page_title: Sahara
section_title: Nubians
hierarchical_section_title: Sahara / History / Nubians
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Beni Isguen, die von dicken Mauern umgebene heilige Stadt in der algerischen Sahara. English: Beni Isguen, a holy city surrounded by thick walls in Ghardaïa, Mzab, the Algerian Sahara.
context_page_description: The Sahara is a desert located on the African continent. With an area of 9,200,000 square kilometres, it is the largest hot desert in the world and the third largest desert overall after Antarctica and the Arctic. The name 'Sahara' is derived from the Arabic word for "desert", ṣaḥra.
  The desert comprises much of North Africa, excluding the fertile region on the Mediterranean Sea coast, the Atlas Mountains of the Maghreb, and the Nile Valley in Egypt and Sudan. It stretches from the Red Sea in the east and the Mediterranean in the north to the Atlantic Ocean in the west, where the landscape gradually changes from desert to coastal plains. To the south, it is bounded by the Sahel, a belt of semi-arid tropical savanna around the Niger River valley and the Sudan Region of Sub-Saharan Africa. The Sahara can be divided into several regions, including the western Sahara, the central Ahaggar Mountains, the Tibesti Mountains, the Aïr Mountains, the Ténéré desert, and the Libyan Desert.
context_section_description: During the Neolithic Era, before the onset of desertification around 9500 BCE, the central Sudan had been a rich environment supporting a large population ranging across what is now barren desert, like the Wadi el-Qa'ab. By the 5th millennium BCE, the people who inhabited what is now called Nubia, were full participants in the "agricultural revolution", living a settled lifestyle with domesticated plants and animals. Saharan rock art of cattle and herdsmen suggests the presence of a cattle cult like those found in Sudan and other pastoral societies in Africa today. Megaliths found at Nabta Playa are overt examples of probably the world's first known archaeoastronomy devices, predating Stonehenge by some 2,000 years. This complexity, as observed at Nabta Playa, and as expressed by different levels of authority within the society there, likely formed the basis for the structure of both the Neolithic society at Nabta and the Old Kingdom of Egypt.
caption: Beni Isguen, a holy city surrounded by thick walls in the Algerian Sahara
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