Livestock
Livestock is defined as domesticated animals raised in an agricultural setting to produce labor and commodities such as meat, milk, fur and wool. The term is sometimes used to refer to those that are bred for consumption, while other times it refers only to farmed ruminants, such as cattle and goats. Horses are considered livestock in the United States; the USDA uses livestock to some uses of the term “red meat”, in which it refers to all the mammal animals kept in this setting to be used as commodities. The USDA mentions pork, veal and lamb are all classified as livestock and all livestock is considered to be red meats. Poultry and fish are not included in the category; the breeding and slaughter of livestock, known as animal husbandry, is a component of modern agriculture, practiced in many cultures since humanity's transition to farming from hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Animal husbandry practices have varied across cultures and time periods. Livestock were not confined by fences or enclosures, but these practices have shifted to intensive animal farming, sometimes referred to as "factory farming".
Now, over 99% of livestock are raised on factory farms. These practices increase yield of the various commercial outputs, but have led to negative impacts on animal welfare and the environment. Livestock production continues to play a major economic and cultural role in numerous rural communities. Livestock as a word was first used between 1650 and 1660, as a merger between the words "live" and "stock". In some periods, "cattle" and "livestock" have been used interchangeably. Today, the modern meaning of cattle is domesticated bovines. United States federal legislation defines the term to make specified agricultural commodities eligible or ineligible for a program or activity. For example, the Livestock Mandatory Reporting Act of 1999 defines livestock only as cattle and sheep, while the 1988 disaster assistance legislation defined the term as "cattle, goats, poultry, equine animals used for food or in the production of food, fish used for food, other animals designated by the Secretary."Deadstock is defined in contradistinction to livestock as "animals that have died before slaughter, sometimes from illness".
It is illegal in many countries, such as Canada, to sell or process meat from dead animals for human consumption. Animal-rearing originated during the cultural transition to settled farming communities from hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Animals are domesticated when their living conditions are controlled by humans. Over time, the collective behaviour and physiology of livestock have changed radically. Many modern farm animals are unsuited to life in the wild; the dog was domesticated early. Goats and sheep were domesticated in multiple events sometime between 11,000 and 5,000 years ago in Southwest Asia. Pigs were domesticated by 8,500 BC in the Near 6,000 BC in China. Domestication of the horse dates to around 4000 BC. Cattle have been domesticated since 10,500 years ago. Chickens and other poultry may have been domesticated around 7000 BC; the term "livestock" is may be defined narrowly or broadly. Broadly, livestock refers to any breed or population of animal kept by humans for a useful, commercial purpose.
This can mean semidomestic animals, or captive wild animals. Semidomesticated refers to animals which are only domesticated or of disputed status; these populations may be in the process of domestication. Traditionally, animal husbandry was part of the subsistence farmer's way of life, producing not only the food needed by the family but the fuel, clothing and draught power. Killing the animal for food was a secondary consideration, wherever possible its products, such as wool, eggs and blood were harvested while the animal was still alive. In the traditional system of transhumance and livestock moved seasonally between fixed summer and winter pastures. Animals can be kept intensively. Extensive systems involve animals roaming at will, or under the supervision of a herdsman for their protection from predators. Ranching in the Western United States involves large herds of cattle grazing over public and private lands. Similar cattle stations are found in South America and other places with large areas of land and low rainfall.
Ranching systems have been used for sheep, ostrich, emu and alpaca. In the uplands of the United Kingdom, sheep are turned out on the fells in spring and graze the abundant mountain grasses untended, being brought to lower altitudes late in the year, with supplementary feeding being provided in winter. In rural locations and poultry can obtain much of their nutrition from scavenging, in African communities, hens may live for months without being fed, still produce one or two eggs a week. At the other extreme, in the more developed parts of the world, animals are intensively managed. In between these two extremes are semi-intensive family run farms where livestock graze outside for much of the year, silage or hay is made to cove
Idriss Déby
General Idriss Déby Itno is a Chadian politician, the President of Chad since 1990. He is head of the Patriotic Salvation Movement. Déby is of the Bidyat clan of the Zaghawa ethnic group, he took power at the head of a rebellion against President Hissène Habré in December 1990 and has since survived various rebellions against his own rule. He won elections in 1996 and 2001, after term limits were eliminated he won again in 2006, 2011, 2016, he added "Itno" to his surname in January 2006. He is a graduate of Muammar Gaddafi's World Revolutionary Center. Déby was born in the village of Berdoba 190 kilometers from Fada in northern Chad, his father was a poor herder. After attending the Qur'anic School in Tiné, he continued his studies at the École Française in Fada and at Franco-Arab school in Abéché, he attended the Lycée Jacques Moudeina in Bongor and holds a bachelor's degree in Science. After finishing school, he entered the Officers' School in N'Djamena. From there he was sent to France for training, returning to Chad in 1976 with a professional pilot certificate.
He remained loyal to the army and to President Félix Malloum after the country's central authority crumbled in 1979. He returned from France in February 1979 and found the country had become a battleground for many armed groups. Déby tied his fortunes to those of Hissène one of the chief Chadian warlords. A year after Habré became President in 1982, Déby was made commander-in-chief of the army, he distinguished himself in 1984 by destroying pro-Libyan forces in Eastern Chad. In 1985, Habré sent him to Paris to follow a course at the École de Guerre. In 1987, he confronted Libyan forces on the field, with the help of France in the so-called "Toyota War", adopting tactics that inflicted heavy losses on enemy forces. During the war, he led a raid on Maaten al-Sarra Air Base in Kufrah, which located in Libyan territory. A rift emerged on 1 April 1989 between Habré and Déby over the increasing power of the Presidential Guard. According to Human Rights Watch, Habré was found responsible for "widespread political killings, systematic torture, thousands of arbitrary arrests", as well as ethnic purges when it was perceived that group leaders could pose a threat to his rule, including many of Déby's Zaghawa ethnic group who supported the government.
Paranoid, Habré accused Déby, Mahamat Itno, the minister of interior, Hassan Djamous, commander in chief of the Chadian army of preparing a coup d'état. Déby first fled to Darfur, to Libya, which he was welcomed by Muammar Gaddafi in Tripoli, while Itno and Djamous were arrested and killed. Since all three were ethnic Zaghawa, Habré started a targeted campaign against the group which saw hundreds seized and imprisoned. Dozens were summarily executed. In 2016, Habré was convicted of war crimes by a specially-created international tribunal in Senegal. Once in Libya, Déby gave the Libyans detailed information about CIA operations in Chad. Gaddafi offered Déby military aid to seize power in Chad in exchange with Libyan prisoners of war. Déby moved to Sudan and formed the Patriotic Salvation Movement, an insurgent group, supported by Libya and Sudan, which started operations against Habré in October 1989, he unleashed a decisive attack on 10 November 1990, on 2 December Déby's troops marched unopposed into the capital, N'Djaména.
Idriss Déby assumed Chad's presidency in 1990, has been re-elected with a majority of votes every five years. After three months of provisional government, on 28 February 1991, a charter was approved for Chad with Déby as president. During the following two years, Déby faced a series of coup attempts as government forces clashed with pro-Habré rebel groups, such as the Movement for Democracy and Development. Seeking to quell dissent, in 1992 Chad legalized political parties and held a National Conference which resulted in the gathering of 750 delegates, the government, trade unions and the army to discuss the establishment of a pluralist democracy. However, unrest continued; the Comité de Sursaut National pour la Paix et la Démocratie, led by Lt. Moise Kette and other southern groups sought to prevent the Déby government from exploiting oil in the Doba Basin and started a rebellion that left hundreds dead. A peace agreement was reached in 1994. Two new groups, the Armed Forces for a Federal Republic led by former Kette ally Laokein Barde, the Democratic Front for Renewal, a reformulated MDD clashed with government forces from 1994 to 1995.
Déby, in the mid-1990s restored basic functions of government and entered into agreements with the World Bank and IMF to carry out substantial economic reforms. A new constitution was approved by referendum in March 1996, followed by a presidential election in June. Déby fell short of a majority. Idriss Déby was re-elected in the May 2001 presidential election, winning in the first round with 63.17% of the vote, according to official results. A civil war between Christians and Muslims erupted in 2005, accompanied by tensions with Sudan. An attempted coup d'état, involving the shooting down of Déby's plane, was foiled in March 2006. In mid-April 2006, there was fighting with rebels at N'Djaména, although the fighting soon subsided with government forces still in control of the capital. Déby subsequently broke ties with Sudan, accusing it of backing the rebels, said that the May 2006 election would st
Chadian–Libyan conflict
The Chadian–Libyan conflict was a series of sporadic clashes in Chad between 1978 and 1987 between Libyan and Chadian forces. Libya had been involved in Chad's internal affairs prior to 1978 and before Muammar Gaddafi's rise to power in Libya in 1969, beginning with the extension of the Chadian Civil War to northern Chad in 1968; the conflict was marked by a series of four separate Libyan interventions in Chad, taking place in 1978, 1979, 1980–1981 and 1983–1987. In all of these occasions Gaddafi had the support of a number of factions participating in the civil war, while Libya's opponents found the support of the French government, which intervened militarily to save the Chadian government in 1978, 1983 and 1986; the pattern of the war delineated itself in 1978, with the Libyans providing armour and air support and their Chadian allies the infantry, which assumed the bulk of the scouting and fighting. This pattern was radically changed in 1986, towards the end of the war, when most Chadian forces united in opposing the Libyan occupation of northern Chad with a degree of unity that had never been seen before in Chad.
This deprived the Libyan forces of their habitual infantry when they found themselves confronting a mobile army, well provided now by the United States and France with anti-tank and anti-air missiles, thus cancelling the Libyan superiority in firepower. What followed was the Toyota War, in which the Libyan forces were routed and expelled from Chad, putting an end to the conflict. Gaddafi intended to annex the Aouzou Strip, the northernmost part of Chad, which he claimed as part of Libya on the grounds of an unratified treaty of the colonial period. In 1972 his goals became, in the evaluation of historian Mario Azevedo, the creation of a client state in Libya's "underbelly", an Islamic republic modelled after his jamahiriya, that would maintain close ties with Libya, secure his control over the Aouzou Strip. Libyan involvement with Chad can be said to have started in 1968, during the Chadian Civil War, when the insurgent Muslim National Liberation Front of Chad extended its guerrilla war against the Christian President François Tombalbaye to the northerly Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti Prefecture.
Libya's king Idris I felt compelled to support the FROLINAT because of long-standing strong links between the two sides of the Chadian-Libyan border. To preserve relations with Chad's former colonial master and current protector, Idris limited himself to granting the rebels sanctuary in Libyan territory and to providing only non-lethal supplies. All this changed with the Libyan coup d'état of 1 September 1969 that deposed Idris and brought Muammar Gaddafi to power. Gaddafi claimed the Aouzou Strip in northern Chad, referring to an unratified treaty signed in 1935 by Italy and France; such claims had been made when in 1954 Idris had tried to occupy Aouzou, but his troops were repelled by the French Colonial Forces. Though wary of the FROLINAT, Gaddafi had come to see by 1970 the organization as useful to his needs. With the support of Soviet bloc nations East Germany, he trained and armed the insurgents, provided them with weapons and funding. On 27 August 1971 Chad accused Egypt and Libya of backing a coup against then-president François Tombalbaye by amnestied Chadians.
On the day of the failed coup, Tombalbaye cut all diplomatic relations with Libya and Egypt, invited all Libyan opposition groups to base themselves in Chad, started laying claims to Fezzan on the grounds of "historical rights". Gaddafi's answer was to recognize on 17 September the FROLINAT as the sole legitimate government of Chad. In October, Chadian Foreign Minister Baba Hassan denounced Libya's "expansionist ideas" at the United Nations. Through French pressure on Libya and the mediation of Nigerien President Hamani Diori, the two countries resumed diplomatic relations on 17 April 1972. Shortly after, Tombalbaye broke diplomatic relations with Israel and is said to have secretly agreed on 28 November to cede the Aouzou Strip to Libya. In exchange, Gaddafi pledged 40 million pounds to the Chadian President and the two countries signed a Treaty of Friendship in December 1972. Gaddafi withdrew official support to the FROLINAT and forced its leader Abba Siddick to move his headquarters from Tripoli to Algiers.
Good relations were confirmed in the following years, with Gaddafi visiting the Chadian capital N'Djamena in March 1974. Six months after the signing of the 1972 treaty, Libyan troops moved into the Strip and established an airbase just north of Aouzou, protected by surface-to-air missiles. A civil administration was set up, attached to Kufra, Libyan citizenship was extended to the few thousand inhabitants of the area. From that moment, Libyan maps represented the area as part of Libya; the exact terms by which Libya gained Aouzou remain obscure, are debated. The existence of a secret agreement between Tombalbaye and Gaddafi was revealed only in 1988, when the Libyan President exhibited an alleged copy of a letter in which Tombalbaye recognizes Libyan claims. Against this, scholars like Bernard Lanne have argued that there never was any sort of formal agreement, that Tombalbaye had found it expedient not to mention the occupation of a part of his country. Libya was unable to exhibit the original copy of the agreement when the case of the Aouzou Strip was brought before the International Court of Justice in 1993.
The rapprochement was not to last long, as on 13 April 1975 a coup d'état removed Tombalbaye and replaced him w
Date palm
Phoenix dactylifera known as date or date palm, is a flowering plant species in the palm family, cultivated for its edible sweet fruit. Although its exact place of origin is uncertain because of long cultivation, it originated from the Fertile Crescent region straddling between Egypt and Mesopotamia; the species is cultivated across Northern Africa, the Middle East, The Horn of Africa and South Asia, is naturalized in many tropical and subtropical regions worldwide. P. dactylifera is the type species of genus Phoenix, which contains 12–19 species of wild date palms, is the major source of commercial production. Date trees reach about 21–23 metres in height, growing singly or forming a clump with several stems from a single root system. Date fruits are oval-cylindrical, 3–7 cm long, about an inch in diameter, ranging from bright red to bright yellow in color, depending on variety, they are sweet, containing about 75 percent of sugar when dried. Dates have been the Indus Valley for thousands of years.
There is archaeological evidence of date cultivation in Arabia from the 6th millennium BCE. The total annual world production of dates amounts to 8.5 million metric tons, countries of the Middle East and North Africa being the largest producers. The species name dactylifera "date-bearing" comes from the Greek words daktylos, which means "date", fero, which means "I bear"; the fruit is known as a date. The fruit's English name, as well as the Latin both come from the Greek word for "finger", dáktulos, because of the fruit's elongated shape. Fossil records show. Dates have been the Indus Valley for thousands of years. There is archaeological evidence of date cultivation in eastern Arabia between 5530 and 5320 calBC, they are believed to have originated around what is now Iraq, have been cultivated since ancient times from Mesopotamia to prehistoric Egypt. The Ancient Egyptians used the fruits to make date wine, ate them at harvest. There is archeological evidence of date cultivation in Mehrgarh around 7000 BCE, a Neolithic civilization in what is now western Pakistan.
Evidence of cultivation is continually found throughout civilizations in the Indus Valley, including the Harappan period 2600 to 1900 BCE. In Ancient Rome the palm fronds used in triumphal processions to symbolize victory were most those of Phoenix dactylifera; the date palm was a popular garden plant in Roman peristyle gardens, though it would not bear fruit in the more temperate climate of Italy. It is recognizable in frescoes from Pompeii and elsewhere in Italy, including a garden scene from the House of the Wedding of Alexander. In times, traders spread dates around South West Asia, northern Africa, Spain. Dates were introduced into Mexico and California by the Spaniards in 1765, around Mission San Ignacio. A date palm cultivar what used to be called Judean date palm, is renowned for its long-lived orthodox seed, which sprouted after accidental storage for 2000 years; the upper survival time limit of properly stored. A genomic study from New York University Abu Dhabi Center for Genomics and Systems Biology showed that domesticated date palm varieties from North Africa, including well-known varieties such as Medjool and Deglet Noor, are a hybrid between Middle East date palms and the Cretan wild palm P. theophrasti.
Date palms appear in the archaeological record in North Africa about 2,800 years ago, suggesting that the hybrid was spread by the Minoans or Phoenicians. Date trees reach about 21–23 metres in height, growing singly or forming a clump with several stems from a single root system; the leaves are 4–6 metres long, with spines on the petiole, pinnate, with about 150 leaflets. The leaflets are 2 cm wide; the full span of the crown ranges from 6–10 m. The date palm is dioecious, having separate female plants, they can be grown from seed, but only 50% of seedlings will be female and hence fruit bearing, dates from seedling plants are smaller and of poorer quality. Most commercial plantations thus use cuttings of cropping cultivars. Plants grown from cuttings will fruit 2–3 years earlier than seedling plants. Dates are wind pollinated, but in both traditional oasis horticulture and in the modern commercial orchards they are pollinated manually. Natural pollination occurs with about an equal number of female plants.
However, with assistance, one male can pollinate up to 100 females. Since the males are of value only as pollinators, this allows the growers to use their resources for many more fruit-producing female plants; some growers do not maintain any male plants, as male flowers become available at local markets at pollination time. Manual pollination is done by use of a wind machine. In some areas such as Iraq the pollinator climbs the tree using a special climbing tool that wraps around the tree trunk and the climber's back to keep him attached to the trunk while climbing. Date fruits are oval-cylindrical, 3–7 cm long, 2–3 cm diameter, when ripe, range from bright red to bright yellow in colour, depending on variety. Dates contain a single stone about 2 -- 6 -- 8 mm thick. Three main cultivar groups of date exist: soft, semi-dry, dry; the type of fruit depends on the gluc
Fish
Fish are gill-bearing aquatic craniate animals that lack limbs with digits. They form a sister group to the tunicates. Included in this definition are the living hagfish and cartilaginous and bony fish as well as various extinct related groups. Tetrapods emerged within lobe-finned fishes, so cladistically they are fish as well. However, traditionally fish are rendered paraphyletic by excluding the tetrapods; because in this manner the term "fish" is defined negatively as a paraphyletic group, it is not considered a formal taxonomic grouping in systematic biology, unless it is used in the cladistic sense, including tetrapods. The traditional term pisces is considered a typological, but not a phylogenetic classification; the earliest organisms that can be classified as fish were soft-bodied chordates that first appeared during the Cambrian period. Although they lacked a true spine, they possessed notochords which allowed them to be more agile than their invertebrate counterparts. Fish would continue to evolve through the Paleozoic era.
Many fish of the Paleozoic developed external armor. The first fish with jaws appeared in the Silurian period, after which many became formidable marine predators rather than just the prey of arthropods. Most fish are ectothermic, allowing their body temperatures to vary as ambient temperatures change, though some of the large active swimmers like white shark and tuna can hold a higher core temperature. Fish can communicate in their underwater environments through the use of acoustic communication. Acoustic communication in fish involves the transmission of acoustic signals from one individual of a species to another; the production of sounds as a means of communication among fish is most used in the context of feeding, aggression or courtship behaviour. The sounds emitted by fish can vary depending on the stimulus involved, they can produce either stridulatory sounds by moving components of the skeletal system, or can produce non-stridulatory sounds by manipulating specialized organs such as the swimbladder.
Fish are abundant in most bodies of water. They can be found in nearly all aquatic environments, from high mountain streams to the abyssal and hadal depths of the deepest oceans, although no species has yet been documented in the deepest 25% of the ocean. With 33,600 described species, fish exhibit greater species diversity than any other group of vertebrates. Fish are an important resource for humans worldwide as food. Commercial and subsistence fishers hunt fish in wild fisheries or farm them in ponds or in cages in the ocean, they are caught by recreational fishers, kept as pets, raised by fishkeepers, exhibited in public aquaria. Fish have had a role in culture through the ages, serving as deities, religious symbols, as the subjects of art and movies. Fish do not represent a monophyletic group, therefore the "evolution of fish" is not studied as a single event. Early fish from the fossil record are represented by a group of small, armored fish known as ostracoderms. Jawless fish lineages are extinct.
An extant clade, the lampreys may approximate ancient pre-jawed fish. The first jaws are found in Placodermi fossils; the diversity of jawed vertebrates may indicate the evolutionary advantage of a jawed mouth. It is unclear if the advantage of a hinged jaw is greater biting force, improved respiration, or a combination of factors. Fish may have evolved from a creature similar to a coral-like sea squirt, whose larvae resemble primitive fish in important ways; the first ancestors of fish may have kept the larval form into adulthood, although the reverse is the case. Fish are a paraphyletic group: that is, any clade containing all fish contains the tetrapods, which are not fish. For this reason, groups such as the "Class Pisces" seen in older reference works are no longer used in formal classifications. Traditional classification divides fish into three extant classes, with extinct forms sometimes classified within the tree, sometimes as their own classes: Class Agnatha Subclass Cyclostomata Subclass Ostracodermi † Class Chondrichthyes Subclass Elasmobranchii Subclass Holocephali Class Placodermi † Class Acanthodii † Class Osteichthyes Subclass Actinopterygii Subclass Sarcopterygii The above scheme is the one most encountered in non-specialist and general works.
Many of the above groups are paraphyletic, in that they have given rise to successive groups: Agnathans are ancestral to Chondrichthyes, who again have given rise to Acanthodiians, the ancestors of Osteichthyes. With the arrival of phylogenetic nomenclature, the fishes has been split up into a more detailed scheme, with the following major groups: Class Myxini Class Pteraspidomorphi † Class Thelodonti † Class Anaspida † Class Petromyzontida or Hyperoartia Petromyzontidae Class Conodonta † Class Cephalaspidomorphi † Galeaspida † Pituriaspida † Osteostraci † Infraphylum Gnathostomata Class Placodermi † Class Chondrichthyes Class Acanthodii † Superclass Osteichthy
Salt
Salt is a mineral composed of sodium chloride, a chemical compound belonging to the larger class of salts. Salt is present in vast quantities in seawater; the open ocean has about 35 grams of solids per liter of sea water, a salinity of 3.5%. Salt is essential for life in general, saltiness is one of the basic human tastes. Salt is one of the oldest and most ubiquitous food seasonings, salting is an important method of food preservation; some of the earliest evidence of salt processing dates to around 6,000 BC, when people living in the area of present-day Romania boiled spring water to extract salts. Salt was prized by the ancient Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Hittites and the Indians. Salt became an important article of trade and was transported by boat across the Mediterranean Sea, along specially built salt roads, across the Sahara on camel caravans; the scarcity and universal need for salt have led nations to go to war over it and use it to raise tax revenues. Salt has other cultural and traditional significance.
Salt is processed from salt mines, by the evaporation of seawater and mineral-rich spring water in shallow pools. Its major industrial products are caustic chlorine. Of the annual global production of around two hundred million tonnes of salt, about 6% is used for human consumption. Other uses include water conditioning processes, de-icing highways, agricultural use. Edible salt is sold in forms such as sea salt and table salt which contains an anti-caking agent and may be iodised to prevent iodine deficiency; as well as its use in cooking and at the table, salt is present in many processed foods. Sodium is an essential nutrient for human health via its role as an osmotic solute. Excessive salt consumption may increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases, such as hypertension, in children and adults; such health effects of salt have long been studied. Accordingly, numerous world health associations and experts in developed countries recommend reducing consumption of popular salty foods; the World Health Organization recommends that adults should consume less than 2,000 mg of sodium, equivalent to 5 grams of salt per day.
All through history, the availability of salt has been pivotal to civilization. What is now thought to have been the first city in Europe is Solnitsata, in Bulgaria, a salt mine, providing the area now known as the Balkans with salt since 5400 BC; the name Solnitsata means "salt works". While people have used canning and artificial refrigeration to preserve food for the last hundred years or so, salt has been the best-known food preservative for meat, for many thousands of years. A ancient salt-works operation has been discovered at the Poiana Slatinei archaeological site next to a salt spring in Lunca, Neamț County, Romania. Evidence indicates that Neolithic people of the Precucuteni Culture were boiling the salt-laden spring water through the process of briquetage to extract the salt as far back as 6050 BC; the salt extracted from this operation may have had a direct correlation to the rapid growth of this society's population soon after its initial production began. The harvest of salt from the surface of Xiechi Lake near Yuncheng in Shanxi, dates back to at least 6000 BC, making it one of the oldest verifiable saltworks.
There is more salt in animal tissues, such as meat and milk, than in plant tissues. Nomads who subsist on their flocks and herds do not eat salt with their food, but agriculturalists, feeding on cereals and vegetable matter, need to supplement their diet with salt. With the spread of civilization, salt became one of the world's main trading commodities, it was of high value to the ancient Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Hittites and other peoples of antiquity. In the Middle East, salt was used to ceremonially seal an agreement, the ancient Hebrews made a "covenant of salt" with God and sprinkled salt on their offerings to show their trust in him. An ancient practice in time of war was salting the earth: scattering salt around in a defeated city to prevent plant growth; the Bible tells the story of King Abimelech, ordered by God to do this at Shechem, various texts claim that the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus Africanus ploughed over and sowed the city of Carthage with salt after it was defeated in the Third Punic War.
Salt may have been used for barter in connection with the obsidian trade in Anatolia in the Neolithic Era. Salt was included among funeral offerings found in ancient Egyptian tombs from the third millennium BC, as were salted birds, salt fish. From about 2800 BC, the Egyptians began exporting salt fish to the Phoenicians in return for Lebanon cedar and the dye Tyrian purple. Herodotus described salt trading routes across Libya back in the 5th century BC. In the early years of the Roman Empire, roads were built for the transportation of salt from the salt imported at Ostia to the capital. In Africa, salt was used as currency south of the Sahara, slabs of rock salt were used as coins in Abyssinia. Moorish merchants in the 6th century traded salt for weight for weight; the Tuareg have traditionally maintained routes across the Sahara for the transportation of salt by Azalai. The caravans
Amédée-François Lamy
Amédée-François Lamy was a French military officer. He was born at Mougins, in the French département of Alpes-Maritimes on 7 February 1858 and died in the battle of Kousséri on 22 April 1900. Lamy's ambition to become an officer developed early. In 1877 he entered at the foremost French military academy. Lamy began his career in 1879 as a Second Lieutenant in the First regiment of Algerian tirailleurs, he discovered Saharan Africa, took part in the French occupation of Tunisia. The following year he was back in Algeria, where he became aide-de-camp to the General in command of the division quartered in Algiers in 1887, resumed his previous interest in the Sahara and learned to exploit the qualities of the meharistes, the camel cavalry. Fascinated by the desert, he learned how to live with little: "Personally, I will be happy only when I'll be able to live without neither drinking nor eating. At the moment, I'm attempting this kind of existence. I'm still obliged to eat more than six dates at my meals: this is afflicting!".
In 1893 Lamy participated in the Le Châtelier Mission where he was in charge of studying the project of a railway between Brazzaville and the coast, of making botanical and geographical studies. Through Alfred Le Châtelier, Lamy met Fernand Foureau, with whom he assembled the Foureau-Lamy Mission in 1898, with another two expeditions, the Gentil and Voulet-Chanoine missions, to conquer Chad and unify all French dominions in West Africa. Foureau and Lamy proceeded from Algiers through the Sahara, met with the other two missions at Kousséri on 21 April 1900; the following day the united French forces confronted Rabih az-Zubayr, a Sudanese warlord who had created an empire in the Chad Basin. In the following battle, in which Lamy was in command with 700 riflemen, while the French reported a crushing victory, Lamy was killed, as was Rabih. In his honour, the first French governor, Émile Gentil, named the capital of the new French territory of Chad Fort-Lamy, which name it bore until it was renamed N'Djamena in 1973.
In 1970, Chad issued an undated gold 1,000 francs coin as part of its tenth independence celebrations. One side features Lamy's head, with a military style collar, the legend COMMANDANT LAMY 1900. Marcel Souzy: Les coloniaux français illustres B. Arnaud Lyon vers Émile. La chute de l'empire de Rabah. Hachette, 567–577. Ayakanmi Ayandele, Emmanuel. Nigerian Historical Studies. Routledge, 130–131. ISBN 0-7146-3113-2. Pakenham, Thomas; the Scramble for Africa. Abacus, 515–516. ISBN 0-349-10449-2. Henri Bretonnet Mission Battle of Togbao 1899 Voulet-Chanoine Mission Paul Joalland Émile Gentil Rabih az-Zubayr Battle of Kousséri
Chad
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