Pomponius Mela, a popular travel writer of the 40s ad, tells us that in Cyrenaica there is a spring “they call the Fountain of the Sun,” which “boils in the middle of the night, and then, gradually cooling down, at dawn becomes cold; then, as the sun rises, it promptly gets colder until at midday it is solid ice. . .” (1.39).
For Mela, Africa was full of such strangeness and paradox, and little known beyond the coast. He takes his reader on a sailing trip, or periplus, along the Mediterranean shore (“our sea”) from west to east as far as Egypt, describing the coastal towns and landscape, but seeing beyond them in only the haziest way, and reporting much in the interior as uncertain or open to doubt (1.25-40; cf. 3.100-107 for the Atlantic coast of North Africa). Mela then gives an account of the peoples of the region, written in a continuous ethnographic present that emphasizes their inactivity and primitive state (1.41-48). He works in from the inhabitants of the coast, who are relatively similar to “us” other than in language and religious affiliation, through the pastoral peoples of the interior who do not have cities, laws, beds, or tables, to the inhabitants of the desert without names, dreams, or voices. Finally we reach the monsters of the deep interior, including the Blemyes “who lack heads; their face is on their chest” and the Goat-Pans whose form “is celebrated in their name.” Mela relies largely on Herodotus and sources of similar antiquity for his ethnographic information, which adds to the sense of ahistoricism and exoticism in his account. The Roman reader is distanced and separated from Africa in time as well as space (cf.
B. Shaw 1982 on the Mediterranean ideology of nomadism).
But this is odd: North Africa was by then well known to Romans, after centuries of war with Carthage, decades of colonial activity and military occupation in the coastal region, and several famous expeditions into the interior in the time of Augustus. It may have suited Mela’s immediate purposes to portray Africa as distant, peripheral, and increasingly strange - not least as a way of justifying the narrow limits
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Of Roman territorial control there to his readers (Mattingly 2003: 9) - but it is also the inevitable result of his interpretative framework, common among ancient authors, working out from “our sea” and “our customs” to the increasingly other beyond.
This Romanocentric approach still guided the construction of colonialist models of ancient North Africa almost two millennia later: T. R. S. Broughton’s 1929 account of “the general social development” of the region consists for the most part of a long quotation from Mela’s ethnography describing the people of Africa from the inhabitants of the coastal cities to the “roving nomads” without homes (the completely implausible section on monsters is tacitly suppressed), followed by the comforting remark that “it was Rome’s task to organize, administer, and colonize the sea regions” (Broughton 1929: 10-12).
New paradigms of interpretation in ancient history now offer alternatives to periphery-periphery models. Rather than focusing on or from one city, many historians are looking to broader geographical contexts of interpretation, of which one of the most popular has been the Mediterranean. There has also been a turn to more complex conceptual frameworks, such as globalization (Hingley 2005) and most recently network theory, which analyzes society in terms of complex and dynamic interconnected systems with fluctuating nodes rather than fixed central points (Malkin 2003). The internet provides a striking example of such a network, illustrating too the way in which developments in historical interpretation are always of their time, depending heavily on contemporary scholarly and political concerns in a postcolonial era (Morris 2003). This is no criticism: models have to make sense of the time they are written in as well as the time they are written about. But can these new approaches make good sense of ancient North Africa?
In the now classic elaboration of the “Mediterraneanism” model, The Corrupting Sea, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell define the Mediterranean as characterized by an unusual amount of topographical and environmental fragmentation into “microregions” alongside an unusual level of communication, or connectivity, between those micro-regions; within this ideal model, relative levels of connectivity and fragmentation of course vary according to time and place (Horden and Purcell 2000; cf. Hitch-ner, the mediterranean and the history of antiquity). This thesis has prompted Brent Shaw to make a case for North Africa as “characterized by a peculiar insularity” (B. Shaw 2003: 93). For him, “[t]he northern fringe of the African continent. . .is isolated, locked between the world’s largest inland sea. . .on the one side and the world’s largest desert on the other.” (95). Within this North African island, Shaw vividly evokes three distinct micro-regions created by plate tectonics and cut off from each other and from the wider Mediterranean world: Cyrenaica in north-eastern Libya, the Maghrib proper, and the Maghrib Al-Aqsa, or modern Morocco. For him, this ecological fragmentation at multiple levels and the subsequent lack of regular and consistent contact with the rest of the Mediterranean means that socio-economic development in North Africa is out of step with the rest of the Mediterranean world, but that when Africans do adopt new economic and cultural practices from elsewhere change is often fast, dramatic and strikingly localized.
Shaw investigates these themes primarily in the prehistoric and Roman periods; in this chapter I want to explore the nature of connectivity with and within the region
5 North Africa, showing caravan route discussed in Liverani 2000b
Between these eras. Recent research on North Africa in different historical periods has highlighted the extent to which the Mediterranean and the Sahara can operate as bridges as well as barriers, as contact and exchange zones, places of work, habitation and transit (e. g. Mansouri 2000 on the Mediterranean, Keenan 2005 on the Sahara; cf. Cote 2002 and Abulafia 2005 on the Sahara as another Mediterranean). At the same time, the latest archaeological work in the region is revealing new evidence for economic and cultural interaction between North African regions and other peoples beyond the sea and desert from ever earlier periods. What follows will be a brief and impressionistic map of developments in three rather different areas in the first millennium bc, focusing on the links between peoples and places rather than the boundaries around and between them. Despite Mela’s picture, the Punic colonies of the coast, the Garamantian settlements in the desert and the inland Numidian kingdoms all participated in major “international” networks of trade, diplomacy, imperialism and culture, and they illustrate the fluctuations and variety to be found in such networks.
World History
