People of the veil

by Baron Francis James Rennell Rodd Rennell of Rodd

TIFINAGH ALPHABET

If only on account of their script the Tuareg have deserved more attention in this country than they have received. I have no intention at this juncture of examining either T’ifinagh or Temajegh in detail, as they require study in a volume dedicated to them alone; but, as an ancient non-Arabic script which has survived in Africa, I cannot refrain from a brief description of the former. T’ifinagh is an alphabetic and not a syllabic script, but owing to the abbreviations practised in writing and the absence of all vowels except an A which resembles the Hamza or Alif, it has come to resemble a sort of shorthand. It is usually necessary to know the general meaning of any writing before it can be read. The T’ifinagh alphabet consists of between thirty and forty symbols varying somewhat from place to place. Duveyrier[233] collected an alphabet of twenty-three letters used in the north: Hanoteau,[234] who wrote the best grammar of Temajegh yet published, gives twenty-four letters: Masquerey[235] gives twenty-three letters for the Taitoq dialect and script: Freeman found twenty-five in the Ghadamsi Tuareg dialects. In addition to these letter symbols there are about twelve ligatures of two or sometimes three letters. All these signs are used in Air, but there are also certain additional symbols which may be alternative forms. Of the twenty-three to twenty-five letters in T’ifinagh, some ten only have been derived from the classical Libyan script as exemplified by the bilingual Thugga inscription now in the British Museum. Of these ten letters perhaps five have Punic parallels, while for the thirty known Libyan letters six Phœnician parallels have been found. It has hitherto been assumed[236] that the T’ifinagh alphabet was descended from the Libyan, which, it may be noted, has not yet been found in any inscription proved to be earlier than the fourth century B.C. Many theories have been advanced for the origin of the Libyan script, but Halévy is usually accepted as the most reliable authority on the subject. He supposed that the Libyan alphabet was derived from the Phœnician with the addition of certain non-Semitic symbols current nearly all over the Mediterranean. If this were universally admitted as the correct view it would still not be possible to explain why the T’ifinagh alphabet contains so many symbols which are not common to either the Libyan or Punic systems. On evidence which cannot here be examined in detail, it seems easier to believe that the ancestors of the Tuareg brought to Africa, or copied from a people with whom they had been in contact before reaching the Sahara, an alphabet replenished by borrowing certain symbols from a Libyan system partly founded on the Phœnician one. A consideration of this problem, like the one which concerns the Temajegh language itself, must be left to experts to resolve. As much false analogy and loose reasoning have been used on this question as on the subject of the origin of the Libyan races. One thing only seems to me to stand out, namely, that the T’ifinagh alphabet and Temajegh language were not evolved in Africa but came from without, probably from the east or north-east, into the continent, where they developed independently. To postulate an Arabian origin, for instance, for T’ifinagh and Temajegh could not be construed as evidence in support of any theory regarding the origin of the Tuareg themselves. Linguistic evidence is notoriously unreliable from the anthropological point of view, since more often than not it only indicates some cultural contact. The most interesting aspect of the linguistic question is the evidence which it may afford regarding the cultural development of the older Tuareg. In their present stage of development there is no reason for them to have retained, still less for them to have evolved by themselves, any form of script. Their mode of life does not necessitate the use of writing: they are for the most part illiterate or are in process of becoming so. To have had and in so far as they still use T’ifinagh, to have retained an individual script, is to my mind the most powerful evidence in favour of the conclusion to which I have already on several occasions referred, namely, their far higher degree of civilisation in the past.

In Air, T’ifinagh is dying out. One tribal group is famous for having retained it in current use more than any other section of the Southern Tuareg. The Ifadeyen men and women still read and write Temajegh correctly if somewhat laboriously. They use it for sending messages to each other or for putting up notices on trees or rocks, saying how one or other of them visited the place. Among most of the other tribes a knowledge of T’ifinagh is confined to the older women and a few men. The younger generation can neither read nor write either in T’ifinagh or in Arabic: the scribes and holy men usually only write in Arabic script. In the olden days all the Tuareg women knew how to write and it was part of their duties to teach the children.

The rocks of Air are covered with inscriptions which have neither been recorded nor translated. Owing to the changing linguistic forms of Temajegh and the absence of any very fixed rules for writing it, it is difficult to decipher any but the modern writings. Words are not separated, vowels are not written, and where one word ends with the same consonant with which the following one begins, a single symbol is usually written for the two.

PLATE 34

ROCK INSCRIPTIONS IN TIFINAGH

T’ifinagh script may be written from left to right or from right to left, or up and down or down and up, or in a spiral or in the boustrophedon manner. The European authors who have written of Temajegh have variously reproduced T’ifinagh running from right to left and from left to right, but the two best authorities, Hanoteau and de Foucauld,[237] have adopted the former direction. It ill becomes me to differ from such learned authorities, but the existence of certain inscriptions in Air leads me to believe that the left to right manner was, there at least, perhaps the most usual system. On [Plate 40] is reproduced an Arabic inscription written by a Tuareg in Arabic characters running in the wrong direction, namely, from left to right, nor do I think the writer would have made this mistake unless he had been accustomed so to write in the only other script of which he could have had any knowledge, namely, T’ifinagh. The inscription, of course, records the common “La illa ilallah Muhammed rasul Allah.” I came across two or three other instances of the same sort.

The T’ifinagh inscriptions in Air, like the pictures with which they are so often associated, belong to all periods. Some of them certainly date back to the first Tuareg invasion.