Garamantis
In one of the most inhospitable places on Earth: The Central Sahara.
Temperatures can reach 55 degrees Celsius during summer, but still, this town lived there, and thrived, as evidenced by their raids against Carthaginians and Romans.
This is Garama, the head town of the area that came to be called Garamantis, and whose people came to be called Garamantes.
A civilization just like Egypt and Ethiopia, full of history, but one we know very little about.
The Romans appeared to really hate them. A slave from Africa could be described as a "Garamantian muck" (faex Garamantarum). They fought several wars against the Garamantes, sometimes crossing the desert.
From 1 AD to 400 AD, the history of Garama is classified into a classical phase, within which Garama ran a desert empire.
In it's buildings, though stone was briefly used, the Garamantes prefered to stick, even during the most prosperous period of their civilization, with mudbrick. This is a combination of mud, and a binding material such as rice husks or straws - of grain - not plastic straws.
It's a material that humans have used since around 9000 BC, as far as records show, and which continued to be used by peasants even in parts of Europe until the mid-20th century.
During the expnasion of Arabia in the area in 666-667 AD, the Garamantes still had a king, but perhaps due to less trans-Saharan trade in the early medieval period, and less slaves with which to maintain the irrigation system, there was less available to sustain a large population.
Perhaps this eventually lead to the fall of Garama, leaving us with the legacy of the Roman name for the entire region stretching from below Tripoli and Cyrene to west of Ethiopia and Egypt: "Garamantis".