Rock engravings in the Sahara attest to the longue durée of human activity and movement that have made up the desert’s past. Like the fossil record, the compendium of desert fauna in rock engravings speaks to the distant period of the Neolithic green Sahara, while scenes of hunting or dancing constitute important records of the human past. Still other engravings involve inscriptions in the Libyco-Berber and Arabic scripts, attesting to various civilizations that have flourished there and left a written record of their presence. But what of the contemporary archive of the Sahara that records or erases the recent past and present? Based on data from my own fieldwork and from the mediascape of the Sahara, this paper offers a reading of the Sahara’s linguistic landscapes as an archive of the contemporary. Linguistic landscape as it has currently been configured within the discipline of sociolinguistics is the study of writing in public space. As a counterpoint to the manuscripts that have long circulated within the Sahara, many of which have been archived in places like the Ahmed Baba library in Timbuktu, the writing that appears in public space is not erudite writing. It is a record of everyday activity, authored by people who are differently literate and who use their literacy resources to convey messages, to advertise, and to delineate or reclaim territory. Following a more general trend within the study of linguistic landscapes that construes landscape principally as cityscape, this paper focuses on the cities of the Sahara. Cities, as discursive centers, are characterized by denser, more complex linguistic landscapes than rural areas. They are privileged discursive sites associated with multiple forms of power, including symbolic power and the construction of multiple reading publics. This focus on the cities of the Sahara, at its most banal, draws attention to the fact that the desert is in fact home to a great number of cities. Beyond that, it attests to the multiple kinds of activities that go on in the urban Sahara, from tourism to migration to civil unrest and war. These linguistic landscapes are written in multiple scripts (Arabic, Tifinagh, Roman), each of which can be associated with a number of ideological stances. They are also written in multiple languages, mirroring the multilingual environments of these cosmopolitan cities. Taken together, this paper argues, they constitute a rich and complex archive of contemporary life in the cities of the Sahara.