Did any civilizations inhabit the Sahara before it became a desert?

by Legendtamer47

I'm curious if there could be undiscovered ruins buried beneath the sands.

Imgig

It's not what I would call a 'civilization', but seeing as the term is pretty vague and subjective, it's worth mentioning the Tichitt culture. Around 2000 BC they emerged as a sedentary agropastoralist culture around the rim of the Hodh Depression in southeastern Mauritania, an area which at the time was still relatively humid compared to the drying Sahara from which they migrated, with lakes and streams forming around the edges of the Depression. This was the earliest of a number of Neolithic West African sedentary societies that were emerging at the time, such as the Nok and Kintampo, but they were unique among these cultures for attaining a form of proto-urbanism, building sprawling complexes of drystone enclosures at the top of the cliffs which surround the depression. The larger of these, which appeared around 1600 BC, could cover 30-95 hectares and consist of some 200-600 walled compounds, which would have enclosed huts, granaries and livestock. These were arranged in a settlement hierarchy, evidencing some degree of social complexity, but there's no evidence of a more complex state.

The culture flourished throughout the second millennium BC and survived into the beginning of the Iron Age, but after about 500 BC the whole region was gradually swallowed up by the Sahara, its inhabitants retreating south towards the Niger River. They are commonly thought to have been the ancestors of the Soninke people who would later go on to build the kingdom of Ghana, so the complexity seen in the Tichitt culture can be seen as the first step towards the emergence of the state in West Africa.

Sources;

MacDonald, KC; Vernet, R; Fuller, DQ; Woodhouse, J. (2003) 'New Light on the Tichitt Tradition: a preliminary report on survey and excavation at Dhar Néma', in Researching Africa's Past: New Contributions from British Archaeologists.

Holl, Augustin (2009) 'Coping with uncertainty: Neolithic life in the Dhar Tichitt-Walata, Mauritania, (ca. 4000–2300 BP)', Comptes Rendus Geoscience, Vol. 341, No. 8-9.

Commustar

There were humans living in the region that is now the central Sahara approximately 7,000-10,000 years ago, and some settlements on the edge of the Sahara or in mountain ranges as recently as 2500-3500 years ago.

Before I get too deep into an answer, I want to debunk something that has already come up in this thread. Several comments that are now deleted have made reference to this Journal Nature article, and concluded that "the Sahara desert is much older than modern humans, so nobody could have lived there before it was desert". This is wrong.

Within the past 100,000 years there have been numerous periods of climate variability in the Sahara region. The prevailing climate has switched from long periods of aridity and desertification, to wetter "pluvial" periods with much more rainfall and ecological change to grassland and numerous lakes and rivers^1, and back. That journal nature article says that the earliest period of desertification happened some 7 million years ago, but the region has not been uninterrupted desert for the last 7 million years, there have been many "wet" periods where it was relatively easy for humans to live there.

We know that humans did live in the region because we have surviving rock art that depicts giraffes, buffalo, birds, and humans hunting and swimming. We also have archaeological sites like Adrar Bous, Ti-n-hanakaten, Gobero which show evidence of human habitation in the central Sahara from 10,000-3,500 years ago. There is also the site at Nabta Playa in the Egyptian desert which demonstrates megalithic architecture some 9,500 years ago.

/u/Imgig already mentioned the Tichitt culture at Dhar-Tichitt, which existed in an area that could support pastoralism, but the climate has become more arid in the past 3,500 years.

Are there more sites out in the Sahara that are in that same time-frame which haven't been identified, or which have been identified but not excavated? Possibly. As a continent, Africa is generally under-studied archaeologically. Adrar Bous was first surveyed in 1970, Nabta Playa in the 1980s.

Of course, humans did not completely abandon living in the Sahara once the area became desert. Folks continued to live there and struggled to adapt, or adapt their surroundings to them. There has been some archaeological surveying of the foggara underground irrigation systems in the Fezzan region of Libya, constructed by the Garamantes peoples from 500 BC-500 AD.

Ditto, after sustained and direct trans-saharan trade developed after 600 AD, there was a growth of cities along the trade routes to support the caravan trade. Cities like Awadaghust, Sijilmasa, Tadmekka, Taghaza, Ghat.

These later examples might be more like what you picture when you talk about "ancient ruins" and "lost civilizations". However, these trans-saharan trade oases are much more likely to have been documented by contemporary writers. That means historians have more to go on, if only "Al Bakri mentions a town called X, which he says is 2 days west of Tadmekka".

I am excited for the possibilities that satellite imaging, other forms of remote sensing, and computing bring to archaeology. If there are overlooked sites, those tools have the potential to help identify them.