Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography

by Daniel G. Brinton

The Libyans have possessed from time immemorial the country in which we find them. They are its indigenous inhabitants—all others, as Carthaginians, negroes and Arabs, being demonstrably intruders. Can we obtain any clue to their monuments in prehistoric times by the aid of archæology and linguistics? Some able students have thought they could, and have brought forward some singular surmises. There is a series of structures of huge stones, called dolmens, menhirs and cromlechs, extending over northern and central France, southern England, northern Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Algiers, and central Tunisia. They are much alike, and seem to have been constructed by some one people in very ancient times. The skulls in them are often long, like those of the Libyans and Teutons. Hence several French writers have suggested that the ancestors of the white Libyans moved from central Europe into Morocco, along the line of these megalithic structures.[64]

In spite of a good deal of severe criticism, there remains much in favor of the view that these remains mark a route by which some neolithic people extended their conquests. But it seems to me the trend of migration was in the other direction, toward the east, and not from it. The white race began as such during the glacial epoch; it could scarcely have developed north of the Pyrenees, for the climate was so cold that the reindeer, which to-day cannot breed in Stockholm, found a suitable home in the valley of the Garonne. The Iberian peninsula and the Atlas at that time possessed climatic conditions about like those of Great Britain to-day.

In that peninsula, at that time connected with Morocco by a land bridge at the straits of Gibraltar, are the oldest forms of languages spoken by the race, the Euskaric dialects. There is reason to believe that at the dawn of history these occupied the centre of the peninsula; north of them, in the Cantabrian mountains and along the shores of the Bay of Biscay, were the Celtiberians, the rearguard of the migratory hordes of Aryans; and along the southern shores and in North Africa extended the tribes whose direct descendants are the Libyan peoples. The name Iberi, Iberians applied by the ancients to the inhabitants of the eastern and southern shores of Spain, testifies to this. It means in the Libyan tongue freemen, and in the plural form berberi or Berbers, is that by which the old Egyptians knew them, and which from the same root is their own favorite designation to-day.[65]

That the Iberians were Hamites, and not Basques, has long been suspected, and is plainly the opinion to be derived from the statements of the ancients and the presence of Libyan proper names in the south of Spain.[66]

When the Berber chieftain Tarik crossed the straits in the seventh century, and gave to the great rock his name (Gibraltar, Djebel-el-Tarik), he was but returning to seize anew the land from which his ancestors had been driven by Carthaginians and Romans.

From the remotest times the Libyans have had the same form of government—village communities, united by loose bonds into federations. The Egyptians referred to them as “the Nine Bows,” or Bands,[67] the Romans as the “Quinquigentes,” the Five Peoples, the Arabs as “Qabail” or Kabyles, Confederates. These confederations were sufficiently powerful, even so far back as 1400 years before Christ, to put in the field an army of 30,000 or more men for an attack on Egypt; and that the general culture of their country was quite high is shown by the character of the spoils obtained by the Egyptians—horses, chariots, vessels of brass, silver, copper and gold, swords, cuirasses, razors, etc.[68]

At that date the nations of the North Mediterranean branch were yet in the stone age, and the sites of Greece and Rome were the homes of savages.[69]

It is probable that this defeat of the Libyans by the armies of Rhamses gave a serious shock to their progress, by disintegrating their growing state. It appears that about this time there were various colonies which migrated to sites on the northern shores of the Mediterranean. One of these I have believed to be the Etruscans, who settled on the west coast of Italy about 1200 years before our era. They were tall blondes, dolichocephalic, speaking an un-Aryan language, and by their traditions came by sea from the south.[70]

The Libyans were at times partially under the dominion of the kings of Egypt, and many of them entered the Egyptian armies as mercenaries. They allowed the Phenicians peaceably to found the great city of Carthage on their shores, and from these early colonists they learned the art of writing. The alphabet which is still preserved among some of their hordes is derived from the Punic letters.[71] When Carthage fell, Rome seized the mastery of the coasts and productive valleys, but her legions never penetrated to the inland fastnesses. When the great empire tottered to its fall, Goths and Vandals poured across and over the straits of Gibraltar to found an ephemeral empire in Africa; but these cavalry soldiers, knowing to fight only on horseback, scarcely touched the confines of the Libyan mountain homes. Even the Arabs, sweeping resistlessly across their land in the beginning of the eighth century, failed to penetrate many of these fastnesses. To this day no Arab dares venture into the land of the Rifian Berbers, and many a tribe of the Djurjura keeps its customs and its blood unaltered by the Koranic laws, or the Semitic intruders, or the Code Napoleon of the French invaders.

The ancient elements of their culture are still largely retained. Among the Kabyle and Touareg tribes of to-day, in spite of the liberty authorized by Islam, monogamy is the almost invariable rule, the women are not only respected, but generally possess most of the property, and prostitution is unknown. They are, moreover, usually the learned class, and most of the “tifinar” manuscripts come from the hands of these fair scribes.[72] As to the general character of the Berbers of Morocco, we may take Sir Joseph Hooker’s word when he tells us that they are “decidedly superior in intelligence, industry and general activity to their neighbors.”[73]