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comment by kleinbl00

Unfortunately it appears that the Sahara is tectonic in origin and has been there since like Gondawanaland was a thing.

The Yatir Forest is substantially bigger than Serapium and probably has better long-term hopes; Lebanon isn't called "the Cedars" because they wanted trees. Which doesn't mean they shouldn't try, but it does mean that greening will be easier in places that had trees within the reach of recorded history.





user-inactivated  ·  1537 days ago  ·  link  ·  
This comment has been deleted.
Quatrarius  ·  1537 days ago  ·  link  ·  

"the green sahara" might be a long-ago thing in a geological timespan (i wouldn't know), but a significantly green-er sahara was pretty recent - enough that it comes up in some theories/reconstructions of where proto-afroasiatic speakers lived and the history of predynastic egypt, which is where i started learning about it - environmental changes in north africa is a really interesting topic and if you're interested in how one of the richest areas of the roman empire turned into a big dusty boy i would recommend it because it goes down some neat rabbitholes

be careful though in that a fair bit of the resources online about it are things originating in french colonialism or eugenicists trying to make everything the dirty arabs' fault - if you see a story relying a little too heavily on the banu hilal just give the author a quick spotcheck

kleinbl00  ·  1537 days ago  ·  link  ·  

This is interesting to me. Can you throw up like three or four links that you think are worth digging into?

Quatrarius  ·  1537 days ago  ·  link  ·  

unfortunately i only managed to find one thing (tangentially related) that i favorited at the time - this is more about "how, if at all, we can associate ancient descriptions of groups of peoples with modern ethnic groups", but i think you would probably find that interesting too, and it has a LOT of keyterms in it that would help the search for more information. for once in my life it seems like i didn't save enough links, instead of far too many

https://historycooperative.org/journal/what-happened-to-the-ancient-libyans-chasing-sources-across-the-sahara-from-herodotus-to-ibn-khaldun/

i originally got into the environmental-change thing through a "hey why did north africa become so much less important over 1000 years or so" search so the things i learned are related to that

basically to sum up what i can remember, the steady march towards desertification was due to a combination of the following:

roman agricultural and forestry practices sucking over the longterm (which was a thing elsewhere too)

groundwater being used up by said practices - when it ran out, the garamantes went bye-bye for example among other groups

actually i lied in the process of writing this post i found this, which again isn't as related as i would like but it goes over similar territory

also when a shitton of pastoralists moved in during the arab expansion plantlife got fucked over by grazing animals, as well as old infrastructure getting rekt

as for proto-AA, i think the more accepted linguistic theory is an urheimat around ethiopia? but frankly it's modeled to be spoken a long-ass time ago and it's not as well studied as proto-indo-european, which still has really big theoretical disputes (in who spoke it, where it was spoken, and what exactly it looked like). i don't know how much you know about historical linguistics but feel free to ask if you wanna get a crash course

it's quite late at night so forgive me if i'm less coherent than usual (which i admit isn't a comfortably high ceiling in the first place)

kleinbl00  ·  1536 days ago  ·  link  ·  

That link is interesting in that it goes from "Herodotus to ibn khaldoun" but Cyrene was 200 years old when Herodotus got there so... from an "ancient history" perspective Ibn Khaldoun writing about the berbers founding Libya is kind of the equivalent of Gibbon writing about Rome - I mean, yeah, it's important but he was reliant on sources that weren't entirely reliable at the time and the historical record has pretty much blown everything he had to say away.

Here's the thing: desert societies are always precarious. Ask the Anasazi, ask the Assyrians, ask the Egyptians. Libya exists, as far as I know, because it was Cyrene. The north coast of Africa became less relevant in no small part because everything fell to ruin in the Peloponnesian War, and then when the Romans were busy picking over the Greeks' sloppy seconds they fucked up the African Coast something serious. By the time of the Islamic conquest, anyone with any pull ended up in Spain while anyone whose life sucked ended up in Africa.

So yeah. It never really had a chance. But really, it was never really a place that had much going on anyway.

By the bye, Cyrene is the home of silphium, one of my favorite little bits of folklore. I may have developed a low-budg indie script about some adventuresome botanists who head out to Libya in search of silphium only to find haoma at which point things get extremely altered states slash red one. There was a time when I figured spending a couple days shooting b-roll and key shots on Socotra would have been within the realm of possibility, but that time has passed.

Read the silphium box here. You can read the bit about asafoetida; it's kind of a trip. But the silphium thing is...evocative.

Quatrarius  ·  1536 days ago  ·  link  ·  

i disagree with the assertion that it never had much going on, given that it was rome's breadbasket and rich as hell for quite a while after the time you discussed - i think if you're gonna point to the romans fucking up the coast you should point to deforestation and not to the whole "salting the earth" thing - sure, they fucked up the city for a while, but it rebounded into a bigass metropolis and only really lost relevance after getting bounced back and forth between rebels, vandals, eastern romans, and arabs for like 400 years

libya wasn't just cyrene: there was a lot of shit in roman africa and i think it's not correct to characterize north africa-west-of-egypt as "the greeks' sloppy seconds" and punic ruins. a bunch of important stuff happened in between "rome moves in" and "everything is islam" and if things turned out a bit differently it sure as hell could have "had a chance", or at least could have declined a lot slower

also north africa was like. extremely important in the spread of christianity and popped out more bishops and heresies than anybody knew what to do with so it's like even culturally speaking it's not like it was a backwater given that saint mutherfuckin augustine was the bishop of HIPPO

i dunno man. i don't disagree with the first half of your post (old historians are lying bastards at the best of times and it's a dangerous game living in the desert), but i deeply disagree with your conclusion and i think it's an unhelpful oversimplification

silphium is neat as hell, i agree with that - i would watch the hell out of that movie too

kleinbl00  ·  1535 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Look - we started talking about the permanence of the Sahara and ended up at the historical origins of native Libyans. I've done my level best to keep up and keep pointed in the direction you wanna take this but I also wanna point out that while we're talking your passion?

I'm just pointing out that the Sahara is an old desert.

Quatrarius  ·  1535 days ago  ·  link  ·  

hey I'm not trying to be a dick about it, it's that i want to clarify some things that i actually have knowledge about / want to contribute to discussion on here for once instead of floating around complaining about my life like i normally do - I'm sorry for breathing down your neck, i didn't intend it

at the same time if i was saying smth inaccurate about sound design or moviemaking or watches or etc the things you know a lot about, i would want to be corrected / for people who know more to come in and share because I'm an ignorant person generally so it's like, i thought i could share some stuff that i thought was interesting

so i apologize for using your comments to jump off on rambling / making you need to 'keep up with' a discussion that doesn't interest you: next time I'll just comment on the main body of the post to avoid this kind of thing i guess

user-inactivated  ·  1535 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    next time I'll just comment on the main body of the post to avoid this kind of thing i guess

Please don't and please keep being you. This is stuff I like hearing about, especially culture and language and religion and art. So if you have interesting side tangents, I'd love to hear them.

ButterflyEffect  ·  1536 days ago  ·  link  ·  

And much as the Romans did to Utica so did the late 20th century do to Upstate New York. Some “fun” historical parallels and, of course, city and townships names.

http://yorkstaters.blogspot.com/2006/01/whats-in-name-no2-origins-of-classical.html?m=1

Quatrarius  ·  1537 days ago  ·  link  ·  

also as for egypt, essentially the people that were having a grand ol time hanging out in the quite habitable sahara fishing, hunting, doing a lil early agriculture in what was apparently a pretty cool savanna (you can find cave art of animals like giraffes in libya and other places at times you definitely wouldn't have been able to transport one across a friggin desert) - they all had to drastically change how they were living: population went for a shit, people either turned to a more nomadic existence (like out west), to oasis-type groundwatery places, or to the nile

nile turned out to be a pretty good deal