More than two millennia after Herodotus described the empty vastness of the Libyan desert, the German explorer Gustav Nachtigal set out in February 1869 from Tripoli toward Fazzan, and beyond, on a trip to the ruler of Bornu. His camel – burdened on one side with a “red velvety chair of state” and on the other side by a crate of “lifesize portraits of King William, Queen Augusta, and the Crown Prince” – followed a wide arc east of Tripoli across the desert to southern Murzuq and Qatrun. Throughout his travels, Nachtigal ably summarized much of what was known of the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and Fazzan at the time – the three immense pieces of territory that would eventually constitute modern-day Libya.

Nachtigal’s presence was not entirely fortuitous. Germany and Italy were slowly developing an interest in what Britain and France at the time considered a combination of forbidding and economically uninteresting territories. Within little more than a decade after France’s seizure of Tunisia in 1881, however, Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, and Fazzan became the only territories in North Africa left unclaimed by a European power. By that time, the scramble to delineate the borders of the remaining Ottoman possessions in North Africa had already started in earnest.