoples at all social levels in the same way (Morris 2003). Levels of trade and cultural networks don’t tell us about social or economic organization. We know little about the power structures of the commercial networks of the coast and desert, for instance: Who ran them? How were the benefits of prosperity distributed? The Garamantes are particularly mysterious, since they are so little discussed in ancient literary sources: we do not know to what extent the trans-Saharan trade was in the hands of one or more states, and to what extent in the hands of individuals, we do not know who paid the cost of the geographical expansion of the Garamantian state in this period (Liverani 2000b: 511), or how Garamantian society was structured - though given the difficult and dangerous nature of foggara construction, and the rewards of trade, slavery is very likely to have been common (Wilson in Mattingly 2003: 276-77).
So to come back to my initial question, can a connectivity approach make sense of ancient North Africa? It does seem that a “Mediterranean” paradigm of simultaneous fragmentation and connectivity makes increasing sense in the region during the first millennium bc, although this pattern presents a paradox for the Mediterranean model in that it relies on the desert as well as on the sea. But “North Africa” itself may not make much sense at all as an independent unit of analysis, not only because it is in some ways so fragmented and isolated, but because it is at other times and in other ways so connected to the rest of the world (cf. B. Shaw 2003: 94-95). The same might be said of the sea, and indeed of the desert: environmentally coherent spaces are not always historically coherent subjects.
World History
