For centuries, the Gaetuli were reduced to a footnote in Roman history — the primitive nomads at the edge of the empire's maps, briefly troublesome, quickly forgotten. The Desert Kings is their recovery.Drawing on archaeology, epigraphy, historical linguistics, and a careful reading of the classical sources against their own grain, Tormund Newell restores the Gaetuli to their rightful place at the center of ancient North African history. These were the breeders of Rome's finest cavalry horses, the operators of the ancient world's largest purple dye industry, the managers of the trans-Saharan routes through which sub-Saharan gold and ivory reached Mediterranean markets. They organized military resistance that held the Roman Empire to a draw for nearly a decade. They produced in Apuleius one of the towering literary minds of late antiquity. And they endured — through Roman absorption, Christian schism, Islamic transformation, and medieval imperial expansion — as the living Amazigh world of modern North Africa.Spanning three thousand years of history, from the Meshwesh Libyans who founded an Egyptian dynasty to the Sanhaja confederation whose cavalry conquered Spain, The Desert Kings tells the story of a people who were never the barbarians Rome needed them to be. They were something more interesting: themselves.
