900–700 BCE: (The Garamantes as Peripheral Responders, Not Instigators — The Chronology Refuting the Attribution of an Instigating Role to the Garamantes in …

900–700 BCE: (The Garamantes as Peripheral Responders, Not Instigators — The Chronology Refuting the Attribution of an Instigating Role to the Garamantes in West African Commerce, the Garamantes Becoming Prominent Only from the Ninth and Eighth Centuries BCE While Both the Mediterranean and West African Commercial Revolutions Were Already Separately Under Way Centuries Earlier, the Garamantes Living on the Periphery of Both Systems and Responding to Commercial Opportunities Rather Than Creating Them): The chronology refutes the Garamantes attribution straight out. The Garamantes began to become prominent only from the ninth and eighth centuries BCE onward. But the two commercial revolutions — to the north in the Mediterranean regions, and to the south in the western and central Sudan belt — were each already separately under way centuries earlier, in the second millennium BCE. It is the Garamantes who began as peripheral actors. They lived on the southern periphery of the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern commercial revolution. They lived on the northern periphery of the West African commercial revolution. They were responders, not instigators. They responded to commercial opportunities — to the availability of goods that reached them from both the savanna lands of Africa to the south and the Mediterranean sea lanes to the north — although they began soon also to produce products of their own for both market regions. The inversion is devastating. The people whom scholars have cast as the catalysts of West African commerce turn out to have been middlemen positioned between two preexisting systems, exploiting a geographical accident rather than generating a commercial revolution. To credit the Garamantes with instigating West African trade is like crediting a ferry operator with inventing the rivers.