Libyan Desert

The Libyan Desert (not to be confused with the Libyan Sahara) is a geographical region filling the northeastern Sahara Desert, from eastern Libya to the Western Desert of Egypt and far northwestern Sudan approximately 1,300,000 km². On medieval maps, its use predates today's Sahara, and parts of the Libyan Desert include the Sahara's most arid and least populated regions; this is chiefly what sets the Libyan Desert apart from the greater Sahara. The consequent absence of grazing, and near absence of waterholes or wells needed to sustain camel caravans, prevented Trans-Saharan trade between Kharga (the Darb al Arbein) close to the Nile, and Murzuk in the Libyan Fezzan. This obscurity saw the region overlooked by early European explorers, and it was not until the early 20th century and the advent of the motor car before the Libyan Desert started to be fully explored.

Nomenclature

The term Libyan Desert began to appear widely on European maps in the last decades of the 19th century, typically identified as straddling the borders of present-day Egypt and Libya. This name derived from a territory known as Ancient Libya. (It was not until 1934 that former Ottoman Tripolitania became known as Libya.) In his book Libyan Sands, Ralph Bagnold went as far as to suggest that the Libyan Desert was a separate geographical entity from the Sahara, cut off by the mountains and plateaus of the Ennedi and Tibesti in northern Chad, and the Akakus and Tassili n'Ajjer along the Algerian border in the west. Since that time the meaning has come to revert to the definition given above.

Geography

The Libyan Desert covers an area of approximately 1,300,000 km2 (500,000 square miles), and extends approximately 1,100 km (680 miles) from east to west, and 1,000 km from north to south, in about the shape of a rectangle slanting to the south-east. Like most of the Sahara, this desert is primarily sand and hamada or stony plain.