How can we promote powerful civilization in subsaharan Africa as early as possible?

I think you're both also missing another point here: even if they did collapse, they just spread a steam engine across the Sahara. They're not going to have a handle on the tech forever, and that region is now going to have a very advanced piece of technology that cuts out a lot of work from a lot of things.

Oh, they are going to collapse. But the extra boost means they will grow larger, and last longer than OTL first.

One issue I am not sure about...how local is water tables, pressure etc in the Sahara? The presence of the occasional Oasis leads me to believe there may be some local component. This would make growing and founding new cities easier with steam extraction, as it would be a lot less work to set up than constructing a new lot of tunnels.

Whats more...they have a spectacularly strong and clear motivation for improving the steam engine before they collapse, because water will get harder and harder to extract.

Fuel will probably change to naphta after not too long.
 
So was the religion of the Garamentes really the Kemeti indigenous religion? Did it change throughout the years or did their isolation preserve it?

Also, given that they were Tuaregs, does that mean they were matriarchal? I really hope so.
 
I know that. What I meant was that why don't more people propose ways to enhance the Bantu's package. Say, have some crops from India come to Africa from way of the Eastern African coast.

Which they did, it seems (although the other way around appears to have been more common, intriguingly).
 
There isn't a lot of information about the Garamantes is there? We don't know what names they used, their religion, or what their relationship was like with Egypt or the Berbers. Did they leave behind any written records?
 
There isn't a lot of information about the Garamantes is there? We don't know what names they used, their religion, or what their relationship was like with Egypt or the Berbers. Did they leave behind any written records?

Not that I know of, although by logic, actually they should have.
We do have some ideas of their onomastics through (scarce) Classical sources, IIRC suggestive of some Berber linguistic element (at least among the elites; there's speculation that they may be ancestral to the modern Tebu people in the same general area, who speak a Nilo-Saharan language utterly unrelated to anything Berber - this, too, is of course entirely unproven).
Their material culture however is pretty well known - before the present nastiness in Libya, their capital and other significant sites have been excavated and are decently documented - we should have some clues about their religion from that, the shape of their temple at least. We also have their art documented by graffiti and decorated objects (IIRC, also showing traits that point to "Berber" similarities - although as always it should be noted that objects don't have language groups).
I vaguely recall having read a throwaway remark somewhere on the net about Greco-Roman influence on their architecture, but don't quote me on that. And equally vaguely, that some Classical author mentions them as worshipping Jupiter - which may mean anything, and thus means nothing except that they had something that could pass for a supreme deity to distracted Roman eyes.
Problem is, probably much this knowledge is buried in some relatively obscure archaeological campaign reports, publications behind paywalls, or simply past the tenth page of search results with obvious keys in Google.

EDIT: As I imagined, it turns out they had writing - pity we can't still read it. Also, here is a decent summary about them - I think it's where I took my impressions above from, easier to find than I thought. http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/200403/libya.s.forgotten.desert.kingdom.htm
 
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I think you guys are missing the point that the Garamantes were using a water source that was limited. Inventing a way to extract it quicker just diminishes the easily accessible water.

You'd have to get really lucky to have the Garamantes invent not just a steam machine but also the know-how to extract the deeper water sources. Otherwise their entire large agricultural civilization is doomed to collapse. Borderline ASB, in my opinion.
 
Maybe have people understand the seeds in ground=plants connection circa 50K bc or so, then develop into little agricultural city-states along the Ethiopian rivers, maybe.
 
Honestly I have never heard of the Garamantes following Egyptian religion and would welcome a source.

Hm. It seems to be a common assumption, but following the references, I can't seem to find a source. It seems to be an assumption based on images of animal-headed gods, burying their dead in pyramids and mummifying them. The mummification process used appears somewhat similar to the Egyptian one, but mummification in the area seems to predate the Egyptian practice by at least 1000 years. There seems to be some speculation that it influenced the Egyptians.

There isn't a lot of information about the Garamantes is there? We don't know what names they used, their religion, or what their relationship was like with Egypt or the Berbers. Did they leave behind any written records?

Yes, but we can't read them.

I think you guys are missing the point that the Garamantes were using a water source that was limited. Inventing a way to extract it quicker just diminishes the easily accessible water.

You are misunderstanding how their water-extraction worked. It was not 100 % effective. Far from it, there are vast, vast amounts of groundwater left still. They did not collapse when they ran out of water. They collapsed when they ran out of accessible water.

A small distinction, but the POD we are presupposing is not one that would allow them to pump accessible water faster, but one that would also increase the amount of water that was accessible immensely.
 
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