[292]El Noweiri tells the same story of a later expedition in Morocco led by Okba. If only for the fact that no place of this name can be found on the route of the latter expedition, the attribution of the incident to the Kawar campaign is justified, though there are also other reasons for accepting this identification.
[293]See Schirmer’s note on Von Bary’s diary, op. cit., p. 192.
[294]Corippus, Johannis, IV. 1065-83 et passim.
[295]De Schis. donatistarum, passim.
[296]Gibbon: Decline and Fall, Chap. XXI.
CHAPTER XI
THE ANCESTRY OF THE TUAREG OF AIR
After the close of the classical period, the works of that great historian and philosopher, Abu Zeid Abd el Rahman ibn Khaldun, are our most fruitful source of information regarding North Africa. Himself a native of North Africa, whose inhabitants he esteemed inferior to none in the world, Ibn Khaldun compiled a monumental History of the Berbers, which has become a classic in the Arabic language. His lifetime, falling between A.D. 1332 and 1406, was still sufficiently early for him to have had experience of conditions and people before they had fallen so completely under the influence of the Arabs as we find them a century or two later. On the subject of the Tuareg, or Muleththemin as he calls them, the work is perhaps a little disappointing, for the author seems to have drawn his material from several sources; he is not wholly free from contradictions. To avoid, however, adding unduly to the complications attending a study of the divisions of the Tuareg in the Central Sahara, it will be preferable in the first instance to examine the account of another historian, Leo Africanus. Hassan ibn Muhammad el Wezaz el Fazi or el Gharnathi, to give him his full name, was also a North African, but born, probably in A.D. 1494 or 1495, at Granada. In the course of his life he became converted to Christianity, when he relinquished his original name. He travelled extensively in North Africa, and after living for some time in Rome, died at Tunis in 1552.[297]
According to Leo,[298] in the interior of Libya there was a people who wore the Litham or Veil. The nations of this people were called Lemtuna, Lemta, Jedala, Targa,[299] and Zenega; in other lists the names are given as Zenega or Sanhaja, Zanziga or Ganziga, Targa, Lemta and Jedala. While “Lemta” and “Lemtuna” have been regarded in some quarters as two forms of the same name, the groups are only ethnically connected, inasmuch as both were Muleththemin. In Leo’s descriptions of the deserts of Inner Libya the Lemta figure in the country between Air and the Tibesti mountains; the northern part of their area is almost identical with the present habitat of the Azger Tuareg. The Lemtuna, on the other hand, as we shall presently see, were a subdivision of the Sanhaja who lived much further west. The passage is a little obscure, but I find it difficult to agree with the interpretation put upon it by the learned editors of the Hakluyt Society in their reprint of Leo’s works.