SC - Columbus' chilies
Stefan li Rous
stefan at texas.net
Thu Jun 22 21:45:08 PDT 2000
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
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at: http://www.florilegium.org ****
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