SC - Columbus' chilies

[Stefan li Rous]

Bear gave some wonderful information on some spices and then said:

> Do you have any dates on the trade?  A lot of things came from the
> Trans-Sahara in Antiquity, when the Sahara was still a grassland and travel
> was relatively easy.  After it turned to desert, the trade route between
> Mali and the Mediterranean became one of the deadliest in the world and it
> was essentially abandoned.  IIRC, it became a major slave trading route only
> in the 17th and 18th Centuries as the supply of slaves from Europe was cut
> off.

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?

While humans appear to have denuded Easter Island and Iceland in only
a few hundred years, the Sahara is much larger and isn't as isolated. That
is a lot of climatic change within a short time period.

Was slavery still going on from within Europe as late as the 17th and
18th centuries? I thought that it had pretty much stopped even from
Eastern Europe well before then.

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