A town in the hot desert

With what grows here (barley and dredge, wheat), this land can feed a town of about 11,000 people from farms less than a day's cart from its walls, about the size of York around 1377.

Build a town in the hot desert

A town of 10,000 here

Its grain comes from 24 km around, 1 day by cart (comfortable). About 420 villages and 79,000 country people farm it, and the town keeps about 40 scholars. Grown to 40,000 people, its grain comes from 47 km around, 2 days by cart (strained). A city of 150,000 cannot live off this land alone.

In history

Palmyra, in the Syrian desert, grew beside a spring, Efqa, where stone tools have been dated to about 7500 BC. The oasis had about 1,000 hectares of irrigable land, and the Palmyrenes built reservoirs and channels in the northern hills to catch the rare rain; the Harbaqa dam, built in the late first century AD 48 km from the city, could hold about 140,000 cubic metres. It was not enough: Palmyra imported food. It paid with the caravan trade. Merchants paid their duties in the Tariff Court under a tax law of AD 137, and silk was the cargo that earned the most.

In the Fezzan, in what is now southern Libya, the Garamantes built what has been called the first urban society in a major desert that did not stand on a river. Their capital, Garama, had around 4,000 people, with 6,000 more in the villages within 5 km. They lived on foggaras, tunnels dug down to fossil water under the desert; the archaeologist David Mattingly counts some 600 of them, running for hundreds of miles in all. Slave labour kept them open. Fossil water does not come back: over the centuries the water table fell, and that helped bring the kingdom to its end in the late 7th century AD.

How large a city?

PeopleGrain fromBy cartVillagesScholars
3,00013 km around1 day (comfortable)12012
10,00024 km around1 day (comfortable)42040
40,00047 km around2 days (strained)1,700160
150,00091 km around4 days (not by land alone)6,200600
1,000,000240 km around9.5 days (not by land alone)42,0004,000

Living there

There are no woods to spare here. The town needs about 5,300 tonnes of wood a year for its hearths and workshops: it burns straw (about 7,100 tonnes a year), dung and brush, and buys the rest. Provisional figure.

Its market sells grain, flax, cotton, dates and dye plants, and buys timber and iron. About 23 market towns stand in its countryside.

About 40% of what its people eat does not come from the fields. Of that share: herds 60%, gardens 40%. That is some 5,300 livestock units on 80 km² of pasture. Hearth estimate.

What makes it hard

  • A water tunnel takes years to dig: in Algeria a crew may advance only about 2 m a day at 15 m deep. A town whose channel collapses, or is cut by an enemy, cannot replace it in one season.
  • Water drawn from deep, old layers is not refilled by the rain. Every generation that draws more lowers it a little, and the next one has to dig deeper.
  • The land around the spring cannot feed the town, so grain comes by caravan and whoever holds the roads holds the bread. At Palmyra, bandits were attacking caravans by AD 199.
  • Water is property, measured out to the drop. In the Algerian oases, weirs split each foggara's flow into separate channels, one for each owner: a quarrel over a share is a quarrel over a field.
  • The summer heat drives life indoors. In old Ghadames the family floor of each house overhangs covered alleys that form an almost underground network of passages, and people still go back to the old town in summer because its houses keep out the heat better.

Hard years

About one year in 8, the harvest falls below four fifths of a normal one: the town is short of some 530 of the 1,800 tonnes of grain its land gives it, with no water to bring the gap in. A plague that kills 39% of the town, as the Black Death did in Europe's towns, would leave about 680 km² of its fields idle.

What it can make

Grain, Flax, Cotton, Dates, Dye plants, Orchards, Herbs, Maize, Wool, Horses (at a cost), Cattle and hides, Cheese, Pigs and bacon (at a cost), Goats, Camels, Honey and wax

What its land cannot give, a town here must buy: timber.

What it lives on

Barley and dredge, Wheat

Underground

What a city digs depends on the rock under it: Granite, Volcanic rock, Ultramafic rock (peridotite, serpentinite), Schist and gneiss, Marble, Limestone and chalk, Sandstone, shale and clay, Salt beds, River gravels and sands

Found here

Gathered (Rerum): Agave Leaf, Aloe Vera Gel, Beetle Wing, Bighorn Sheep Meat, Camel Fat, Capers, Century Plant Fibre, Aguamiel

Hear it

Hot Desert in Biomes: plants, animals, hazards and sounds

The same climate

A town in the hot desert, on a river, A town in the hot desert, on the coast

By city size

1,000, 3,000, 10,000, 30,000, 100,000, 300,000, 1,000,000

Sources

Open the city builder — MGS Toolbox