500s–400s BCE: (The Garamantes Misconception — Scholars Wrongly Attributing to the Garamantes of the Central Sahara an Instigating Role in West African Comme…

500s–400s BCE: (The Garamantes Misconception — Scholars Wrongly Attributing to the Garamantes of the Central Sahara an Instigating Role in West African Commerce, When in Fact the West African Commercial Revolution Predated Garamantes Activity by Centuries and Developed Independently of Mediterranean Influence, the Need for Direct Confrontation of This Not-At-All-Tangential Misattribution): Ehret pauses to confront a misconception that is not at all tangential. There is a tendency among scholars to attribute to the Garamantes — notable African merchants of the northern and middle parts of the central Sahara in the mid-first millennium BCE — an instigating role in the West African commercial revolution. This attribution is a species of the same diffusionist reflex that has distorted the history of African technology and agriculture: the assumption that commercial complexity in sub-Saharan Africa must have been triggered by contact with the Mediterranean world rather than generated independently by African peoples operating within African contexts. But the chronology makes the attribution impossible. The West African commercial revolution, with its specialized production towns, its artisan wards, its long-distance trade networks stretching across 2,000 kilometers of the Sudan belt, was already well under way centuries before the Garamantes became prominent in the central Sahara. The Garamantes were participants in networks that already existed, not creators of networks that had not. To credit them with instigating West African commerce is to misread the direction of historical causation — and to do so in a way that, once again, denies African peoples the agency they demonstrably possessed.