Libyans Bronze-Age Army Overview

The Libyans in the Bronze Age

This is the Third in a series of articles about some of the unsung peoples and armies of the Bronze Age that are worthy of your consideration. Remember these are written to encourage interest in building "alternate" armies to the staid old stand-bys (when you get tired of Egyptians versus Hitites), and not intended for deep PhD level scrutiny. Having said that, constructive criticism and thoughtful additions to known info are always appreciated. There are new explanations and hypotheses coming to light every year on the armies and organizations of the Bronze Age, and we'd encourage you to do some research on armies that tweak your interest. Don't forget to share your findings with the rest of us!

For the Bronze Age period the sparse evidence means that we usually have to start much higher up the `historical ladder' than in other periods and extrapolate further downwards to get to our warfare/wargames platform. By that we mean we have few campaign diaries, few uniform guides and no drill regulations. There are almost no surviving paintings or manuscript records (of the more obscure dress and unit staffs and flags for example), nor eye-witness reports (save what the Pharaoh authorized to forward his own glory) and this means the research becomes more `historical' than simply picking up an Osprey book, as we can for other periods (note 1).

Location and the Land

Neolithic culture in Libya can be traced back to the 7th millennium BC, when it was flourishing on a well-watered savanna that stretched far to the South --- there are several petroglyph drawings of elephants, giraffes, and other non-desert dwelling beasts that show the area wasn't always a desert. Sometime around 2000 BC, the process of desiccation (or the drying up of the land) accelerated, and most animals moved away, as the Sahara expanded northward and southward a little each year, on its way to becoming the broad swath of photographic uninhabitable dunes that we know today. Desertification made less and less of the land suitable for plant life over the course of centuries – and even today, only a little more than 1% is considered arable, while over 90% of Libya's territory is classified as desert or semi-desert – which obliged the people who lived there to adapt in order to survive in the harsh conditions.

Many of the people of the old savanna migrated toward the (then) more fertile fields of the Sudan, while some stayed put and melded into the tribes of Berbers, who'd been trickling in for the past few hundred years. The origin of the Berbers is hard to determine. They seem definitely Caucasian and of Mediterranean stock, but they identify themselves by tribe, clan, and family rather than by nationhood or land of origin. Ranging from Egypt to the Niger Basin, they speak mutually unintelligible languages of the Afro-Asiatic family. They collectively refer to themselves as imazaghan ("free men"). Old Kingdom records from Ancient Egypt show many Berber/Libu migrations and border skirmishes. One possible origin of the term "Libya" is that these Egyptian documents identify one of the unruly tribes the "Libu" mentioning that they'd been raiding and attempting to settle in the Nile River Delta.