Libya's Forbidden Deserts | Full Documentary | TRACKS

the Sahara the most unforgiving desert on earth stretches like a dry rolling sea across 10 countries [Music] once though there were no borders North Africa was all one place known by one name Libyan [Music] when the armies of ancient Rome entered its desert heartland they found a place of mystery and terror a land is unknown to them as contemporary Libya is to us and that's why I'm here to try and discover something of modern day Libya on a journey to the ends of the ancient Roman world as I follow in the tracks of the chariots [Music] Libya is in North Africa it's 90% desert but it's also got the longest Mediterranean coastline of any country [Music] and as I arrived in this little-known country by sea just as the Romans did more than 2,000 years ago I realized that this is to be a journey of contrasts and surprises my name is David Adams and as a photojournalist I travel to some of the most isolated places on the planet this journey takes me far from the Mediterranean and Libya's capital Tripoli into the heart of the Sahara and on to the ax carcass mountains on the Algerian border Ali Jamal and Mohammad are Berbers one of North Africa's original tribes but their lifestyle is pure Mediterranean they learn to catch octopus even before they started school like their father before then and his father this is a particularly persistent octopus everything thing about hunting octopus here is the same way they've been doing it for thousands of years Carthaginians and the Greeks and the Romans everybody up to present-day boomers like these guys have been doing it the same way it's the best way to catch an octopus when the first Europeans arrived on these shores they found a place of Plenty the Seas rich with fish the land fertile and warm the perfect place to establish a foothold from which to explore the rest of Africa [Music] [Music] the Greeks got here first but it was the Romans who left the most indelible mark on the country on the shores of the Mediterranean they built a city to rival anything in Europe Leptis Magna it still stands today the best preserved Roman city in the world [Music] there's some absolutely remarkable pieces right through Leptis Magna but not all of them have laid around for 1,500 or more years unused these three were destined for the palaces of Europe actually for Versailles Leptis remains undisturbed to this day wandering alone in these ruins it's easy to imagine what life would have been like here in its heyday located at the end of the north african trans-saharan trade routes it quickly became rich trading in slaves ivory gold and wild animals and like all of the Roman Empire's cities it had its circus maximus its gladiators arena indeed this was the most famous amphitheater in the whole empire outside of Rome's own Coliseum even 2000 years after the slaughter and the hysteria this is still a powerful place walking out here still evokes an unsettling feeling put a few stone blocks back in place and Ridley Scott's oscar-winning gladiator could easily have been filmed here but even more popular than the hand-to-hand fights of the gladiators were the chariot races well this is the chariot arena of Leptis now if you remember the movie Ben Hur with fifteen or twenty chariots hurtling around an arena well this was the African version I mean can you imagine what it would have been like there would have been thousands of people up along these bleachers and then down here the chariots would have roared around this circular part [Applause] but the cherry provided more than just entertainment it was a war machine the vehicle in which the Romans headed south to conquer Africa next stop is Tripoli we run to meet my Arabic translator and another surprise Libyans love horse racing [Music] horse-racing is a time on a tradition in Libya for all I know these horses may be able to trace their bloodlines back to those that pulled the chariots Libyans may love the races but they never lose their shirt in Libya there's no betting these guys are Islamic and Quranic law forbids gambling they come here purely for the sport today this is about as close as you'll get to a chariot race after a short stop at the track I make it into the heart of the city I'm not really sure what I expected to find in Tripoli but it wasn't this a vibrant modern city [Music] Libya is regarded by many as a rogue nation it's up there with Afghanistan and Iraq the haven for terrorists and Islamic extremists surely the architect of the Libyan Revolution Muammar Gaddafi rules over a backward and medieval world well another surprise it isn't not so surprising though are these Gaddafi is everywhere indeed there's a whole industry exclusively devoted to churning out all these Gaddafi's they may be everywhere but it's hard even for posters to obscure the charms of ancient Tripoli just a few short steps from the modern city lies the old town the street plan unchanged since the days of the charioteers it's here that I meet my translator in desert and even she is not at all what I expected the Judd is the female face of modern Muslim Libya she's educated wears no veil and is free to meet me alone she can even meet me in one of Tripoli's defiantly traditional coffee houses like the rest of the Arab world the coffee house is the preserve of men nazar maybe the very model of a modern Libyan woman but Libya is still a very conservative place especially outside Tripoli so have you ever been in the desert because we I think we're getting to do some camping while women can enter Tripoli's coffee houses these days they still almost never travel to the desert the Judd has lived here all her life and yet she's never been exactly wait a minute it's a lot of fun because you sleep under the stars and so every if you wake up in the middle of the night and all you see is that is the sky it's beautiful I can imagine if she's to come she needs permission from her parents and family with this in mind and Colonel Gaddafi watching over us we make plans to head cells about how many days that we have to about two weeks two weeks problem I can take three weeks if you want ya from Tripoli the tracks of the chariots lead to a place that struck terror into the hearts of Roman soldiers they gouged out their eyes just to return home and it's my next stop [Music] [Applause] today the road out of Tripoli is a good 100 miles out of most other African capitals and you'd be driving on dirt tracks [Music] any charioteers heading for the Sahara 2,000 years ago wouldn't have had it quite so easy [Music] the next leg of my journey takes me from Libya's fertile Mediterranean coast to the town of gaddama on the edge of the Sahara [Music] this is a very funny little car I don't know if it'll make it all the way across the desert a couple of hours into our journey it struck me that my translator Nejad had managed to leave Tripoli rather easily I wondered if she was here to keep an eye on me officially you know Harry I'm still not sure if no jets here to keep an eye on things but this guy definitely is he's the reason the jet could leave town so easily his name's Nagi and his new jets brother and he's to be her chaperone for the rest of our journey her family gave her permission to accompany me only on the understanding that he would come to [Music] we're heading for the ancient town of gadamer's but before we get there Nijat asks me to pull over to show me the abandoned berber village of caballo [Music] it's like a catacomb you know catacombs the Berbers are the great traders of the North African coast it was in warehouses like these that their ancestors stored perishable projects like olives oil cheese salted meat and other foodstuffs which they traded with the trans-saharan caravans for slaves and ivory in this underground maze conditions remain a constant comfortable 18 degrees centigrade 64 degrees Fahrenheit you can see all the with the visors that kept the oil outside though things are different during the day the temperature can build to over 50 degrees centigrade about a hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit while at night it plunges to below freezing it seems like it's made for people this big it was this unique and hostile environment that caught the imagination of the first Europeans to hear about it [Music] writing 200 years before the Romans arrived the Greek historian Herodotus gives us the first recorded glimpse of this ancient land from Thebes to The Pillars of Hercules lies a waterless desert here live the garamantes [Music] they hunt in chariots they eat snakes and lizards and speak a language like no other and to squeak like bats Herodotus's Africa was a land of legend of mysterious people lost to history a place of warriors and charioteers it is this world that we're now entering for this is the point where one libya ends and another begins the Fertile north is behind us and before us the vast barren interior this is gadamer's and it doesn't take me long to realize that it's a far more conventional Islamic town than Tripoli the reason I wanted to come here is because Gaddafi's was the most southerly outpost of the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago this was the ends of the earth can you imagine what it would have been like to have been stationed here for a Roman soldier this was hell on earth literally the edge of empire and the only way to get out of here the minimum requirement was to lose an eye and that's exactly what they did they dug their own eyes out so they could get out of here when I first planned on coming to Libya this was to be my ultimate destination it was to be a journey to the ends of the Roman Empire now I'm here though I'm told Rome's influence extended well beyond this town to the place Herodotus refers to a land of the gara mountains [Music] a few hundred miles further south there's a city buried in the sand a desert Atlantis that proves that the chariot went further than history records but to get there I need a desert guide now she knows of one so he sets off to try and track him down leaving the jet and I to explore the old city like caballo gaddama s' was built to cope with the environment every wall alcove and opening carefully designed for climate control when temperatures outside swelter it's cool down here though if you live here anymore they've moved to the neighboring new city with its modern amenities and the lure of satellite TV most though keep their old homes as retreats from the heat in the summer fantastic yeah for this place it's a living room you know and this is it's a bit Breuer bedrooms off the side yeah this tiny alcove is also for sleeping but only the owner's wife was ever allowed to use it the woman when she got married this is the first time and the second time when she her husband dies yeah she's sitting here and she received her relative yeah it's only twice only my whole life yeah I use this room yeah it's a very special room upstairs the roof is also a no-go zone for men this was where the women of gadamer's spent much of their time no can you stop here because here it's only for a women really yeah the men they can come here to where they raised their children and did their daily chores safely hidden from the prying eyes of men this place usually the women they are met each other here spending nice time here yeah afternoon sitting stalking laughing so they could travel from each roof - yes Wow yeah a whole different world from up here they looked down on a world dominated by men and this is something they would have seen many times it's an event peculiar to get dermis an ancient order of monks is gathering as they've done every Islamic holiday for centuries to celebrate the life of the Prophet this Sufi mystics by chanting phrases from the Quran over and over they hope to communicate directly with the Prophet and bring good fortune to the community [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the square in which they gather was once a slave market many of the slaves that made Leptis Magna and Rome's other African cities rich came from good diamonds most sold right here in this square and these guys and by the descendants of the people who brought them to be sold here the Touareg [Music] these nomads controlled the north african slave trade right up until the end of the 19th century and if their music sounds familiar there's a reason the blues weren't born in Mississippi they were born in Africa and taken to America by slaves the Tuareg sold the Tuareg may no longer deal in slaves but there is fiercely independent as ever now as in Roman times anyone who travels further south than gadamer's has to enter their territory on their terms the next leg of our journey across the Uncharted wasteland the Tuareg core home starts tomorrow but not before we witness a meeting of these fearsome warrior clans [Music] following in the two-thousand-year-old chariot tracks of the Roman army across the Sahara is not something to be taken lightly even on Libya's goods sealed roads the next leg of our journey takes us from gadamer's in northwestern Libya to the Oasis of gibran on our way to the ik arcus mountains this is the land of Africa's last nomadic warriors the Tuareg and we're on the way to a wedding I've read that women in in Libya get married quite late during their 30s and sometimes in their 40s why is that you know the problem here because the wedding its cost too much money you know yes so what about you do you have a boyfriend I had an engagement before but now we finished but sometimes you feel that you cannot live with someone like this well that happens that having a Western I'm still unmarried I - I travel too much but it's the same you've gotta find the right person yes right [Music] Tuareg territories cover a vast area of the central Sahara and spread across the borders of Libya Mauritania Nazir Algeria and Mali and because of strategic alliances between the great plans they can cover great distances to attend inter tribal events [Music] on the outskirts of gadamer's we've been invited to attend one such meeting of the clans at a wedding at the start the men and the women are separated the men waiting for the women to prepare the nuptial tent dressed in indigo robes the groom patiently waits portraying no wedding day butterflies or doubts to know which one is the bride as the tent is built we watch from a respectful distance it's both unusual and a great honor to be allowed to witness such a ceremony the groom and his entourage are the first to slowly make their way to the tent singing prayers for the blessing of the union next comes the bride hidden from sight under her wedding robes it may look like she's entering the Union as the subjugated partner but that's far from the truth despite the almost legendary warrior reputation of Tuareg men Tuareg society is matrilineal women-owned the family tents only women are allowed to learn and write the Tuareg language and all hereditary rights are passed to the firstborn daughter [Music] and as the party goes on into the night our thoughts drift to the next leg of the journey Nagi has located a desert guide and some vehicles our next stop is Garen ah Libya's desert Atlantis [Music] [Music] this is Mansoor and he's been learning his craft since he could walk it's a made and here it it looks all the same of it having how do you and the other drivers navigate how do you how do you know which way to go I started with Dwyer guide you know don't give me all the time then I learned my own way now I can do it so easy now this is an unforgiving place if you can survive here let alone live here all you need to have another car to travel with so you always have to travel with more than one car definitely there's anything ever happened to you you've been stuck out here yeah I've been stuck out once I had to wait for two days almost until another car passed around [Music] 200 miles deeper into the desert at the Oasis of Saba is one of the largest camel markets in North Africa at any one time there are upwards of 25 thousand camels here most of them from Sudan traditionally this market supplied the beasts of burden for the great camel caravans that crisscross the Sahara today though most of these animals will be sold for me we've stopped here to replenish supplies and not surprisingly najat quickly become something of a curiosity Mohammed Ali's been buying and selling camels here since he was a boy he's made the three-month trip from cartoon more than 40 times and yet he has never seen an uncovered woman from Tripoli here before like he's showing to you that he is a little bit angry oh really yeah like like a man one day argument between each others yeah another just come in to the last pound of flesh but there were on the other hand the seller knows what he wants it's time this one you said that he's the part of the king of the camels and this one is the part of the rupture yes very good want to get to the part of Africa you know the bargain and the deal and loving to argue and haggle yeah because you absolutely jointly the deals done and I suspect Muhammad Ali's got the price he wanted it's a timeless scene and one that could easily have been witnessed by any charioteers that came this way in Roman times [Music] tonight's camp is that the charity is equivalent of the truck stop the Oasis of Gibran one of a handful of life-giving lakes that stretch across the desert [Music] these oases were most likely what made it possible for chariots to cross this harsh and hostile world [Music] tomorrow I discover what little remains of an all but forgotten civilization as I enter Libya's desert Atlantis [Music] waking up in the idyllic oasis of gibran you'd be forgiven for thinking you're in some earthly paradise rather than deep in the Libyan Sahara [Music] [Applause] my journey in the tracks of the chariots has taken me from Gouda mez to gab Ron next stop Girma the side of a long-forgotten city my translator Nejad is experiencing camping in the desert for the first time good morning some teeth every morning you look like you just walked out of a beauty salon and I'm all beard and you what time do you must get up at 5 o'clock to start no no thanks only 15 minutes not more how did you sleep I did not sleep well yesterday yes every 10 minutes I think I got about 4 hours maybe that in one stretch [Music] in these modern-day four-wheel-drive chariots with wide slightly deflated tires and powerful engines great distances can be covered quickly in relative comfort [Music] but could traditional chariots with wooden wheels have really negotiated these dunes and where would the drivers have found the food to feed their horses [Music] what's likely is that for much of the time they didn't have to travel across the dunes because they could travel down these they're called Woody's this is the wadi al-hayat which actually means the valley of life what is a hard-packed valleys which could possibly have supported the chariots in their crude wheels more important perhaps is the fact that this valley once ran through the center of an empire that spread across 70,000 square miles of desert now for three thousand years people have been living in theirs and not just nomads but actual cities this was a real civilization right in the middle of the Sahara this is the land of the garam aunties and today the secrets of their world are being revealed by a combined team of archaeologists from Britain and Libya who are excavating the Gera Monty ins capital garden a desert Atlantis but slain buried by the shifting sands of the Sahara for centuries team leader is Professor David Mattingly from Leicester University in England and we're now stepping into a garam antion house this is a domestic space with very particular guarantee of features here we've got a gammadion half ancient texts described the garam Anton's as a backward barbaric and nomadic people professor Mattingly and his colleagues are now proving those texts to be wrong that's really a common stereotype that we have of siharan peoples and we share this with the greek-roman writers that we imagine people as being essentially nomadic but you know we're here in the heart of an oasis and an oasis is all about sedentary living agriculture at their peak the garam antion's made the Desert Bloom they built a 3,000 mile network of irrigation canals linked to underground aquifers not really the sort of thing barbaric and nomadic people usually get up to this is that the bit of girl ancient grammar that really catches the imagination I think we've been looking those domestic structures and they create give the lie to the view that these people in America this is a temple it built in a Mediterranean style and it and it clearly influenced by the architecture of Rome there are columns standing along here we've got fragments of the Capitals and the bases and so on but it's one of the sequence of big public buildings that exists in this part of the ancient side that really made this a metropolis so is this the real end of the Roman world was this as far as the chariots really got so with the metallurgy and the different artisans they had they they would have had the technology to make chariots and weapons of war and to maintain the man to use them yeah [Music] before we parted professor Mattingly tantalizingly Tolwyn that there's evidence of chariots having got even further into the desert he'd never seen it only heard of it [Music] but it's out there somewhere in the mountains that separate Libya from Algeria tomorrow I come face-to-face with the charioteers of the Sahara [Music] [Music] [Music] the Sahara in southern Libya is actually a collection of deserts everything from immense seas of sand and stony wastes to rugged mountains we're following in the tracks of the chariots heading towards the most spectacular mountain range in the entire Sahara deer carcass we're still a day's drive from the mountains and we've run into trouble this is part of the realities of travelling in the Sahara that you you do break down we've been splattering along for the last half hour but what you find when you're traveling with these guys is that anything can be fixed and usually in about 20 minutes half an hour if it was maybe three or four days trying to get something replaced but they carry everything and can strip an engine apart totally we chose this place to pull up and make repairs for a reason rock art for it's on the mountain walls of the ik arcus that I hope to find a picture a picture that may prove chariots crossed the Sahara five thousand years ago this Wadi would have been a very different place how do we know because the humans who came here to fish and hunt recorded what they saw I guess you'd have to say this is about the last thing that you'd expect to find in the desert a crocodile so it poses a really interesting question how did it get here well it suggests I guess is that the Sahara hasn't always been so desolate what's trackless desert today was once a lush string of lagoons watering a rich savanna full of zebra a buffalo ostrich rhino and giraffe and no chariot to try and find that we must press on [Music] back on the road and we finally enter what can only be described as the monument value of living [Music] it hasn't rained in the Akaka for 30 years this is the reality of the Sahara today deep bore holes 20 years ago there are ladies all over here and a lot more people lived here but the Sahara is drying up the water table has been steadily dropping for centuries now there's only one well in this entire region not surprisingly very few people remain ali akbar and his family have stayed on though each day they make the 15 kilometer trip to this well he's watched as his neighbors and friends have all literally left for greener pastures so why does he stay it's because he's the self-appointed guardian of the treasure trove of rock art scattered through the caves in the mountains above his home maybe this is where I can find my chariot could you ask him I know that he is a guardian of the caves and drawings one would he allow us to look for it and does he know of any any drawings like that I have frost sollozos corrosive an eruption wouldn't be the top of the mountains but he doesn't want to show them because did you show them to anybody no he doesn't actually he doesn't show except if somebody's a Fisher coming from the government he would do that otherwise he wouldn't I mean that's good because that will preserve as far as a chariot goes there's one you know about is he happy for us to go and look for that do you think fulfills my nephew her corrosive in Kandahar guys his twos are around here and everybody can see it he doesn't have any problem but the others know [Music] Mansu may have heard about paintings of chariots problem is he doesn't know exactly where they are and there's no guarantee of finding them the ik arcus is a maze of high-walled interconnecting valleys and blind canyons many have perished here simply because once inside they couldn't find their way out and our fuel is running low we can't afford to spend a lot of time searching so Manso decides to take us to a cave system he knows about he's never seen a chariot there but he's only ever explored a tiny part of it once this cave and the valley it sits above would have supported a small community [Music] so how old are these do you think what according to the archaeologists I see about six to eight thousand years old and it might be the oldest here in this region really yeah and this does it they will have lived in this case I toasted the protection and the fuel from here you know against the wind protection no and what about these these holes here perhaps it's for a grating greet oh really like a mortar and pestle yeah okay in the Akaka s-- figures constantly seemed to loom up out of the landscape [Music] because of the people who once called this place home [Music] [Music] this is our last day in the desert apart from only having enough fuel for the return trip we're also running low on other supplies so we start to prepare for the long haul back to Tripoli what do you think Nancy but do you like this country yeah different little different yeah it's very different Holly and Olivia show you showed us it's quite a big different attitude it's the first experience we're here we know yeah well it's just a differ from what what he used to leave and he's in the same country as all well I mean it's a vast this is some much country every place is so different what does nice you think about how the the West thinks about Libya would gear Phillip Island beer vanilla with Somali who was chef Avenue police exactly feel sorry about this person and how they talked about Libya and what they say about Libyan under - but he's glad a lot of people now coming you know tourists is often and so they can see the truth but I can see how this country is leaving it's not as they used to think it is you know as the vehicles are loaded Mansoor scours the map one last time before we leave we've got the time for one last attempt to find the paintings I've come all this way to see [Music] a two-hour trek from our camp there's another cave and under the leave an ancient overhang we find the world I've been looking for recorded on stone [Music] these paintings are the public records of forgotten societies they show the animals they hunted the landscape to clothes they wore their rituals the minute I of their daily lives [Music] well this is the most incredible place because it's not just paintings on a wall in the middle of the desert this is actually a history book well like a movie of what was happening two and a half thousand years ago you've got cattle camels a recent arrival in the desert at that time you've got a group of hunters soldiers and here what we've been looking for a chariot in full flight but what's really interesting about this is that whether it was a sign like their brand saying this is our territory or if this was painted by a guy who lived here and had never seen a chariot and then out of the the sands came five or ten of these just cutting down warriors it would have been an awesome sight and what this guy is recorded is this faithful piece of technology that's entered his world this really is one of the most incredible places in Africa only problem this was most likely painted about two-and-a-half thousand years ago centuries before the Romans even came to Libya I started out in the tracks of the Roman chariots and ended up finding evidence suggesting even earlier charioteers [Music] and if they weren't Roman who were they were they the garam Anton's warriors of an all but forgotten civilization it once flourished in the heart of this ancient desert or with a someone else another civilization as yet unknown who like me also made journeys to the ends of the earth [Music] you

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Id: NTf2rki0AcI

Length: 50min 24sec (3024 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 22 2020