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Updated: May 5, 2025
"So when inclement winters vex the plain With piercing frosts or thick-descending rain, To warmer seas the cranes embodied fly, With noise and order, through the midway sky; To Pigmy nations wounds and death they bring, And all the war descends upon the wing." The account which Herodotus gives of the expedition of the Nasamonians is well known.
It may have been a Phoenician caravan route which Herodotus describes as traversed on one occasion by the Nasamonians, which began in North Africa and terminated with the Niger and the city of Timbuctoo; and another, at which he hints as lying between the coast of the Lotus-eaters and Fezzan.
Thus far I have set forth the account of Etearchus the Ammonian; to which may be added, as the Cyrenaeans assured me, "that he said the Nasamonians all returned safe to their own country, and that the men whom they came to were all necromancers."
De Quatrefages, after a most careful examination of the question in all its aspects, finds himself obliged to conclude, either that the Pigmy race seen by the Nasamonians still exists on the north of the Niger, which has been identified with the river alluded to by Herodotus, but has not, up to the present, been discovered; or that it has disappeared from those regions.
Five young men of the Nasamonians started from Southern Libya, W. of the Soudan, and journeyed for many days west till they came to a grove of trees, when they were seized by a number of men of very small stature, and conducted through marshes to a great city of black men of the same size, through which a large river flowed.
But what comes after that point no one can clearly say; for this land is desert by reason of the burning heat. Of the account given by Etearchos the Ammonian let so much suffice as is here said, except that, as the men of Kyrene told me, he alleged that the Nasamonians returned safe home, and that the people to whom they had come were all wizards.
This Herodotus identifies with the Nile, but, from the indication of the journey given by him, it would seem more probable that it was the Niger, and that the Nasamonians had visited Timbuctoo! Owing to this statement of Herodotus, it was for long thought that the Upper Nile flowed east and west.
But I have heard the following account from certain Cyrenaeans, who say that they went to the oracle of Ammon, and had a conversation with Etearchus, King of the Ammonians, and that, among other subjects, they happened to discourse about the Nile that nobody knew its sources; whereupon Etearchus said that certain Nasamonians once came to him this nation is Lybian, and inhabits the Syrtis, and the country for no great distance eastward of the Syrtis and that when these Nasamonians arrived, and were asked if they could give any further formation touching the deserts of Libya, they answered, that there were some daring youths amongst them, sons of powerful men; and that they, having reached man's estate, formed many other extravagant plans, and, moreover, chose five of their number by lot to explore the deserts of Libya, to see if they could make any further discovery than those who had penetrated the farthest.
The Spartans removed their red cloaks and wrapped them round the dead; the Athenians laid them out with their faces towards the rising sun; the Cantabrians buried them beneath a heap of pebbles; the Nasamonians bent them double with ox-leather thongs, and the Garamantians went and interred them on the shore so that they might be perpetually washed by the waves.
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