The Sahara

Where it is

The Sahara stretches across northern Africa from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, roughly the area of the United States and the largest hot desert on Earth. It is not uniform sand: most of it is rock plateau, gravel plain and mountain, with dune seas covering a minority of the surface. Rainfall is negligible over most of it, but water exists — in mountain massifs like the Ahaggar and Tibesti, in scattered oases, and in very large fossil aquifers beneath the sand that were filled when the region was wet.

The land and water around it

• The ergsdesert

  The great dune seas — the Grand Erg Oriental and Occidental, the Erg Chech — which are the image of the Sahara and a minority of its surface.

• The Ahaggar and Tibesti massifsmountains

  Volcanic highlands rising well above the surrounding plateau. They catch what rain there is, hold populations, and carry the rock art that records a wetter Sahara.

• The Sahelplateau

  The transitional belt along the desert's southern edge, where rainfall becomes just sufficient for cultivation. The desert's boundary here is not a line but a band that moves with the rains.

Its history, in short

The Sahara has not always been a desert. During the African Humid Period, roughly eleven to five thousand years ago, it held lakes, rivers, grassland and the herders and hunters who left rock art across the massifs. As it dried, populations concentrated along the Nile and at the margins, and the desert became a barrier — but a crossable one. Camel-based caravan trade from around the first millennium CE linked West African gold and Saharan salt to Mediterranean markets, and carried Islam, Arabic literacy and manuscripts along the same routes. Colonial borders were later drawn across it in straight lines that ignored who used which wells.

Timeline

Dates are shown on a timeline rather than as changing shapes on the map. The globe draws modern boundaries only, and tinting a modern outline to stand for a historical one would state something we cannot source.

Places that carry meaning

• Timbuktu12th century onward

  Where the Niger comes closest to the desert, and therefore where river craft and camel caravan exchanged cargo.

• Taghaza and the salt minesMedieval

  Desert salt workings where slabs were cut and loaded for the journey south. The buildings there were reportedly made of salt, for lack of anything else.

Learn the language here

1. 1Understand which languages are spoken hereThe Sahara is multilingual. Start with which languages are used, by whom, and for what — the phrase list only covers one of them.Written by Globe Quest
2. 2Practise with people: Arabic practice · DohaAn in-person practice circle. It is a prepared plan and needs a host before it runs.Run by members

Check yourself

• What covers most of the Sahara's surface?

  Rock plateau, gravel plain and mountain

  Dune seas are the famous part and the minority. Most of the Sahara is stone.

• Why does the camel matter to Saharan history?

  It made sustained crossings practical, so regular trade followed

  Trans-Saharan trade at scale follows the dromedary's spread rather than preceding it.

Worth arguing about

• The Sahara was grassland within human memory. What does that suggest about treating any climate as the natural state of a place?
• Borders here were drawn across wells and routes. What would a boundary drawn by the people using the land have looked like?

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