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Herodotus on the Garamantes: A Problem in Protohistory*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Daniel F. McCall
Daniel F. McCall*
Affiliation:
Boston University
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Extract

The Garamantes first come to our notice with Herodotus' Survey of Libya. Hekataeus of Miletus traveled along the Libyan coast over half a century before Herodotus, but his work is preserved only in fragments. Hekataeus may have mentioned the Garamantes, but if so, that part of his work has not survived. The Histories of Herodotus (iv.174) lists the “Garamantes” among the peoples of eastern Libya, giving to each a brief description; and iv.183 refers to them in another list, this one a sequence of stopping places on a desert trail which includes “the country of the Garamantes.”

The earlier paragraph had fewer than half a dozen lines and the later one fewer than two dozen; not very much in total, but as Vansina has recently affirmed, the medievalist's axiom also applies to Africa: “the fewer the sources… the more they are treasured and scrutinized.”

The intent of this paper is to attempt to determine how the two references, four paragraphs apart, are related to each other; and thereby to prepare the way to extract as much as we can learn from these two references about the Garamantes in the time of Herodotus, the fifth century BC.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 26 , January 1999 , pp. 197 - 217
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1999

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Footnotes

*

Quotations throughout this article are from the translation of George Rawlinson as printed in The Greek Historians, The Complete and Unabridged Historical Works, ed. Francis Godolphin (2 vols.: New York, 1942). However, I have consistently replaced the -ians ending in ethnonyms with -es; the former is an unnecessary anglization, the latter is simpler, closer to the original, and used by some other translators. Although as an undergraduate half a century ago I had an introduction to classical Greek, I am unable now to read it; therefore I compared Rawlinson's rendition in the passages treated here with the wording of other translators.

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