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And just 2 millenniums ago, around 140 B.C., when Romans conquered Carthage (now Tunisia), it was a fertile land and its wheat fields produced enough food to feed the Rome.
Do we know the size and health of the Amazon at this time? I’ve read that the Amazon relies on silt carried from the Sahara.
Did you mean the Nile? I can't think of any method that would get silt from the Sahara in Africa to the Amazon in South America.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More broadly, the Middle East in general was once extraordinarily bountiful, but the cumulative effects of natural climate change and thousands and thousands of years of saltwater irrigation have unfortunately desertified much of the region.
Well yeah, and also considering that natural climate change was the most significant issue. Since the Pleistocene ice age ended around 11 thousand years ago, and ever since then the equatorial regions have changed dramatically. Coincidentally this is about the beginning of recorded history, or at least the parts recovered from antiquity. The regions around north Africa, the Arabian peninsula, etc... they all would ha…
Goat?
At some point the ecosystem just can't regenerate faster enough, the buffer is broken, and all is downhill from that point.
Changes in the earth's orbit known as its orbital precession, a change in tilt that cycles every 25,000 years, forced the African monsoon rains southward, and the Sahara became drier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsidal_precession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
Familiar story. America's Southwest used to be treed grasslands until overgrazing turned them to sand and wasteland.
Even just 500 years ago most of the Sahara was green.
Hate to be the "Source?" person, but were you there at the time? If not, please update Wikipedia with references to your original source of information. (Wikipedia doesn't admit original research.)