The Libyan Desert: Natural Resources and Cultural Heritage

Abstract

It may not be immediately apparent why we should be looking at snapshots of Morocco, Mauritania and Mali in a collection of works devoted to Libyan culture and history. Nor why we should be focusing our viewfinder primarily on a moment in time, between the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that is scarcely treated elsewhere among these papers. It is my contention, however, that this particular set of text-images reflects something essential about what it meant to ‘be Saharan’ at this particular moment of transformation, and that this ‘essence’ has relevance in other times and spaces. In this case, there is a relevance attached both to the specifics of Saharan salts and their industries, and to the dynamics of Saharan politics and their power configurations. Introduction Among the other papers here, for example, are references to the Garamantes’ salt works at Jarma – an extensive industry about which we know something in archeological terms (Ziegert 1974), but little else with respect to its historical economic or political role (see Mattingly and Wilson, this volume). Also mentioned are the extensive salt works of Kawar, production sites known to have played an important role in the extension of political power by the Fazzan, under the leadership of both Jarma and of Zawila (Insoll, this volume). Knut Vikor’s work on Kawar confirms this lengthy and significant period straddling the Islamisation of the Fazzan in which the Libyan region attempted in various ways to establish influence (if not hegemony) over this source of trans-Saharan trade revenue. Vikor would argue that the Fazzan-Kawar relationship survived centuries of transformation and strain, finally pulling apart only when influences from the south, from the rising states of Kanem and Bornu in sub-Saharan Africa, became dominant from about the thirteenth century (Vikor 1999, 140-8; 161-4). In short, both in terms of the specific questions raised by looking at salt in its cultural and commercial contexts, and the general ones emerging from images of political economies seeking to incorporate control over salt as a basis of power, the following set of ‘snapshots’ do indeed reflect something of the dynamics, if not the specifics, of moments in the history of the Fazzan. Snapshot 1: The Legends of Ijil (c. Eighteenth Century) A shepherd of the ‘saintly’ Kunta Choumad family of Wadan is ‘led’ by a giant lizard (dzabe) to the Ijil saline; it then disappears into the middle of the sebkha and the salt is discovered (Brosset 1933, 259-60). Some versions of this oral tale continue by saying that the Kunta chief, a highly respected wali (saint or marabout in French terminology) kept this a secret for a long time because the mine lay close to wells dug by another tribe (originally of southern Morocco), the Ahel Barikallah, and therefore by Islamic law ‘belonged’ to them (Berges n.d.). The wells are 1Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta, Edmonton (Canada) The Libyan Desert: Natural Resources and Cultural Heritage