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Article: What happened to the ancient Libyans? Chasing sources across the Sahara from Herodotus to Ibn Khaldun.
- Article from:
- Journal of World History
- Article date:
- December 1, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 University of Hawaii Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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PIECING together the ethnic history of the ancient world in a systematic way is an impossible mission. One particularly perplexing problem is the fate of groups that lived beyond the bounds of city and empire: hundreds of them come and go in the historical record. We think we know what happened to a few, such as the Franks and the Angles and Saxons. Many others, however, simply disappear from the historical record, presumably the victims of larger or more martial groups, although the disappearance of an entity was more likely to have meant absorption or fragmentation than complete annihilation. (1) Even prominent or notorious peoples came to mysterious ends: the Scythians ...