The Garamantes, a tribal people who had entered the area known as Fezzanr sometime before 1000 BCE, dominate the region hroughout the period of Punic and Greek colonization of the coastal plain.

In the desert they establish a powerful kingdom astride the trade route between the western Sudan and the Mediterranean coast.

The Garamantes leave numerous inscriptions in tifinagh, the ancient Berber form of writing still used by the Tuareg.

Beyond these and the observations of Herodotus and other classical writers on their customs and dealings with the coastal settlements, little is known of this extraordinary and mysterious people until the advent of modern archaeological methods.

The Garamantes' political power is limited to a chain of oases about four hundred kilometers long in the Wadi Ajal, but from their capital at Germa they control the desert caravan trade from Ghadamis south to the Niger River, eastward to Egypt, and west to Mauretania.

The Carthaginians employed them as carriers of goods—gold and ivory purchased in exchange for salt—from the western Sudan to their depots on the Mediterranean coast.

The Garamantes are also noted as horsebreeders and herders of long-horned cattle.

They succeed in irrigating portions of their arid lands for cultivation by using foggares, vast underground networks of stone-lined water channels.

Their wealth and technical skill are also attested to by the remains of their towns, which are built of stone, and more than fifty thousand of their pyramidal tombs.

Rome sends several punitive expeditions against the Garamantes before concluding a lasting commercial and military alliance with them late in the first century CE.

…their capital Garama—over six hundred kilometers south of Leptis Magna.

Uqba ibn Nafi, an Arab general under the ruling caliph, invades Fezzan in 663, forcing the capitulation of Germa.

Stiff Berber resistance in Tripolitania had slowed the Arab advance to the west, however, and efforts at permanent conquest are resumed only when it becomes apparent that the Maghreb can be opened up as a theater of operations in the Muslim campaign against the Roman Empire.

In 670 the Arabs surge  into the Roman province of Africa (transliterated Ifriqiya in Arabic; present-day Tunisia), where Uqba founds the city of Kairouan (present-day Al Qayrawan) as a military base for an assault on Byzantine-held Carthage.

The king of the Garamantes, a Saharan Berber kingdom in the Fezzan that has long resisted the Roman Empire's dominating influence, concludes a peace treaty with Constantinople in 569 and accepts Christianity, according to records of the Eastern Roman Empire.