SC - Honeycomb (confectionary) - question to the list

[DianaFiona@aol.com]

Brandu replied to my question:
> > What evidence do we have that the Sahara was still a grassland in Classical
> > times? Or by "Antiquity" do you mean further back than say 100 AD?

> this goes back to something I remember from school (we were 
> discussing climatology...)
> 
> Lybia and the North of Africa were called " the Breadbasket of Rome", 
> where where the gigantic "Grain ships" of the Romans loaded up.
> I remember reading that at its peak North Africa supplied some 80% 
> of the Empires total cereal grain supply. 
> 
> What apparently happened is that the Roman farming practices were 
> not efficient, and they never heard of crop rotation or letting a field go 
> fallow to replenish the soil. as the soil grew more impoverished, and 
> yeilds decreased, the Romans simply expanded the fields to makeup 
> the difference.
> They effectively Agriculturally "stripmined" much of Noth Africa.
> a very similar cause and effect to the Dust Bowl catastrophe of 
> Midwestern America 70 - 80 years ago.

Okay, but I understood your earlier message to say all of the Sahara
was grassland in Antiquity. North Africa, at least as far south as
the Romans would have gotten still leaves a lot of the Sahara untouched.

If all of the Sahara had been grasslands, and that good a breadbasket
I imagine the Romans would have gone much further south if they hadn't
been stopped by something such as the desert. While I haven't studied
it, I get the impression they didn't penetrate Africa that far. Certainly
not as far as they did to the north.

- -- 
Lord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
Mark S. Harris             Austin, Texas           stefan at texas.net
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