quote:Speakers of Amazight go back 7000 years. They are the Imazigen of Ta Mazgha (Berbers of North Afrika). Amazight is an Afrikan language of the Afro-Asian group. The Afro-Asiatic linguistic phylum developed somewhere between the south-eastern Sahara and the Horn and began splitting at least 8000 years ago.
Branches and probable date of split: Kushitic - 8th millenium BCE Egyptian - before the 7th millenium BCE Omotic - 7th millenium BCE Hausa - 7th millenium BCE Semitic - 6th or 5th millenia BCE Amazigh - 6th or 5th millenia BCE (I. M. Diakonoff, Afrasian Languages, Moscow 1988)
Herodotus described Libyans as indigenees of Afrika. Egyptian records list Libyans or Lebou of two types, the Tehenou and the Temehou (people created light/white skinned). This is simply recognizing that there was no uniform phenotype in ancient Tamazgha. It is not saying there was only one phenotype among the Lebou.
Tehenou and Tamahou were not the same ethnic type. The first Lebou people that the Egyptians refered to were the Tehenou. In color paintings they are dark brown. They were the local blacks of Libya. They were not Nilotics nor Bantu nor Sudanese. They were a local Libyan ethnic group. (G. Moller, Die Aegypten und ihre libyschen Nachbaren, ZDMG, Liepzig 1924 pg 78.)
Oric Bates who wrote on the Eastern Libyans records Afrikoid features. He says that before 12th dynasty Egyptians colored Tehenou dark brown. The Eastern Libyans, London 1914, pp 43-45.
C. M. Daniels makes a similar report in The Garamantes of Southern Libya, Wisconsin 1970, pg 27.
Later in time the Tamahou begin to appear in Egyptian paintings. They are creamy colored often with light hair and eyes. This is the type that absorbed and replaced the Tehenou. (W. Holscher, Libyer und Agypter Beitrage zur Ethnologie und Geschichte Libyscher Volkerschaften, AFU 5, Gluckstadt 1955)
Surely it is an injustice to the resurgance of Amazigh (Berber) self-determination to deny this aspect of the ethno-history of Tamazgha by writing the Tehenou out of history or denying that they were dark and they were the first Libyan Imazighen
Posts: 8675 | From: Tukuler al~Takruri as Ardo since OCT2014 | Registered: Feb 2003
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quote:The Meshwesh are again found in the Classical writings of Herodotus, over a thousand years later. He refers to this group of peoples as the "Maxyes", and offers the most physical description outside of the pictorial reliefs. Herodotus describes their semi-barbaric hairstyle— consisting of shaving one side of the head while leaving the other— and the fact that they paint their bodies and lay claim to Trojan heritage (Selincourt 1954: 306). He goes on to talk about the land from which they came (eastern Libya), all the while making sure to guard himself by saying that he cannot vouch for any of these statements, he is merely passing along what he himself has heard. These are the two major sources for description, both physical and cultural, for the Meshwesh. They are initially identified in Egyptian battle records as having fought alongside the Libyans and their allies, but also recognized as having risen to their own respective seat of power following these skirmishes. The fact that they are again specifically singled out by Herodotus in his Histories serves notice to the fact that they were indeed a significant socio- political entity in the Eastern Mediterranean at this time. Primary Sources.
quote:It is unclear for certain where the Labu originated, but they may have originated from west of the region of Libya. It is clear, however, that along with other tribes such as the Meshwesh they replaced the pervious inhabitants of Libya at some time during the New Kingdom (Redford 1992: 247). If the Labu are from the west of Libya, then it seems strange to associate them so closely with the Sea Peoples, even if the Labu do fight alongside the Sea Peoples against the Egyptians. Another theory, though, is that the Libu originated in the Balkans and were driven to migration by the Illyrians, with the Libu finally settling in Libya (Drews 1993: 58). The other Sea Peoples are generally thought to have originated in the Aegean, in the case of the Philistines, or in Anatolia, in the case of many of the other Sea Peoples tribes. The Labu are characterized by a number of features when they are depicted in Egyptian reliefs, such as fair skin, red hair, and blue eyes. They also wore ornamental cloaks, had one lock of hair, and were tattooed on their arms and legs. Some of these characteristics the Labu also shared with the Meshwesh, but unlike the Meshwesh the Labu wore kilts instead of loincloths and were uncircumcised (Gardiner 1968: 122.
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ausar, Thanks for the post. The Bible quotes Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, and Canaan as brothers. I knew Canaan was subdue by other people, but I always wondered what happened to the people of Libya. Your post states how they became fair skinned.
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Keep in mind however that the most ANCIENT form of the Amazigh language is Tamashek and Tifanagh and is ONLY maintained by the Tuareg who are one of the groups who descended from the ancient Tehenu/Tehenou. If you understand North African history, when these foreign elements invaded from the coast, many of the prior inhabitants moved South. The Tehemou may have been a major force in the dynastic period of Egypt after the 12th dynasty, but that does NOT mean that ALL North Africans became WHITE in this period. That would therefore CONTRADICT the existence of people like the Tuareg who trace their origins back to Morocco and other parts of North Africa and Siwa as well. Many people, including myself when I first saw them, considered the Fulani as the modern descendents of the ancient Tehemou Libyans who migrated South. The Tuaregs are considered as the descendants of the ancient Nomadic/Pastoral people who originally populated MOST of North Africa and the Sahara when it was wet.
Bottom line, North Africa is a BIG place and just because the Tehenu came to fore during the 12th Dynasty of Egypt does not mean that they had COMPLETELY replaced ALL of the Africans in North Africa. In fact, most would consider their domanin limited to Northern Libya and certain parts of the COAST of Libya, much as it does today. The Tehemou still remained in the Southern parts of Libya along with the other INDIGENOUS Africans of the Sahara. The Garamantes again are an example of an INDIGENOUS African group along with the Numidians to a great degree, even though their rulership was somewhat Greek and Roman, similar to the Ptolomies of Egypt. Eurocentrics often try to imply that ALL of North Africa was changed when the Tehenou became prevalent in Libya, but the EVIDENCE shows that this is FAR from the case. MOST of North Africa, which includes ALL of the Sahara and Sahel remained FULL of INDIGENOUS Africans, unmixed with outsiders in the period of 1,000 BC to 624 AD. This is when the LAST of the great invasions was to occur of the "Arabs", who were actually mainly Syrians initially and followed by many clans from Syria, Turkey, Persia, Baghdad, the Levant and Arabia, into the lands of Northern Africa.
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^LOL Yes, which is why I find it funny how many Eurocentrics and others try to either white-wash or mix-up North Africans!
Even today, there are still many 'un-mixed' black North African groups who live in coastal North African regions like the Djerba of Tunisia.
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King Muhammed VI is a distant ancestor of Mulay Ishmali[who had a Senegalese slave mother] and he comes from a southern Moroccan Imazigh origin. Don't quote me on the Southern Moroccan Imazigh part but I have read sources about his ancestry.
Moroccans are pretty diverse and come in all shades from white[yes there are Moroccans as white as Russians] to black[yes some Moroccans even look like Western Africans].
Posts: 8675 | From: Tukuler al~Takruri as Ardo since OCT2014 | Registered: Feb 2003
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How a Saharan slave-trading people made the desert bloom
During the past six years, an archaeological survey in the Fazzan area of southern Libya, led by David Mattingly of the University of Leicester, has revealed that a remarkable, yet obscure desert civilization known to the Romans as the Garamantes constructed almost a thousand miles of underground tunnels and shafts in a successful bid to mine long-buried fossil water.
Descended from Berbers and Saharan pastoralists, the Garamantes were likely present as a tribal people in the Fazzan by at least 1000 B.C. They first appeared in the historical record in the fifth century B.C., when Herodotus noted the Garamantes were an exceedingly numerous people who herded cattle (that grazed backward!) and who hunted "troglodyte Ethiopians" from four-horse chariots.
Archaeologists had excavated parts of the Garamantian capital, Garama, in the 1960s. But prior to recent investigations, most scholars still thought of the Garamantes as little more than desert barbarians living in one small town, a couple of villages, and scattered encampments. The research, however, now suggests that the Garamantes had about eight major towns (three of which have now been examined) and scores of other important settlements, and that they controlled a substantial state. "The new archaeological evidence is showing that the Garamantes were brilliant farmers, resourceful engineers, and enterprising merchants who produced a remarkable civilization," says Mattingly.
The success of the Garamantes was based on their subterranean water-extraction system, a network of tunnels known as foggaras in Berber. It not only allowed their part of the Sahara to bloom again--it also triggered a political and social process that led to population expansion, urbanism, and conquest. But in order to retain and extend their newfound prosperity, they needed above all to maintain and expand the water-extraction tunnel systems--and that necessitated the acquisition of many slaves.
Luckily for the Garamantes--but less so for their neighbors--Garamantian population growth gave the new Saharan power a demographic and military advantage over other peoples in Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, enabling them to expand their territory, conquer other peoples, and acquire vast numbers of slaves.
By around A.D. 150 the slave-based Garamantian kingdom covered 70,000 square miles in present-day southern Libya. It was the first time in history that a nonriverine area of the Sahara (or indeed any other major desert) had produced an urban society. The largest town, Garama (in what is now called the Jarma Oasis), had a population of some four thousand. A further six thousand people probably lived in suburban satellite villages located within a three-mile radius of the urban center.
Thanks to their aggressive mentality and the slaves and water it produced, the Garamantes lived in planned towns and feasted on locally grown grapes, figs, sorghum, pulses, barley, and wheat, as well as on imported luxuries such as wine and olive oil. "The combination of their slave-acquisition activities and their mastery of foggara irrigation technology enabled the Garamantes to enjoy a standard of living far superior to that of any other ancient Saharan society," says archaeologist Andrew Wilson of the University of Oxford, who has been surveying the foggara system. Without slaves, they would not have had a kingdom, let alone even a whiff of the good life. They would have survived--just--in conditions of relative poverty, as most desert dwellers have done before and since.
In the end, depletion of easily mined fossil water sounded the death knell of the Garamantian kingdom. After extracting at least 30 billion gallons of water over some 600 years, the fourth-century A.D. Garamantes discovered that the water was literally running out. To deal with the problem, they would have needed to add more man-made underground tributaries to existing tunnels and dig additional deeper, much longer water-extraction tunnels. For that, they would have needed vastly more slaves than they had. The water difficulties must have led to food shortages, population reductions, and political instability (local defensive structures from this era may be evidence for political fragmentation). Conquering more territories and pulling in more slaves was therefore simply not militarily feasible. The magic equation between population and military and economic power on the one hand and slave-acquisition capability and water extraction on the other no longer balanced.
The desert kingdom declined and fractured into small chiefdoms and was absorbed into the emerging Islamic world. Like its more famous Roman neighbor, the once-great Saharan kingdom became, little by little, simply a thing of myth and memory. Along with the rest of the world, Berbers living in the Fazzan today have all but forgotten their ancestors. The kingdom's legacy has faded so dramatically that local residents believe the vast water-extraction system--the pride of the Garamantes--is the handiwork of Romans.
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^Thanks for the info on the Garamantes, Banana.
The Garamantes were also nicknamed 'Negratai' by the Romans for their dark skins, and also exported salt as well as slaves.
The Garamantes ancient script is said to be the ancestor of the Berber script Tifinagh that is still used by Saharan Berber nomads like the Tuareg.
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