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Unlike the later writings of mediaeval Arabs, the Egyptian and classical notices of Berbers do not assign to them an orderly descent from a few patrilineal ancestors in a typically Semitic scheme. The Egyptians, throughout their artistic history, took pains to distinguish the Libyans from other peoples by well-defined physical peculiarities. The Libyans

are shown as active barbarians, clothed in animal skins, and wearing ostrich plumes in their hair; they are definitely white men, with lighter skins than either Egyptians themselves or Semites. Their faces are usually more sharply cut in profile than those of the Egyptians; the browridges are often prominent, the noses aquiline, the chins pointed, and the beards moderately abundant.

During the Old Empire, the Libyans are depicted as brunets; but in New Empire representations we see a change in the appearance of some of them. One branch, the Tehennu, known to the Egyptians from earlier times, still consists of brunet white men, but another group, the Mashausha, coming from farther west, is definitely blond.⁸⁰ These two, the new people and the old, joined forces and attacked Egypt from the west. In dress and in other respects, there is nothing to indicate that the Mashausha were not Libyans.

Herodotus, in later times, places the Maxyces in

Bates, O., The East- western Libya, and states that they were culturally p”l Ltty^ans> Plate 3, different from the purely nomadic Libyans to the east. The continuity of the name Mashausha through Maxyces extends to Mazuza, a sub-tribe of Riffians, and to the term Imazighen, by which many of the Berber groups designate themselves, and thamazighth, by which they identify their language.

These Maxyces, or Mashausha, as described by Herodotus, Sallust, and others, seem curiously un-African in some respects. They drive about in chariots, drawn by fiery horses; their garments are covered with gold; they sacrifice oxen by strangulation, in a central Asiatic manner; the details of their council form of government, as revealed by a study of its modern counterpart, the Ait Arbain, are strangely Altaic.

While it would not be prudent to press this argument too far, it is quite possible that one or more of the invasions of West central Asiatic peoples which reached Palestine during the Bronze Age, or during the

80. Bates, O., The Eastern Libyans, pp. 39-43.

Maspero, G., The Struggle of the Nations, p. 431.

Fig. 38. Ancient Libyan. Redrawn from

465

time of the earliest use of iron, crossed the Delta into northern Africa and kept moving across a country which offered little feed for cattle and horses, until they reached the Algerian and Moroccan grasslands. He­rodotus specificially states that these people were descendants of Persians. In any case, the horse and chariot entered North Africa from the east; either some Libyans took both from the Egyptians and spread them westward, or a specific people brought them in. The hypothesis of an Asiatic invasion of blond horse-users is not necessary to explain the Mashausha, nor the modern incidence of North African blondism, but, as will be seen later, it agrees perfectly with the present distribution of races in this area.

The history of North Africa during the last five millennia, as dimly outlined by oblique literary and artistic references, and in the absence of adequate archaeology, is not as simple a matter as the early Arab historians, who codified Berber tradition in their own pattern, supposed. It appears to have consisted of a succession of invasions of Hamitic- speaking peoples, mostly nomadic, interspersed with various outsiders, and later of Arabs, into the territory of agriculturalists of Neolithic cultural tradition and of basically European racial character. The Ghomara-Masmuda invasion is one of the earliest which may be salvaged from Berber traditional history, and this was followed by that of the Senhaja, and finally by that of the Zenata. Although the main direction of these expansions seems to have been from east to west, from the Hamitic center to its periphery, this is not true of all of them. The Senhaja, in at least part of their history, moved eastward.

In remote parts of Barbary are still to be found clans and families who cannot trace their ancestry to one of these noble Hamitic lines, or to Arabs, but who admit descent from indigenous heathen or from Chris­tians. These families are called by Marmol “Berbers without name,” and represent the last survival in mountain communities of pre-Hamitic patrilineal family lines, except in those cases in which descent from Romanized Christians of various origins is indicated. Even in the clans named after Hamites or Arabs, the indigenous blood may be strong through continuous female infusion and through adoption.

The Masmuda and Ghomara, who made up the earliest invasion on record, are said to have come from Rio de Oro, as are the Senhaja, according to one tradition. There is, however, a story in both El Bekri and Ibn Khaldun that Ifrikos, the ancestor of the Senhaja, came from the Yemen, not long before the birth of Mohammed. This curious legend is supported in ways unknown to the Arab historians, for cultural traits diffused by some of the Senhaja-speaking peoples include terraced agriculture with irrigation, high earthen tigremts or castles, architecturally

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similar to those in southern Arabia, textile techniques, textile designs, and pottery forms and decorations all of which are strikingly similar to those in the Yemen.

The Zenata, who appeared in Roman Africa in the third or fourth century a.d. and did not invade northern Morocco and Spain until the twelfth century,⁸¹ brought with them the camel, which they passed on to some Middle Atlas Braber tribes, who, separately or in combination with them, developed into the Tuareg. These Zenatan invaders were what Gautier calls les grands nomads chamelliers, the tall, lean, desert people, riding on camels, clothed in blue, and veiled, who trickled along the northern rim of the desert, and who took from Rome the outlying portions of her African empire.

The introduction of the camel changed profoundly the life of the North African plains, although it had little effect on that of the mountains. The wheel disappeared completely; the barbaric Libyans with their bronze and gold vanished from history, and those of them who were not absorbed by the newcomers and who refused to adopt the new economy took to the hills, to found rustic family lines among the mountain farmers. The camels of the newcomers pulled up the grass by the roots, flayed the trunks of all the trees which they could reach, hastened the process of soil erosion, and made the plains of North Africa at last truly African in appearance.

With the introduction of the camel, however, the Sahara became once more suitable for more than a sub-marginal human habitation. At some time during the late Pleistocene or during the periods of post-pluvial climatic change, negroes and negroids had moved up to occupy the oases and mountains of the northern Sahara, and the southern fringe of the Atlas country. Kufra was a negro oasis until the Arabs took it, and the course of the Wed Dra’a is the home of the Haratin, an insuf­ficiently studied group of negroes. With the camel, white men moved down into the Sahara as swiftly riding nomads, enslaving the scattered groups of local negroes, and bringing others up from the Sudan in slave caravans, to cast a negroid tinge across the racial complexion of North Africa, which had hitherto been wholly white man’s country. Most of the slave trading, however, was carried on in Arab times, and indeed, the Arabs arrived in North Africa not long after their most useful animal, the camel.

The Arab invasions of North Africa can be divided into two waves, the first which came directly from Arabia, shortly after the death of the Prophet, and which brought families of aristocratic Arabs from the Hejaz and Yemen. These invaders came mostly without wives, married Berber

80. As Almohades, or al-Muwahhids.

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women, and founded towns and dynasties. Although they converted much of the countryside to Islam, they did not force the Berbers to accept Arabic speech, which was confined, at that time, to the cities. In the eleventh century came the second Arab invasion, which was one of much greater volume and importance. This was the invasion of the Beni Hillal and Beni Soleim, tribes of apostate Bedawin from the Syrian Desert, who had made nuisances of themselves by pillaging caravans. This Hillali element introduced the first numerically important infusion of Arab blood into North Africa. The Beni Hillal and their companions settled first in Cyrenaica; thence some of them moved on to the Algerian plateau country, and to the country just south of the Atlas in the Moroccan Sahara, and onward to Rio de Oro. Other bands passed from Algeria through the Taza gateway down the trik es-sultan, to occupy the Moroccan plains along the Atlantic coast, from Safi to Tangier, and inland to Fez and Wezzan.

At present the inhabitants of North Africa are about evenly divided be­tween Arabic and Berber speech, with the former commoner in the east, and the latter in the west. Although the Siwans speak Senhajan, the Cyrenai- cans, largely Berber in blood, have been Arabized in language. Aside from the Tuareg, who also speak Senhajan, the next most easterly area of Berber speech lies in southern Tunisia and eastern Tripoli. In Algeria Berber is spoken by two important Berber groups, the Kabyles of the coastal mountains east of Algiers, and the Shawia of the Aures Mountains farther south. Oasis people, such as the Mzabites of Ghardaia, are also Berber speakers, as are the inhabitants of the Tunisian island of Jerba. In Morocco Berbers hold more land than do Arabic speakers; the whole northern strip from east of Melilla nearly to Tetwan, is occupied by Riffians and Ghomarans; the whole Middle Atlas by Senhajan Braber, and the Grand Atlas west of Demnat, by Shluh. In the lowlands east of the Middle Atlas, on the Algerian-Morpccan borderlands, and reaching up into the Riffian territory, are tribes of Zenata.

Throughout North Africa there are tribes and confederations of Arab­ized Berbers, and also some Berberized Arabs. Language and ethnic origins do not always coincide, and North Africa must be studied as a whole. The present North African peoples, apart from Jews and negroes and European colonists, represent a blend in different proportions be­tween descendants of the old Afalou race, the Mesolithic and Neolithic Mediterraneans, the hypothetical central Asiatic nomads who may or may not have brought in the horse and chariot, the Hamitic-speaking tribesmen whose relationships are east of the Nile and in Ethiopia, and the two waves of Arabs. The regional variation between these elements reflects, in the main, varying proportions of the different components.

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An exception is seen, however, in the coastal region of Tunisia, where the Carthaginian state had its center, and where there may survive a minor Punic element, and the Islamized descendants of the much more numerous Greek and Italian settlers of the Roman period.

10. TJiE EASTERN ARABO-BERBERS, LIBYA, AND THE OASES

The subject of this section will be the population of the eastern part of the Italian territory of Libya, and of Siwa Oasis, which is under Egyptian suzerainty. This population is largely Arabic-speaking, although the Siwans still maintain a Senhajan idiom; the Cyrenaican tribes of Berber ancestry have been linguistically Arabicized. In this territory there are three general classes of people (1) Oasis Berbers (2) Arabized agricultural Berbers, in Cyrenaica and Marmarica, (3) Nomadic tribes, mostly of Arab origin. The third group lives mostly in the hinterland of Cyrenaica, and in the neighborhood of the oases of Awjila and Magiabra.

The oasis dwellers of Siwa and Awjila are so much alike that they may be considered together.⁸² In both there is a considerable homogeneity of type, and this type differs little from that described in Kharga, except that here it is more extreme. We have anthropometric data on the stature and bodily segments only from Awjila. These oasis dwellers are short, with a mean stature of 161 cm.; relatively long armed, with a relative span of 105. The shoulders are relatively broad and the legs somewhat short. The Siwans on the whole seem very much the same, judging from descriptions and photographs. Neither of these populations appears particularly well nourished.

The most notable feature about these oasis peoples is their extreme dolichocephaly. The mean for both Siwa and Awjila is 71.7, and in neither group has a single brachycephal been measured. The heads are of moderate size, with lengths of 193 mm. and breadths of 138 mm. The vault height, at least in Awjila, is relatively low, with a mean of 117 mm. On the whole these people are a hyperdolichocephalic and platy­cephalic group, and ^fstand at an extreme end of the Mediterranean racial range in vault proportions. The faces are both short and narrow, with a mean menton-nasion height of 118 and bizygomatics of 130 mm. in the case of Siwa and 133 mm. in the case of Awjila. The corresponding facial indices are mesoprosopic to mildly leptoprosopic. The noses of these people are mesorrhine, with nasal indices of 70 in the case of Awjila and 73 in the case of Siwa. In both the nose height is approximately 50 mm. and the mesorrhine condition is caused not by the breadth of the nose but by its shortness.

80. Cline, W. B., HAS, vol. 10, 1932.

Puccioni, ,N., Antropometria delle Gente della Cyrenaica.

469

The hair form in both groups is characteristically wavy. In Siwa, one-fourth of the series is said to have curly to frizzly hair, while the same type is apparently rare in Awjila. Beard and body hair are quite scanty, and the hair color is usually black, but with a very few individuals in Siwa classified as dark brown. The eye color is dark brown in three- fourths of the Siwans examined, and the incidence of eye blondism totals only 9 per cent in the Siwan group, while there is no evidence of it whatever in Awjila, where the eye colors include both dark brown and light brown. In hair and eye color, then, the oasis people are unusually brunet for North Africans. The skin color of both these oasis populations is likewise on the brunet side. In Siwa it falls for the most part between the von Luschan jf 12 and jf 15, which is a dark brunet-white or a light brown, and 10 per cent of the group has pinkish-white skin. In Awjila it runs from #16 to #24, and is often a medium brown.

In both these groups straight noses are commonest, but nasal convexity is very frequent, and concave forms are rare. The roots are of moderate height, but with a tendency toward broadness, and the bridge is moder­ately high and moderately broad. The tips are of medium thickness with medium or slightly flaring wings, and the nasal tip is usually slightly elevated. One of the most characteristic features of the nose of the Siwans, and of the Awjila people, is a considerable nasion depression. The browridges, however, are usually absent or slight, and the forehead slightly sloping to straight; in some cases bulbous.

The chins are frequently receding and the jaws narrow. The mean bigonial diameter of 99 mm. among Siwans indicates the extreme narrow­ness of jaws among these people, which, however, does not reach a Somali extreme.

On the whole the evidence from these oases, when combined with that from Kharga, demonstrates that the eastern Libyan peoples of antiquity included an oasis dwelling branch of an extreme Mediterranean type characterized by small stature, extreme dolichocephaly, a low cranial vault, a short face, and a mesorrhine nose. This type, while well-characterized today, cannot be identified with any hitherto studied skeletal Mediterranean sub-race, although it appears closest to the small­sized, mesorrhine or chamaerrhine Mediterranean type which reached southwestern Europe during the Mesolithic or as a Neolithic advance guard, and which is best represented by the cranial series from Chamb- landes.⁸³

The inhabitants of the oasis of Magiabra, adjacent to Awjila, belong partly to the same type, but differ in having a higher cephalic index, their mean being 75.5, and also in possessing the taller stature of 164 cm.

80. See Chapter IV, p. 115; also Appendix I, col. 1 A.

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Certain Marabutic tribes, who live on the outskirts of these oases and who are of palpably Arab descent are much taller, with a mean stature of 168 cm. and are dolichocephalic (C.I. = 74).

In the agricultural regions of Marmarica and Cyrenaica, the Arabo- Berber tribesmen present a variety of physical types. On the whole they are a moderately tall group with tribal stature means ranging from 166 to 171 cm. As with the oasis people, their characteristic hair form is wavy, and curly forms are relatively rare. The hair is mostly black, but brown hair rises to 20 per cent among certain tribes, and the mus­taches are often lighter. This hair blondism is particularly prevalent along the coast. The skin color is a dark brunet-white, usually between von Luschan #12 to #18, but the range is considerable. The fairest skin is again found coastally. Light brown is the commonest eye color, but 33 per cent show some evidence of eye blondism. All of these people are dolichocephalic with cephalic index means ranging from 74 to 77, They are all long faced, and all leptorrhine. Considerable differences are found in their facial features, and in order to discuss these it will be best to de­scribe some of the principal types under which this population falls.

Relatively rare is a thick-set type with a large head, a square, low face, retreating forehead, heavy browridges, deep nasion depression, and a rather short and wide nose with a straight or concave profile. This type is not negroid, but is reminiscent of the Afalou type found in the Upper Palaeolithic remains of Algeria, and seems to be the oldest indigenous racial element. An ordinary Mediterranean type is also dis­tinguishable, with a straight or slightly sloping forehead, moderate brow­ridges, and a straight nasal profile. This Mediterranean type frequently shows an admixture with the first type, and this influence is evidenced by a rectangular facial contour and a considerable width and prominence of the gonial angles.

A third type, which seems to be of considerable numerical importance, is either Near Eastern or East African in affinity, or both; its diagnostic features are a receding forehead, a high vault, small or absent browridges, a minimum of nasion depression, and a long arc-shaped convex nose. This type must be ancient in Cyrenaica, for it is commonly represented as a standard Libyan type on Egyptian monuments. Now and then one encounters individuals with extremely long, narrow faces and vaults, with straight foreheads and straight noses, who look like the non-negroid end type of the Somalis. Persons who give the impression of being largely Nordic are not common, but may occasionally be observed.

Apparently pure northern Arabian Bedawin features are not infrequent, but the Arabs in North Africa, from Cyrenaica to Morocco, are tall; since they are taller than most Berbers, it is unlikely that this elevated