It is winter time, thus time to update my maps and especially continuing work on the “The Ancient World“ map in DIN A1 announced last year. My current focus is on the African section of this map. Recently, I added the Tichitt culture both to the new one and my The Bronze Age World map. Another early African civilization whose homeland was largely swallowed by the expanding desert.
The Tichitt culture was maybe the earliest complex society in Africa west of the Nile valley, featuring vast stone built settlements, and ancestral to the Soninke people. At the time of my Bronze Age map this culture was at it’s peak, existing in very different environment that the one found there today. During the wettest phase of the Sahara, the Aoukar basin, today covered by desert, was once a large lake, later dissolving into an extensive wet land with multiple smaller, but still very extensive, lakes. Surrounding the basin are several plateaus, from west to east Dhar Tagan, Dhar Tichitt, Dhar Oulatta and Dhar Nema. Mainly along the cliffs of these plateaus, rising above the lakes, an almost endless chain of stone built settlements can be found. Over 400 of all sizes, from hamlets to sizable towns, mostly located along the edges are known today.
Archaeological finds, like Hippopotamus bones and fishing utensils, show us how heavily the inhabitants used the plentiful aquatic resources.
The area today. The settlements of the Tichitt culture are distributed among 4 plateaus surrounding the Aoukar basin. From west to east Dhar Tagant, Dhar Tichitt, Dhar Oulatta, and Dhar Nema. There are about 400 known settlements. Included on the satellite image are only the ones along the edges that I could mark and identify myself by quick search. Image: Google Earth
During the first millennium BCE the lakes begun to disappear and area became the desert it is today. One by one the Dhars had to abandoned.
A typical village of the Tichitt culture. Image: Google Earth
Two of the major walled settlements on the Dhar Tagant plateau. Fortifications, like the circuit walls seen here, become more common in the 1st millenium BCE. This might be a hind to conflicts with Berber tribes expanding from the north into this area and the increasing mobility of nomadic populations by the spread of the Camel through the Sahara. Image: Google Earth
The Tichitt culture on my Bronze Age map.
Since both maps are of a rather small scale, (1:20 Million for the Bronze Age ancillary map and 1:17.5 Million for the Ancient World) a summed up the various clusters of settlements on the plateaus into a single marker and label with the name of the cluster.
To include the Tichitt culture on my Bronze Age map I had to slightly expand the coverage of the ancillary map to the west. For this only the, already duplicate, label describing the Arabian shield cooper sources had to be removed from the main map, while still being present on the ancillary map. Thus, no information was lost.
During the time frame of this map the material culture of the Tichitt people had already spread to neighboring regions, like the Niger inland delta and bend. At this time we see the rise of the first inter regional trade network in western Africa. Besides the people of Aoukar and Niger regions also involving communities living around lake Chad and producers of cooper from the Aïr Mountains.
WIP: More than one millennium later. The relevant section of sub Saharan Africa in the first century CE, in its current, unfinished state, on my upcoming map “The Ancient World”.
In the first century CE only parts of Dhar Tagant remained inhabited, but the emigrants had bolstered the development of the entire region and new towns like Dia or Koumbi Saleh begun to rise. In the not too distant future their descendants founded the Ghana Empire, with Koumbi Saleh becoming its capital in medieval times.
In the east a new polity, centered around Houlouf arose south of lake Chad. Agisymba is the name of a region visited by the Roman merchant and traveler Iulius Maternus in the late 1st century CE, who was accompanying the king of the Garamantes on a journey to sub Saharan Africa. It was rich in fauna like Rhinoceroses and is usually located north of the lake.
Write a comment