![]() ![]() Some historians argue that the scale of slave trade in this period may have been higher than medieval times due to the high demand for slaves in the Roman Empire. Black slaves seem to have been valued as household slaves for their exotic appearance. ![]() The empire imposed customs tax on the trade of slaves. In the 5th century AD, Roman Carthage was trading in black slaves brought across the Sahara. In the early Roman Empire, the city of Lepcis established a slave market to buy and sell slaves from the Bantu African interior. Ancient Greek historian Herodotus recorded in the 5th century BC that the Garamantes enslaved cave-dwelling Ethiopians, known as Troglodytae, chasing them with chariots. They used slaves in their own communities to construct and maintain underground irrigation systems known to Berbers as foggara. The Garamantes relied heavily on slave labor from sub-Saharan Africa. ![]() During times of conquest and after winning battles, the ancient Nubians were taken as slaves by the ancient Egyptians. These raids for prisoners of war, who subsequently became slaves, were a regular occurrence in the ancient Nile Valley and Africa. Records of slave trading and transportation in the Sahara date back as far as the 3rd millennium BC during the reign of the Egyptian king Sneferu who crossed the fourth cataract of the Nile into what is today modern Sudan to capture slaves and send them north. The Arabs managed and operated the trans-Saharan slave trade, although Berbers were also actively involved. Estimates of the total number of black slaves moved from sub-Saharan Africa to the Arab world range from 6-10 million, and the trans-Saharan trade routes conveyed a significant number of this total, with one estimate tallying around 7.2 million slaves crossing the Sahara from the mid-7th century until the 20th century when it was abolished. Most were moved from sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa to be sold to Mediterranean and Middle Eastern civilizations a small percentage went the other direction. The Trans-Saharan slave trade, also known as the Arab slave trade, was a slave trade in which slaves were transported across the Sahara. ![]()
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