num_pages: 350
description: Ten thousand years ago the great desert was teeming with human animal and plant life. Today it is in some respects at its lowest ebb of human activity. To fill in the main outline of the story of these millennia - what might be called 'the rise and fall' of this vast region of the world - is the ambitious aim of James Wellard and he succeeds triumphantly.The story is an astonishing one - of bravery and brutality faith and treachery scientific discovery and hidden mysteries. After discussing the records which prehistoric man left in the shape of some of the world's most fabulous rock drawings James Wellard turns his attention to the absorbing history of Rome's African empire. The whole of Northern and Central Africa was far better known in the days of Julius Caesar than it was at the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign.But Roman Africa disappeared in its turn. A thousand cities ten thousand farms millions of acres of good arable land were destroyed and vanished and with their going civilisation suffered a complete eclipse for over a thousand years. The Vandals and later the Arabs swept across the Sea of Sand and Islam supplanted Christianity. No area of comparable size anywhere in the world can have witnessed a greater load of human misery than the Sahara in these centuries with its criss-cross pattern of slave routes littered with human skeletons and watered only by the tears of the suffering millions who were driven to the Sultans 'palaces in the East and later to the white men's plantations in the West.
language: English
title: The Great Sahara
publisher: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd.