posted 08 September 2005 01:47 PM            

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The pre-historical or proto-historical period presented by the authors lacks depth and ignores some of the latest findings. On page 25, for instance, the authors write that as early as the end of the fourth century we begin to hear of Libyan "kings" such as Aelymas. As such kingdoms emerged throughout the Mediterranean in the Hellenistic age, the Berbers followed suit. Recent research and published findings have demonstrated the presence of great Libyan Kings and dynasties preceding the advent of the Egyptian Pharaonic era, which has been set at about 3,000 B.C. The discovery of the Libyan Stone, presently called The Palermo Stone (from the name of the museum where it is preserved), helped change the horizon of researchers: this stone lists a lineage of fifty Libyan Kings antecedent to the Pharaonic line. These Libyan Kingdoms extended to the Nile, the Fayum area west of the Nile and the Western region of the Delta. The presence of Libyco-Berber populations from the Sahara desert to the Maghreb in the West and to the Delta and the Fayum Lake in the East are documented as far as 4,500 B.C., with pottery, agriculture, and domestication of cattle present from the regions of the Fezzan to the banks of the Nile. Indeed, there are indications that the first King who unified Egypt was a descendant from this Libyan (Libyco-Berber) lineage. Pages 27 to 31 attempt to address the matter of burial complexes and funerary practices, but the infomation is subtantially thin and at times misleading. An excellent study of Berber funerary monuments in the south of Morocco and pre-Sahara. and their physical and semantic relationship to funerary practices of the pyramidal age of Egypt was published by Mohammed Chafik of the Royal Academy of Morocco in 1997. Brett and Fentress do mention the extent of archaeological data such as the 60,000 tombs located in the Fezzan area of the Sahara desert, but do not expand on their data. They instead concentrate on funerary monuments of a much later period, which indicate Hellenistic influence, and conclude that this type of monument was modeled after the "Greek Heroon" or heros monument. No evidence is put forward to present the rich data of funerary practices of the Berbers from the Sahara to the banks of the Nile prior to that era, except in isolated statements which are not followed by pertinent information of a precise nature. On page 33, we find a rare isolated remark on the practice of incubation related to the cult of ancestors (pre Graeco-Roman): As Camps has shown, provision of chambers for this practice is a standard trait of Berber tombs, from prehistory onwards. And, a little further, unexplicably since pertinent data has been omitted, the concluding remark: It is not surprising that tombs are the major monuments left by the Berber Kings. Although their form is Hellenistic, their massive size suggests that the dead kings occupied a role as super ancestors. Such a statement ignores the entire body of data preceding the arrival of the Greeks and Romans in North Africa which is attached to the very African cult of ancestors. It again stresses the Hellenistic aspect of the architecture of a tomb or two instead of the probable continuity of archaic general practice through the times of colonization of Africa. Berber funerary practices seem to have extended from the Atlantic ocean to the banks of the Nile consistently, and might have given rise to the later "Egyptian" funerary rites and the whole pyramidal complex (Cf. Mohammed Chafik, Revue Tifinagh, No. 11-12, 1997, pages 89-98: Elements lexicaux Berberes pouvant apporter un eclairage dans la recherche des origines prehistoriques des pyramides). Such research, stemming from North African scholars, seems to be unavailable to the authors of the book.

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posted 08 September 2005 03:15 PM            

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Indeed, there are indications that the first King who unified Egypt was a descendant from this Libyan (Libyco-Berber) lineage.

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