CHAPTER XI

PLATE 45ASSARARAIf circumstantial evidence seems to point to Tibesti, there is also that of the place names given in the account. The Agisymba Regio contained the mountains of Bardetus, Mesche and Zipta. No similarity to these names can be found in Air, but in Tibesti the first may well be the area and massif round the village of Bardai, while Mesche may be a Latinised form of Miski, a valley and group south-west of Bardai. For Zipta I can offer no suggestion.Like the Romans and the Arabs the modern Turks also penetrated Tibesti as a consequence of their occupation of the Fezzan in an attempt to stop the Tebu raiding. History is curiously consistent in that we have no evidence of the Arabs or the Turks having penetrated Air. The Romans, I assume, probably did not do so either.[293]The Romans must have come into contact with the Tuareg in the Fezzan, where the latter, it might be assumed from Arab evidence alone, were early established if they did not actually constitute the majority of the original population. It is possible to trace in Roman records the names of certain well-known Tuareg tribes. The description which Corippus gives of the Ifuraces, the Ifoghas tribe of the Southern Tuareg, corresponds accurately with that of the present-day camel riders of the Sahara. In a description of an encounter with the Byzantine forces under John, the general himself cuts down a camel with his sword and the rider falls with the accoutrements and paraphernalia, which are those of a Tuareg on campaign or in battle to-day.[294]The activitiesof the Circumcelliones during the troubles described by Opatus[295]during the Donatist heresy in North Africa in the course of the fourth centuryA.D.remind one irresistibly of those of the Tuareg. These bands of marauders from the desert came into Southern Tunisia and Algeria on swift and remorseless errands of plunder for the greater glory of their heretical Faith. They lived in the barren hills of the outer waste and descended to burn churches, sack houses and carry off live-stock with such deadly efficiency and ease that the motive power of their organisation can only have come from a spirit which considers raiding a national sport. “When they were not resisted they usually contented themselves with plunder, but the slightest opposition provoked them to acts of violence and murder. . . . The spirit of the Circumcellians, armed with a huge and weighty club, as they were indifferently supplied with swords and spears, and waging war to the cry of ‘Praise be to God’ . . . was not always directed against their defenceless enemies, the peasants of the orthodox belief; they engaged and sometimes defeated the troops of the province, and in the bloody action of Bagai they attacked in the open field, but with unsuccessful valour, the advance guard of the Imperial cavalry.”[296]So in later years the Tuareg of Ahaggar, disdaining any butles armes blanches, fell in ranks under the rifle fire of the French troops at Tit.But it is curious that in none of these and other early descriptions of the Tuareg is any mention made of their outstanding characteristics, so obvious to the person who sees them for the first time—the Face Veil worn by the men. It seems very strange that none of the classical and post-classical authors should have recorded a feature which so distinguishes these people from other races. There is no reference to the Veil until we come to the first Arab authors, when the whole race is immediately described by this very peculiarity, as the Muleththemin,ملثّمين,the “Veiled Ones,”a second form plural past participle from the rootلثم, which also forms the wordlitham,لثام, the Arabic name for the Veil itself. How it came about that the Arabs should be the first to record the use of the Veil is a problem to which I have been able to find no satisfactory solution.[264]Cf. remarks inChap. VIIIregarding the dating of the mosques in Air.[265]Barth did not himself, unfortunately, visit Assode.Op. cit., Vol. I. p. 376.[266]There were sixty-nine inhabited houses in 1909, with 200 inhabitants, according to Chudeau.Op. cit., Vol. II. p. 66.[267]I could not trace any other of the seven mosques referred to by Barth, nor is the great mosque decorated with columns as he says, unless the pierced walls supporting the roof can so be described. There is no “mimbar.”[268]Some of them were quite old and had painted borders and coloured letters. The work was all, however, rather rough; no T’ifinagh writing was found. I had no facilities for examining the work in detail.[269]People have stumbled upon small beehive grain pits in Air cut in the rock away from villages. In these no doubt the Tuareg who were hastily cleared out of Air in 1918 hid their small treasures. They will in many cases remain undiscovered perhaps for centuries and will prove the happiness of some later archæologist.[270]The significance of the name “People of the King” will be explained inChap. XII.[271]Barth,op. cit., Vol. I. pp. 360-1.[272]Or Bundai; Barth has “Bunday.”[273]The Cortier map is somewhat inaccurate hereabouts.[274]“Asbenawa,” from “Asben,” the alternative name for Air in Southland, is the name which is there given to the Tuareg. Barth,op. cit., Vol. I. p. 334.[275]Wrongly called Tamgak on the Cortier map. The name Tamgak is only given to the larger group on the north of the Ighazar.[276]Not in any way, of course, connected with the Azañieres mountains, which are many miles away.[277]The italics are his. Duveyrier,op. cit., p. 458.[278]Barth,op. cit., Vol. I. p. 197. That the road should have run from Telizzarhen to Anai and then to Air is very doubtful, as this would have entailed a very devious route. What, doubtless, was meant was that it ran from Murzuk or Garama via Anai to Air.[279]SeeAppendix III.[280]Temed is a mountain north of Tamgak: there is a pool below the peak in a cave on which the prophet Elijah is reputed by the Tuareg to have lived.[281]Von Bary’s diary,op. cit., p. 192.[282]“The Gate of the Head of the Desert.”[283]Ptolemy (Marinus of Tyre), I. 8, sec. 4 seq.[284]Pliny,Nat. Hist., V. 5.[285]Tabudium and Thuben are both mentioned, either of which might be the well of Tabonie on the Mizda Murzuk road.[286]In the Fezzan: there are several places of this name elsewhere.[287]Ptolemy,loc. cit.[288]Herodotus, IV. 183.[289]Narrative of Ibn Abd el Hakim in Slane’s translation of Ibn Khaldun,op. cit., Appendix I to Book I.[290]I think this name has nothing to do with Hawara but is derived from Kawar (see below).[291]El Bekri, ed. Slane, 1859, p. 34. Cf. Jawan,جاوانor,حاوار= Hawar, orخاوار= Khawar? Kawar.[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. 1065-83et passim.[295]De Schis. donatistarum,passim.[296]Gibbon:Decline and Fall, Chap. XXI.CHAPTER XITHE ANCESTRY OF THE TUAREG OF AIRAfterthe 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 monumentalHistory of the Berbers, which has become a classic in the Arabic language. His lifetime, falling betweenA.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 inA.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 thispeople 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.LEO’SSAHARAN AREASF. R. del.Emery Walker Ltd. sc.Leo writes:[300]“Having described all the regions of Numidia,let us now proceed with the description of Libya, which is divided into five parts. . . .”“The drie and forlorne desert of Zanhaga which bordereth the westward upon the Ocean Sea and extendeth eastward to the salt pits of Tegaza”[301]is clearly the Atlantic area, now called Mauretania by the French, between Southern Morocco and the Upper Niger and Senegal rivers. The Zanhaga are the Sanhaja, a famous part of the Muleththemin early in their recorded history, but now fallen into great decay.The second area appears to be east of the first. The great steppe and desert area bounded by Southern Morocco and Southern Algeria in the north, and by the Niger country from Walata[302]to Gao[303]in the south, is divided into two and shared between the Sanhaja in the west, inhabiting his first area, and the Zanziga or Ganziga in the east, inhabiting his second area. The latter names are akin to the former and the people, if not identical, are probably related.The third area was inhabited by the Targa. It commences from the desert steppe west of Air and extends eastwards towards the desert of Igidi.[304]Northward it borders on the Tuat, Gourara and Mzab countries, while in the south it terminates in the wilderness around Agades and Lower Air. The boundaries of this area are quite clear: they include the massifs of Air and Ahaggar and the deserts immediately east and west of the former.The fourth and fifth areas we will come to later.Leo is obviously attempting to describe the principal geographical divisions of the Sahara and the Veiled People inhabiting them. The boundaries of each area are given in terms of intervening deserts, or of countries inhabited by sedentaries or by other races which did not wear the Veil.His divisions, therefore, are not deserts but habitable steppe or other types of country bounded by deserts, or non-Tuareg districts.Some confusion reigns in regard to the third area, the eastern limit of which is described as the Igidi desert. What is known as the Igidi desert to-day is a dune area south-west of Beni Abbes in South Western Algeria; but the position of this Igidi, lying as it does on the road from Morocco to Timbuctoo, cannot be theeasternboundary of the third area. This Igidi is, in fact, in the northern part of the second area, which is that of the Zanziga. Now this second area is said to contain a desert zone called “Gogdem,” a name which cannot now be traced in that neighbourhood, though the well-defined Igidi south-west of Beni Abbes immediately jumps to the mind as a probable identification. The eastern boundary of the third area, which includes Air, or, as Leo calls it, “Hair,” must lie between these mountains and those of Tibesti. This vast tract is in part true desert, with patches of white sand dunes, and in part desert steppe with scanty vegetation; it also contains a few oases. In it is one particular area of white dune desert crossed by the Chad road and containing a famous well called Agadem.[305]One of two hypotheses is possible: either the names “Igidi” and “Gogdem” in the paragraphs[306]dealing with the second and third areas respectively have become transposed in the text and Gogdem is to be identified with the Agadem dune desert, or else the whole phrase relating to the desert of Gogdem has been bodily misplaced at the end of the section dealing with the Zanziga area, instead of standing at the end of the succeeding paragraph on the Targa area, in which case Leo would be calling the Agadem dunes the Gogdem desert, within or near another Igidi[307]waste. Agadem is quite sufficiently important as a watering-point on a most difficult section ofthe Chad road to give its name to the area, nor is it hard to account for the corruption of the name into Gogdem[308]—such changes have occurred in many travellers’ notes.[309]The first hypothesis is the most probable; it affords a simple explanation of an otherwise obscure passage and renders Leo’s boundaries lucid.The fourth of Leo’s areas inhabited by the Lemta is described as extending from the desert east of Airas far asthe country of the Berdeoa. This area seems to be that in which the Chad road and the wells to the east of it are found. It would include a part of the desert of Agadem, the Great Steppe north of Lake Chad, and oases like Jado and the Kawar depression.The fifth and last area is thatofthe people of Berdeoa; it adjoins the Fezzan and Barca in the north, and in the south the wilderness north of Wadai, including presumably Tibesti and the Libyan desert west of the Nile Valley. It is said to extend eastward to the deserts of Aujila, though north-eastward would have been a more accurate definition.Between the people of Berdeoa and the Nile Valley are the Egyptian oases inhabited by the Arabs and some “vile” black people.Leo’s description of the Sahara is far from being incorrect or confused; his information may be summarised as follows:[310]Areas I and II.—South of Morocco and Western Algeria; north of the Niger and Senegal rivers; between the Atlantic littoral and the Ahaggar and Air massifs with their immediately adjacent deserts or steppes. Inhabitants: Sanhaja in the west and Zanziga in the east.Area III.—Air and Ahaggar, with their adjacent areas; south of Tuat, Gourara and Mzab, and north of Damergu. Inhabitants: Targa.Area IV.—Desert and steppe between Air and Tibesti from Wargla and Ghadames in the north to the country of Kano and Nigeria generally in the south, including the country of Ghat and the Western Fezzan. Inhabitants: Lemta.Area V.—The Libyan desert of Egypt, the Cyrenaican steppes and desert, a part of the Eastern Fezzan and Tibesti, Erdi and Kufra. Inhabitants: the people of Berdeoa with Arabs in the north-east and some blacks in the south-east.In the fourth area the Lemta were in the country where the Azger now live, but the southern and the eastern sides have since been lost to the Tuareg. Kawar, whence the Tuareg of Air fetch salt, is under the domination of the latter, but, like the other habitable areas on the Chad road and in the Great Steppe, is now inhabited largely by Kanuri and Tebu. There is nothing improbable in the statement that the Lemta covered the whole of the fourth area. We have quite other definite and probably independent records of the Tuareg having lived in the Chad area and in Bornu, whence they were driven by the Kanuri, who are known to have conquered Kawar in fairly recent historical times.[311]The people of Berdeoa are the only inhabitants of any of the five areas who were not Muleththemin. I have little doubt that they are the inhabitants of Tibesti, where the town or village of Bardai is perhaps the most important of the permanently inhabited places. To-day they are Tebu, a name which seems to mean “The People of the Rock,”[312]with an incorrectly formed Arab version, Tibawi. The racial problem which they present can only be solved when they are better known. Keane[313]assumes that they are the descendants of the Garamantes, whose primeval home was perhaps in the Tibesti mountains. He notes the similarity of the names of their northern branch, the Teda, and a tribe called theTedamansii, who seem, however, to have lived too far north to be connected with them.[314]The Southern Tebu or Daza section is certainly more negroid than the northern, and there are reasons for not accepting the view that the Garamantian civilisation was the product of a negroid people. Leo[315]records the discovery “of the region of Berdeoa,” which from the context is probably a misreading fora“region of the Berdeoa” in the Libyan desert of Egypt. The area is described as containing three castles and five or six villages. It is probably the Kufra archipelago of oases. The story of accidental discoveries of oases is also told of other places; Wau el Harir,[316]an oasis in the Eastern Fezzan, was reported to have been found by accident in 1860, and the Arab geographers relate similar stories of other points in the Libyan desert. The accounts of Kufra by Rohlfs and Hassanein Bey go to show that before it became a centre of the Senussi sect, with the consequent influx of Cyrenaican Arabs and Libyans, the population was Tebu. The identity of Berdeoa, which I think must be Bardai, was the subject of some controversy before circumstantial accounts of its existence were brought back by travellers in modern times. The name was for long assumed to be a misreading for Borku or Borgu, as D’Anville suggested. In Rennell’s map accompanying the account of Hornemann’s travels at the end of the eighteenth century the town (sic) of Bornu north of what is presumably meant to represent Lake Chad is a mislocation for Bornu province, while Bourgou in Lat. 26° N., Long. 22° E. is intended to represent Bardai in Tibesti, the Berdeoa of Leo. The “residue of the Libyan desert”[317](i.e.other than that of the Tebu people of Berdeoa), namely, Augela (Aujila oasis) to the River of the Nile, we are told by Leo was inhabited by certaine Arabians and Africans called“Leuata,” a name which coincides with the Lebu or Rebu of Egyptian records. Idrisi places them in the same area as Leo, calling them Lebetae or Levata. The stock is referred to under the general name of Levata or Leuata by Ibn Khaldun in several connections. An ethnic rather than a tribal name seems to be involved, and this is natural if they are the descendants of the Lebu. Bates concludes that in the name of this people is the origin of the classical word “Libyan.”[318]The Leuata[319]assisted Hamid ibn Yesel, Lord of Tehert, in a war in Algeria against El Mansur, the third Fatimite Khalif. InA.D.947-8, when El Mansur drove Hamid into Spain, the Levata were dispersed into the desert; some who escaped found refuge in the mountains between Sfax and Gabes, where they were still living in Ibn Khaldun’s day; others he places in the Great Syrtis and in the Siwa area. In Byzantine times they are shown in the Little Syrtis. El Masa’udi states that the Leuata survived in the Oases of Egypt. Their principal habitat is, in fact, not far from the country of the Lebu, who were in Cyrenaica according to Egyptian records. Both the Tehenu further east and the Lebu are known to have been subjected to pressure from the Meshwesh in the west, and some fusion between the two may well, therefore, have occurred. The ancestors of the Levata of Arab geographers and the modern Libyan inhabitants of Siwa and the northern oases of the Western Desert of Egypt are either the product of this fusion or the descendants of the Lebu alone. The Levata and Lebu seem to have this in common, that they are probably a non-Tuareg Libyan people immigrant from across the Mediterranean at the time of the invasions of Egypt by the Libyan and Sea People. In the course of history they were displaced and reduced; only in the north-east of the Libyan desert did they remain at all concentrated or homogeneous.The Targa who inhabited the third area of Leo concernthis volume most particularly, as their zone includes Air as well as Ahaggar. So long as the Tuareg were believed to be only a tribe they were identified with the Targa, but when the former term was discovered to have a wider or racial significance it was not clear, unless it was a proper name, why Leo used it of any one section of the Muleththemin. The exact significance only appears when Ibn Khaldun’s narrative is considered.In his History of the Berbers Ibn Khaldun attempted to make a comprehensive classification of the Libyans. After working out a comparatively simple system which emphasises both the obvious diversity as well as the superficial appearance of unity[320]of the population of North Africa, he proceeds to elaborate more complex schemes of classification which are difficult to reconcile with one another. He seems throughout to have derived his information from two or more sources which he was himself unable to co-ordinate.Ibn Khaldun divides the Libyans into two families descended from the eponymous heroes, Branes and Madghis, a theory which recognises the difficulties involved by the assumption that they all belonged to a single stock. The division may be traced even to-day. In many Libyan villages the inhabitants are divided into two factions which, without being hostile, are conscious of being different. The factions are not found among the nomadic tribes, where opportunities for living in separate places are greater than in the sedentary districts, but their existence among the latter, however, is hardly otherwise explicable than by the assumption of separate racial origins. This view is suggested by Ibn Khaldun’s classification, and also by the result of a detailed examination of the different constituent elements of the Libyan population. Among the Tuareg, whom I consider belong to a single stock, different from that of the various races which composed the other Libyans, these factions do not exist even in the villages where tribal organisationis in process of breaking down and people of different clans live together under one headman.Out of deference to the patriarchal system of the Arabs—a habit of mind which pervades their life and often distorts their historical perception—Ibn Khaldun has given to the two Libyan families of Branes and Madghis a common ancestor called Mazigh. Both “Madghis” and “Mazigh” are probably derived from the common MZGh root found to be so widespread in North African names.[321]All three are almost certainly mythical personages. The selection of Mazigh as the common ancestor points to an attempt having been made, in accordance with patriarchal custom, to explain the one characteristic which is really common to all the Libyans including the Tuareg, namely, their language. While the MZGh root is not at all universally used as the root of a national appellation, its occurrence in various parts of North Africa might well allow one to talk of “Mazigh-speaking People,” or, as we might more comprehensibly say, “Berber-speaking People.” And so I would confine the use of both “Berber” and “Mazigh” to a linguistic signification, analogous to that of the word “Aryan,” which simply denotes people, not necessarily of the same racial stock, speaking one of the Aryan group of languages.[322]Ibn Khaldun places the home of most of the divisions of the Beranes and Madghis Libyans in Syria. They were, he says, the sons of Mazigh, the son of Canaan, the son of Ham, and consequently related to the Philistines and Gergesenes, who did not leave the east when their kinsmen came to Africa. All Moslems possess a form of snobbishness which is displayed in their attempt to establish some connection, direct or indirect, with an Arabian tribe related to the people of the Prophet Muhammad. In Morocco this feeling is so strong that it is common to find Libyan families free from all admixture with the Arab invaders, boasting ancestral trees descended from the Prophet. The Maghreb is full of pseudo-Ashraf; a term in the Moslem world which is properlyreserved for the descendants of the Leader of Islam. The same occurs in Central Africa. Much of the legendary history of the Libyans relating to an eastern home may therefore be discounted as attempts on the part of Moslem historians to connect them with the lands and race of Islam. Nevertheless, even when all allowances have been made for this factor there remains to be explained a strong tradition of some connection between North Africa and the Arab countries. Not only is it commented upon in all the early histories, but it is to some extent still current to-day among the people. I am not convinced that it cannot be explained by the presence among the Libyans of one element which certainly did come from the East in the period preceding and during the invasions of Egypt, when the people of the Eastern Mediterranean co-operated with the Africans in their attacks on the Nile Valley. The undoubted occurrence of migrations within the historical period both from Syria and from the east coast of the Red Sea are alone sufficient, if the characteristic of Moslem snobbishness is taken into account, to account for such traditions regarding their home. It is unnecessary to attribute these stories to the original appearance of the Libyans proper in Africa even if their cradle is to be looked for in the East. This may be inherently probable, but must be placed at so remote a date as to ensure that traditions connected therewith were certainly by now forgotten.Ibn Khaldun divides the families of Branes and Madghis respectively into ten and four divisions. Four of the ten Beranes people, the Lemta, Sanhaja, Ketama and Auriga, are called the Muleththemin, or People of the Veil.[323]The descendants of Madghis, with whom we are not concerned, include the Louata or Levata. The hypothesis previously brought forward for their non-Tuareg origin gains support from the fact that in Ibn Khaldun’s classification they are not placed in the same family as the People of the Veil.We now come to Ibn Khaldun’s views regarding the origin of the Muleththemin. The four divisions of Lemta, Sanhaja,Ketama and Auriga, though in the Beranes group, he regarded as of a different origin to the other six sections. The inconsistency of the patriarchal classification is apparent. He states that certain traditions which he is inclined to accept as true connect the Sanhaja and the Ketama with the Yemen.[324]They were Himyarite tribes which came from the east coast of the Red Sea to Africa under the leadership of Ifrikos, the hero who gave his name to Ifrikiya, which is now called Tunisia. In examining the organisation and history of the Aulimmiden Tuareg who live between the Air mountains and the Niger bend, Barth[325]found that they also claimed to be descended from Himyer. Now the Aulimmiden in name and history are a part of the Lemta who migrated from the area in North Africa where the rest of the section still lives under the name of Azger, and where we are first able to identify them from our records. What is true in this respect of a part is true of the whole, and three out of the four divisions of the Muleththemin thus seem to be racially different from the other six Beranes divisions, the fourth section in question being the Auriga people, who are also called Hawara. The latter present one of the most difficult problems in the early history of North Africa. Suffice it here to state that in the course of the early Arab invasions many of them lost so much of their individuality that we must rely largely on Ibn Khaldun’s classification of them among the four divisions of the Tuareg for their early identity.There are then, according to Ibn Khaldun, two separate families of Libyans, and in one of these is a group apparently different racially from the remainder of the two families.[Illustration]It is a complicated classification which attempts to establish some sort of unity among all the Libyans, and at the same time indicates without room for doubt that the learned historian felt he was dealing with a mixed population. His difficulties are clear. His statements support the view that the Tuareg are separate from the rest of the people called Libyans, who are themselves composed of at least two stocks, though more than this regarding the origin of the Tuareg I should not yet feel entitled to deduce from his account.At a later stage, when the origins of the People of Air come to be examined, another reference will be found, in the writings of an authority in the Sudan, to the migration of a people from the east coast of the Red Sea into Africa. This Himyaritic invasion is so much insisted upon in various works that the presumption of a migration from that direction, with which the Tuareg were associated, is tempting, though it is not clear whether the Sudanese authority was merely copying Ibn Khaldun’s statements or whether he was working on independent information. I have mentioned the theory because it is one of the more usually accepted explanations of the origin of the Tuareg, but I do not think the problem can be so easily resolved. My own view is that the Tuareg are not Himyarites, but that the memory of an invasion from that quarter which undoubtedly did contribute to the population of Central Africa was adopted by their own traditional historians and accepted by Ibn Khaldun to establish a connection for the People of the Veil with the land of the Prophet. The migrations across the Red Sea are far more likely to have accounted for the early Semitic influence in Africa, especially in the Nilotic Sudan before the rise of Islam, and in Abyssinia, than for the origin of the Tuareg, who, I am convinced, were already in the continent at a far earlier date.Ibn Khaldun now introduces a further classification which again emphasises the separateness or individuality of the Tuareg. He states that among the Beranes were certain divisions collectively known as the Children of Tiski. Amongthese were the Hawara, Heskura, Sanhaja, Lemta, and Gezula. The Hawara we know were the same as the Auriga; the Sanhaja and Lemta have already been mentioned. The Heskura and Gezula may therefore be subdivisions of the Ketama, and the Children of Tiski, therefore, probably a collective term for all the Muleththemin as a whole.Ibn Khaldun’s writings are voluminous and have a baffling tendency to jump about from subject to subject. Having given us these explanations, which though complicated are comprehensible, he suddenly brings in a host of new names, and proceeds to inform us that the Muleththemin are descended from the “Sanhaja of the second race” and to consist of the Jedala or Gedala, Lemtuna, Utzila, Targa, Zegawa and Lemta divisions. It is not within the scope of this work to examine all the Tuareg groups in Africa in detail. To investigate the Zanziga of Leo’s second area or the Utzila or Jedala of Ibn Khaldun would only serve to complicate the issue which deals with the Tuareg of Air. But the Sanhaja, although they lived in the furthest west of the Sahara, played such an important part in the history of all the Tuareg that they must be briefly mentioned in passing.At one period nearly all the People of the Veil were united in a sort of desert confederation under the dominion of the Sanhaja. The era terminated with the death of Ibn Ghania in aboutA.D.1233, some 150 years before Ibn Khaldun wrote, even by which time, however, the inner parts of Africa had hardly recovered. The memory of the Sanhaja empire, which extended from the Senegal River to Fez and eastwards perhaps as far as Tibesti, survived in the additional classifications of Ibn Khaldun and in the stories about the Tuareg collected by his contemporaries. It is possible to suppose that the first ethnological systems he gives refer to the state of the Muleththemin before or during the Sanhaja confederacy, but that when he gives the list of names of six divisions descended from the “second race of Sanhaja” he is referring to the People of the Veil after the death of Ibn Ghania. At that time the name of the dominant group inthe confederation had been given by the other inhabitants of North Africa generally to all the Tuareg. In the process of disintegration of the empire several truly Sanhaja tribes were absorbed by other Tuareg groups. It is difficult to accept the alternative view that the Sanhaja of the second race are a different people from the earlier Sanhaja, for such a conclusion would imply that the Muleththemin were made up of more than one racial stock, whereas their most obvious characteristic is unity of type and habit.The Sanhaja division of Ibn Khaldun’s first grouping are obviously the same as the people of Leo’s first area on the western side of the great desert which extends between Beni Abbes and Timbuctoo. After their period of fame they came on evil days, and were reduced to the position of tributaries when they lost many of their Tuareg characteristics. Their remnants are the Mesufa and Lemtuna tribes. The relationship of the Sanhaja and Lemta noted by Barth either means nothing more than that they were both Muleththemin, or dates from their association with each other during the Sanhaja empire; for they were ever separate ethnic divisions of the People of the Veil.Much trouble has been occasioned by the confusion of the names Lemta and Lemtuna. The apparent derivation of the latter from the former may also have been due to the association of the two main divisions: it is important only to emphasise that while the one is a subdivision of the Sanhaja now living in the north-west corner of the Sahara near Morocco, the other is a branch of the Tuareg race co-equal with the latter. It is in this confusion of names that the explanation is to be found of the statement so often heard and repeated by Barth, that the Lemta were the neighbours of the Moorish Walad Delim of Southern Morocco. The position of the Lemtuna makes this statement true of them, but not of the Lemta, whose home, both on the authority of Leo and on other evidence, was far removed from Mauretania, and, to wit, in the Fezzan. The erroneous association of the Lemta with the Walad Delim is largely responsible for the wrong account of the migrations of various sectionsof the southern and south-eastern Tuareg given by Barth and his successors.[326]But let us return to the people who were the ancestors of the Air Tuareg. The Hawara, according to Ibn Khaldun, El Bekri and El Masa’udi, inhabited Tripolitania, the deserts of Ifrikiya, and even parts of Barca. They lived, in part at least, side by side with the Lemta, Wearers of the Veil, who were “near,” or “as far as” Gawgawa. It has been assumed that this Gawgawa was the Kaukau of Ibn Batutah’s travels, and consequently Gao or Gaogao or Gogo or Gagho on the Niger. But it is more reasonably identified with Kuka on Lake Chad, and if this is so, the Lemta according to Ibn Khaldun extended precisely as far as the place referred to by Leo, in speaking of his fourth area.[327]It is clear that Ibn Khaldun meant “as far as” and not “near,” for in referring to the Hawarid origin of a part of the Lemta people he says that they may be so recognised “by their name, which is an altered form of the word Hawara: for having changed the و (w) into a sort ofkwhich is intermediary between the softgand the hardq, they have formed “Haggar.” The latter are, of course, the Ahaggaren, who then, as now, lived in mountains called by the same name a very long way from Kuka on Lake Chad; even so they were coterminous with the Lemta, a point which coincides with the evidence of Leo and others. Further indications of the extension of the Lemta as far as Lake Chad will be dealt with in the next chapter; they are confirmed both by the sequence of events in Air and by the occupation of Tademekka by the Aulimmiden-Lemta, culminating inA.D.1640 when the former inhabitants of that area were driven towards the west.[328]All this would be incomprehensible if Gawgawa were identified with Gao on the Niger, or if Ibn Khaldun’s “near” were not interpreted as “towards” or “as far as.”It may appear strange to find Ibn Khaldun referring to the Hawarid origin of the Lemta when they are repeatedly given elsewhere by him as separate and co-equal divisions of the Muleththemin. It is possible that originally “Hawara” or “Auriga” may have been the national name of all the Tuareg, and that on the analogy of what we know happens in the case of tribes which have split up, one group may have retained the name of the parent stock. But if this ever did take place it must have happened long before the Moslem invasion, by which time the Tuareg had already become established in the divisions which we know; such an occurrence would have no practical bearing on conditions prevailing to-day. It is therefore easier to assume that all he meant to convey was the existence of a certain rather close connection between the Hawara and Lemta. We know in fact that, though not identical, the two groups have interchanged tribes, some of each division being found in the other one. This connection would account for the suspicious etymology of the word “Haggar,” which sounds uncommonly like an attempt on his part to prove philologically what is known traditionally to be the case.The Hawara as we know them to-day are not all Tuareg or even Libyans, although they were included among the Beranes families under the name of Auriga, and were specifically numbered among the People of the Veil. They were described as an element of great importance among the pre-Arab Libyans and reckoned co-equal with the Sanhaja. Ibn Khaldun does, however, add that at the time of the Arab conquest of North Africa they had assimilated a number of other tribes of different stock, which probably explains the rapid “Arabisation” of a part of them. It was the non-Tuareg part which became readily proselytised and so passed under the influence of the new rulers of North Africa. The Hawara were much to the fore in the occupation of Spain and generally in the Arab doings of the Fatimite era. Some of them in common with other Libyans supported the Kharejite schism in Islam; yet another part which hadbecome “Arabised” established itself under the name of the Beni Khattab in the Fezzan, with their capital at Zuila. But those of them who most retained their Tuareg characteristics represent the original stock. In referring to certain Libyans by the name of Hawara, Ibn Khaldun is obviously not speaking of Tuareg people; one may therefore conclude that he means the strangers whom they assimilated.[329]Consequently I prefer to use the name “Hawara” for the whole group, but when the section which preserves its Tuareg characteristics is indicated the name “Auriga” is more applicable.It may be conceived that a people of such importance left some trace of their name among the Tuareg of to-day, in addition to the name “Haggar,” where Ibn Khaldun’s etymology seems suspicious. The name can be recognised in the form “Oraghen” or “Auraghen,” or in an older spelling “Iuraghen,” a tribe in the Azger group. The root also occurs in the name “Auraghiye” given to the Air dialect of the Tuareg language. These instances are valuable evidence.Duveyrier[330]records of the Oraghen tribe that “according to tradition they originally came from the neighbourhood of Sokna.[331]Before establishing themselves where they are now located, the tribe inhabited in succession the Fezzan, the country of Ghat, and Ahawagh, a territory situate on the left bank of the Niger, east of Timbuctoo. It was in this locality that the tribe divided; one part, the one under review, returned to the environs of Ghat, the other more numerous part remained in the Ahawagh. . . .” The Ahawagh or Azawagh is some way east of Timbuctoo, it is, in point of fact, as Barth rightly points out, the area south of Air. He says:[332]“Their original abode was said to be at a place called Asawa (Azawagh)[333]to the south of Iralghawen (Eghalgawen)in Southern Air.” While the exact sequence of movements thus recorded may not be accurate, the indications are of importance in considering the origin of the people of Air as they refer to a southward migration through Air and a partial return north. But whereas in the Azger country the Auraghen are a noble tribe, in the Southland they are a servile tribe of the Aulimmiden.[334]This fact is very significant and seems to provide an explanation of the ancestry of the Tademekkat and of some of the People of Air,[335]who are in part of Hawarid origin. The date of the expulsion of the Tademekkat people towards the west and north by the Aulimmiden prior and up to aboutA.D.1640 coincides with the legend recorded by Duveyrier of a party of southern Auraghen who came to the assistance of their cousins among the Azger and helped to break the domination of the Imanen kings of the Azger. Those Auraghen who remained behind in the Tademekka country were eventually reduced to a state of vassalage and pushed westward during the general movement which took place in that direction.But in spite of the occurrence of a tribe with this name among the Azger, it is not the latter group but the Ahaggaren who were originally Auriga, even as the Azger were in essence Lemta, notwithstanding the considerable exchange of tribes which has taken place between the two groups.In another place I have had occasion to doubt whether the usually accepted derivation of the word “Tuareg” applied, as it now is, to all the People of the Veil was entirely satisfactory. The derivation seemed founded on the fallacy of “post hoc, ergo propter hoc.” The name Targa in Leo and Ibn Khaldun appears to be the same word as Tuareg, in a slightly modified form; but in these authors it is not used of all but only of a part of the Muleththemin. It is a proper name like Sanhaja, or Lemta, and the group whichbears it is as important as the other main divisions. Now in one place Leo names the divisions of the Muleththemin as the Sanhaja, Zanziga, Targa, Lemta and Jadala; in another as the Sanhaja, Targa, Jedala, Lemta and Lemtuna, of which we can eliminate the last named as a subdivision of the Sanhaja. Elsewhere again he calls them the Sanhaja, Zanziga, Guenziga, Targa and Lemta. Further, in Ibn Khaldun we learn that the Sanhaja, Hawara, Lemta, Gezula and Heskura are in one group as the Children of Tiski, and again he divides the race into four divisions only, the Sanhaja, Auriga, Ketama and Lemta. Of these we can eliminate the Lemtuna as a part of the Sanhaja. Leo’s Zanziga and Guenziga are modifications of the latter name and were given to the Tuareg immediately east of them, probably during their desert confederation; Ibn Khaldun’s Heskura and Gezula seem to be two names for one division which possibly was the Ketama. Now if the remaining names are considered, it is noteworthy that in no one of the lists do the two names Targa and Hawara or Auriga occur. They are therefore quite likely to be different names for the same group. Furthermore, in Leo’s third area the veiled inhabitants of the Air and Ahaggar mountains are both called Targa, and the latter and a large part of the former are known to be Hawara. The conclusion is that “Targa,” so far from being merely a descriptive or abusive term, is another name for Hawara-Auriga. The fact that the dialect spoken in Air is called Auraghiye alone would justify Leo classifying the inhabitants both of Air as well as of Ahaggar under one term, namely, Targa, if, as is highly probable, the name is an alternative for Auriga or Hawara, or for at least a large part of them.Having suggested this equivalent we must return to the question, already foreshadowed, namely, whether, from an examination of the present tribes of the Ahaggaren and Azger groups of Tuareg, any conclusion can be drawn showing that at one and the same time a connection between the two divisions and a separate ancestry existed. It is necessary to postulate for the moment, as has already been done, thatthe Azger were the old Lemta, for the evidence can only be considered in detail a little later. It might have seemed more rational to deal with it now, especially as their history is of greater importance to Air than that of the Ahaggaren, but for various reasons which will become apparent it will be found more convenient to examine the latter first.In Air and in the south generally the two divisions are referred to collectively by the name of Ahaggaren. The reason is that the Azger are now so reduced in numbers that the world has tended to forget their name for that of their more powerful and prosperous western neighbours; the Ahaggaren on account of their trading and caravan traffic have also come more into contact with the outside world. The Azger, on the other hand, instead of becoming better known, as a result of the French penetration of the Sahara have migrated eastwards further and further away from Europeans into the recondite places of the Fezzan mountains, which they now only leave to raid Air or Kawar in company with rascals like the northern Tebu and the more irreconcilable Ahaggaren, who have refused to submit to French administration. Although in Air “Ahaggaren” has come to mean just Northern Tuareg, it has no strict ethnic signification.Many travellers in the Ahaggar country have heard the tradition current among the population that the Ahaggaren are considered originally to have formed part of the Azger division. Duveyrier[336]records that the Ahaggaren and cognate Tuareg to the north-west are divided into fourteen principal noble tribes:Tegehe[337]Mellen,Tegehe n’es Sidi,En Nitra,Taitoq,Tegehe n’Aggali,[338]Inemba Kel Emoghi,Inemba Kel Tahat,Kel[339]Ghela,Ireshshumen,Kel Ahamellen,Ibogelan,Tegehe n’Essakkal,Ikadeen,Ikerremoïn.Bissuel,[340]however, declares that the Taitoq, Tegehe n’es Sidi and Ireshshumen form a separate group of people living in the Adrar Ahnet, who are sometimes called collectively the Taitoq, but should more correctly be described as the Ar’rerf Ahnet. The noble tribes of this confederation, the Taitoq proper and the Tegehe n’es Sidi, claim to be of independent origin and not related either to the Ahaggaren or the Azger. The Ireshshumen are said to be a mixed tribe composed of the descendants of Taitoq men, and women of their Imghad, the Kel Ahnet. There are also four Imghad tribes: the Kel Ahnet and Ikerremoin, who depend from the Taitoq, and the Tegehe n’Efis (probably n’Afis) and the Issokenaten, who depend from the Tegehe n’es Sidi. These Imghad live in Ahnet, but in 1888 were as far afield as the Talak plain west of Air.[341]The Ikerremoin of the Ahnet mountains—though probably of the same stock as the noble tribe of the same name in Ahaggar—are a distinct unit; they were probably a part of the latter until conquered in war by the Taitoq. The Tuareg nobles of Ahnet may be considered a separate branch of the race, possibly descended from the Ketama. They are neither Auriga nor Lemta and probably not Sanhaja either. The Taitoq tribes must therefore be omitted from Duveyrier’s record.He states that a split occurred between the Azger and Ahaggaren. About fifty years before he was writing, or,in other words, about a century ago, the Kel Ahamellen, like other Tuareg tribes in the area, were under the rule of the Imanen kings of Azger. The latter rulers are described as of the same stock as the Auraghen and as “strangers” among the Azger. Such a description is logical if they were, as we may suppose, an Auriga stock living among the Lemta or Azger. The Kel Ahamellen were settled on the extreme west of the country held by the latter division, and according to the story became so numerous that they divided up into the sub-tribes whose names occur in this list, and so broke away from the allegiance of the Imanen kings. But if in Duveyrier’s day the Kel Ahamellen had only broken away from the Azger confederation as recently as fifty years previously, and were, as he also says, in a state of internal anarchy, it is out of the question for one clan to have increased sufficiently rapidly to form fourteen large noble sub-tribes covering an area reaching from Ghat to the Ahnet massif. The supposition is that the Kel Ahamellen did in fact break away from the Azger about then, for tradition is strong on this point, but that instead of being alone to form the new division they joined a group of other tribes already in existence, namely, the descendants of the original Auriga-Ahaggaren stock. It is immaterial whether the latter were also under the domination of the Azger Imanen kings a century or so before, though it may be remembered that this reigning clan was itself from Ahaggar.

PLATE 45ASSARARA

PLATE 45

ASSARARA

If circumstantial evidence seems to point to Tibesti, there is also that of the place names given in the account. The Agisymba Regio contained the mountains of Bardetus, Mesche and Zipta. No similarity to these names can be found in Air, but in Tibesti the first may well be the area and massif round the village of Bardai, while Mesche may be a Latinised form of Miski, a valley and group south-west of Bardai. For Zipta I can offer no suggestion.

Like the Romans and the Arabs the modern Turks also penetrated Tibesti as a consequence of their occupation of the Fezzan in an attempt to stop the Tebu raiding. History is curiously consistent in that we have no evidence of the Arabs or the Turks having penetrated Air. The Romans, I assume, probably did not do so either.[293]

The Romans must have come into contact with the Tuareg in the Fezzan, where the latter, it might be assumed from Arab evidence alone, were early established if they did not actually constitute the majority of the original population. It is possible to trace in Roman records the names of certain well-known Tuareg tribes. The description which Corippus gives of the Ifuraces, the Ifoghas tribe of the Southern Tuareg, corresponds accurately with that of the present-day camel riders of the Sahara. In a description of an encounter with the Byzantine forces under John, the general himself cuts down a camel with his sword and the rider falls with the accoutrements and paraphernalia, which are those of a Tuareg on campaign or in battle to-day.[294]The activitiesof the Circumcelliones during the troubles described by Opatus[295]during the Donatist heresy in North Africa in the course of the fourth centuryA.D.remind one irresistibly of those of the Tuareg. These bands of marauders from the desert came into Southern Tunisia and Algeria on swift and remorseless errands of plunder for the greater glory of their heretical Faith. They lived in the barren hills of the outer waste and descended to burn churches, sack houses and carry off live-stock with such deadly efficiency and ease that the motive power of their organisation can only have come from a spirit which considers raiding a national sport. “When they were not resisted they usually contented themselves with plunder, but the slightest opposition provoked them to acts of violence and murder. . . . The spirit of the Circumcellians, armed with a huge and weighty club, as they were indifferently supplied with swords and spears, and waging war to the cry of ‘Praise be to God’ . . . was not always directed against their defenceless enemies, the peasants of the orthodox belief; they engaged and sometimes defeated the troops of the province, and in the bloody action of Bagai they attacked in the open field, but with unsuccessful valour, the advance guard of the Imperial cavalry.”[296]

So in later years the Tuareg of Ahaggar, disdaining any butles armes blanches, fell in ranks under the rifle fire of the French troops at Tit.

But it is curious that in none of these and other early descriptions of the Tuareg is any mention made of their outstanding characteristics, so obvious to the person who sees them for the first time—the Face Veil worn by the men. It seems very strange that none of the classical and post-classical authors should have recorded a feature which so distinguishes these people from other races. There is no reference to the Veil until we come to the first Arab authors, when the whole race is immediately described by this very peculiarity, as the Muleththemin,ملثّمين,the “Veiled Ones,”a second form plural past participle from the rootلثم, which also forms the wordlitham,لثام, the Arabic name for the Veil itself. How it came about that the Arabs should be the first to record the use of the Veil is a problem to which I have been able to find no satisfactory solution.

[264]Cf. remarks inChap. VIIIregarding the dating of the mosques in Air.[265]Barth did not himself, unfortunately, visit Assode.Op. cit., Vol. I. p. 376.[266]There were sixty-nine inhabited houses in 1909, with 200 inhabitants, according to Chudeau.Op. cit., Vol. II. p. 66.[267]I could not trace any other of the seven mosques referred to by Barth, nor is the great mosque decorated with columns as he says, unless the pierced walls supporting the roof can so be described. There is no “mimbar.”[268]Some of them were quite old and had painted borders and coloured letters. The work was all, however, rather rough; no T’ifinagh writing was found. I had no facilities for examining the work in detail.[269]People have stumbled upon small beehive grain pits in Air cut in the rock away from villages. In these no doubt the Tuareg who were hastily cleared out of Air in 1918 hid their small treasures. They will in many cases remain undiscovered perhaps for centuries and will prove the happiness of some later archæologist.[270]The significance of the name “People of the King” will be explained inChap. XII.[271]Barth,op. cit., Vol. I. pp. 360-1.[272]Or Bundai; Barth has “Bunday.”[273]The Cortier map is somewhat inaccurate hereabouts.[274]“Asbenawa,” from “Asben,” the alternative name for Air in Southland, is the name which is there given to the Tuareg. Barth,op. cit., Vol. I. p. 334.[275]Wrongly called Tamgak on the Cortier map. The name Tamgak is only given to the larger group on the north of the Ighazar.[276]Not in any way, of course, connected with the Azañieres mountains, which are many miles away.[277]The italics are his. Duveyrier,op. cit., p. 458.[278]Barth,op. cit., Vol. I. p. 197. That the road should have run from Telizzarhen to Anai and then to Air is very doubtful, as this would have entailed a very devious route. What, doubtless, was meant was that it ran from Murzuk or Garama via Anai to Air.[279]SeeAppendix III.[280]Temed is a mountain north of Tamgak: there is a pool below the peak in a cave on which the prophet Elijah is reputed by the Tuareg to have lived.[281]Von Bary’s diary,op. cit., p. 192.[282]“The Gate of the Head of the Desert.”[283]Ptolemy (Marinus of Tyre), I. 8, sec. 4 seq.[284]Pliny,Nat. Hist., V. 5.[285]Tabudium and Thuben are both mentioned, either of which might be the well of Tabonie on the Mizda Murzuk road.[286]In the Fezzan: there are several places of this name elsewhere.[287]Ptolemy,loc. cit.[288]Herodotus, IV. 183.[289]Narrative of Ibn Abd el Hakim in Slane’s translation of Ibn Khaldun,op. cit., Appendix I to Book I.[290]I think this name has nothing to do with Hawara but is derived from Kawar (see below).[291]El Bekri, ed. Slane, 1859, p. 34. Cf. Jawan,جاوانor,حاوار= Hawar, orخاوار= Khawar? Kawar.[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. 1065-83et passim.[295]De Schis. donatistarum,passim.[296]Gibbon:Decline and Fall, Chap. XXI.

[264]Cf. remarks inChap. VIIIregarding the dating of the mosques in Air.

[265]Barth did not himself, unfortunately, visit Assode.Op. cit., Vol. I. p. 376.

[266]There were sixty-nine inhabited houses in 1909, with 200 inhabitants, according to Chudeau.Op. cit., Vol. II. p. 66.

[267]I could not trace any other of the seven mosques referred to by Barth, nor is the great mosque decorated with columns as he says, unless the pierced walls supporting the roof can so be described. There is no “mimbar.”

[268]Some of them were quite old and had painted borders and coloured letters. The work was all, however, rather rough; no T’ifinagh writing was found. I had no facilities for examining the work in detail.

[269]People have stumbled upon small beehive grain pits in Air cut in the rock away from villages. In these no doubt the Tuareg who were hastily cleared out of Air in 1918 hid their small treasures. They will in many cases remain undiscovered perhaps for centuries and will prove the happiness of some later archæologist.

[270]The significance of the name “People of the King” will be explained inChap. XII.

[271]Barth,op. cit., Vol. I. pp. 360-1.

[272]Or Bundai; Barth has “Bunday.”

[273]The Cortier map is somewhat inaccurate hereabouts.

[274]“Asbenawa,” from “Asben,” the alternative name for Air in Southland, is the name which is there given to the Tuareg. Barth,op. cit., Vol. I. p. 334.

[275]Wrongly called Tamgak on the Cortier map. The name Tamgak is only given to the larger group on the north of the Ighazar.

[276]Not in any way, of course, connected with the Azañieres mountains, which are many miles away.

[277]The italics are his. Duveyrier,op. cit., p. 458.

[278]Barth,op. cit., Vol. I. p. 197. That the road should have run from Telizzarhen to Anai and then to Air is very doubtful, as this would have entailed a very devious route. What, doubtless, was meant was that it ran from Murzuk or Garama via Anai to Air.

[279]SeeAppendix III.

[280]Temed is a mountain north of Tamgak: there is a pool below the peak in a cave on which the prophet Elijah is reputed by the Tuareg to have lived.

[281]Von Bary’s diary,op. cit., p. 192.

[282]“The Gate of the Head of the Desert.”

[283]Ptolemy (Marinus of Tyre), I. 8, sec. 4 seq.

[284]Pliny,Nat. Hist., V. 5.

[285]Tabudium and Thuben are both mentioned, either of which might be the well of Tabonie on the Mizda Murzuk road.

[286]In the Fezzan: there are several places of this name elsewhere.

[287]Ptolemy,loc. cit.

[288]Herodotus, IV. 183.

[289]Narrative of Ibn Abd el Hakim in Slane’s translation of Ibn Khaldun,op. cit., Appendix I to Book I.

[290]I think this name has nothing to do with Hawara but is derived from Kawar (see below).

[291]El Bekri, ed. Slane, 1859, p. 34. Cf. Jawan,جاوانor,حاوار= Hawar, orخاوار= Khawar? Kawar.

[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. 1065-83et passim.

[295]De Schis. donatistarum,passim.

[296]Gibbon:Decline and Fall, Chap. XXI.

THE ANCESTRY OF THE TUAREG OF AIR

Afterthe 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 monumentalHistory of the Berbers, which has become a classic in the Arabic language. His lifetime, falling betweenA.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 inA.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 thispeople 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.

LEO’SSAHARAN AREASF. R. del.Emery Walker Ltd. sc.

LEO’SSAHARAN AREAS

Leo writes:[300]“Having described all the regions of Numidia,let us now proceed with the description of Libya, which is divided into five parts. . . .”

“The drie and forlorne desert of Zanhaga which bordereth the westward upon the Ocean Sea and extendeth eastward to the salt pits of Tegaza”[301]is clearly the Atlantic area, now called Mauretania by the French, between Southern Morocco and the Upper Niger and Senegal rivers. The Zanhaga are the Sanhaja, a famous part of the Muleththemin early in their recorded history, but now fallen into great decay.

The second area appears to be east of the first. The great steppe and desert area bounded by Southern Morocco and Southern Algeria in the north, and by the Niger country from Walata[302]to Gao[303]in the south, is divided into two and shared between the Sanhaja in the west, inhabiting his first area, and the Zanziga or Ganziga in the east, inhabiting his second area. The latter names are akin to the former and the people, if not identical, are probably related.

The third area was inhabited by the Targa. It commences from the desert steppe west of Air and extends eastwards towards the desert of Igidi.[304]Northward it borders on the Tuat, Gourara and Mzab countries, while in the south it terminates in the wilderness around Agades and Lower Air. The boundaries of this area are quite clear: they include the massifs of Air and Ahaggar and the deserts immediately east and west of the former.

The fourth and fifth areas we will come to later.

Leo is obviously attempting to describe the principal geographical divisions of the Sahara and the Veiled People inhabiting them. The boundaries of each area are given in terms of intervening deserts, or of countries inhabited by sedentaries or by other races which did not wear the Veil.His divisions, therefore, are not deserts but habitable steppe or other types of country bounded by deserts, or non-Tuareg districts.

Some confusion reigns in regard to the third area, the eastern limit of which is described as the Igidi desert. What is known as the Igidi desert to-day is a dune area south-west of Beni Abbes in South Western Algeria; but the position of this Igidi, lying as it does on the road from Morocco to Timbuctoo, cannot be theeasternboundary of the third area. This Igidi is, in fact, in the northern part of the second area, which is that of the Zanziga. Now this second area is said to contain a desert zone called “Gogdem,” a name which cannot now be traced in that neighbourhood, though the well-defined Igidi south-west of Beni Abbes immediately jumps to the mind as a probable identification. The eastern boundary of the third area, which includes Air, or, as Leo calls it, “Hair,” must lie between these mountains and those of Tibesti. This vast tract is in part true desert, with patches of white sand dunes, and in part desert steppe with scanty vegetation; it also contains a few oases. In it is one particular area of white dune desert crossed by the Chad road and containing a famous well called Agadem.[305]One of two hypotheses is possible: either the names “Igidi” and “Gogdem” in the paragraphs[306]dealing with the second and third areas respectively have become transposed in the text and Gogdem is to be identified with the Agadem dune desert, or else the whole phrase relating to the desert of Gogdem has been bodily misplaced at the end of the section dealing with the Zanziga area, instead of standing at the end of the succeeding paragraph on the Targa area, in which case Leo would be calling the Agadem dunes the Gogdem desert, within or near another Igidi[307]waste. Agadem is quite sufficiently important as a watering-point on a most difficult section ofthe Chad road to give its name to the area, nor is it hard to account for the corruption of the name into Gogdem[308]—such changes have occurred in many travellers’ notes.[309]The first hypothesis is the most probable; it affords a simple explanation of an otherwise obscure passage and renders Leo’s boundaries lucid.

The fourth of Leo’s areas inhabited by the Lemta is described as extending from the desert east of Airas far asthe country of the Berdeoa. This area seems to be that in which the Chad road and the wells to the east of it are found. It would include a part of the desert of Agadem, the Great Steppe north of Lake Chad, and oases like Jado and the Kawar depression.

The fifth and last area is thatofthe people of Berdeoa; it adjoins the Fezzan and Barca in the north, and in the south the wilderness north of Wadai, including presumably Tibesti and the Libyan desert west of the Nile Valley. It is said to extend eastward to the deserts of Aujila, though north-eastward would have been a more accurate definition.

Between the people of Berdeoa and the Nile Valley are the Egyptian oases inhabited by the Arabs and some “vile” black people.

Leo’s description of the Sahara is far from being incorrect or confused; his information may be summarised as follows:[310]

Areas I and II.—South of Morocco and Western Algeria; north of the Niger and Senegal rivers; between the Atlantic littoral and the Ahaggar and Air massifs with their immediately adjacent deserts or steppes. Inhabitants: Sanhaja in the west and Zanziga in the east.

Area III.—Air and Ahaggar, with their adjacent areas; south of Tuat, Gourara and Mzab, and north of Damergu. Inhabitants: Targa.

Area IV.—Desert and steppe between Air and Tibesti from Wargla and Ghadames in the north to the country of Kano and Nigeria generally in the south, including the country of Ghat and the Western Fezzan. Inhabitants: Lemta.

Area V.—The Libyan desert of Egypt, the Cyrenaican steppes and desert, a part of the Eastern Fezzan and Tibesti, Erdi and Kufra. Inhabitants: the people of Berdeoa with Arabs in the north-east and some blacks in the south-east.

In the fourth area the Lemta were in the country where the Azger now live, but the southern and the eastern sides have since been lost to the Tuareg. Kawar, whence the Tuareg of Air fetch salt, is under the domination of the latter, but, like the other habitable areas on the Chad road and in the Great Steppe, is now inhabited largely by Kanuri and Tebu. There is nothing improbable in the statement that the Lemta covered the whole of the fourth area. We have quite other definite and probably independent records of the Tuareg having lived in the Chad area and in Bornu, whence they were driven by the Kanuri, who are known to have conquered Kawar in fairly recent historical times.[311]

The people of Berdeoa are the only inhabitants of any of the five areas who were not Muleththemin. I have little doubt that they are the inhabitants of Tibesti, where the town or village of Bardai is perhaps the most important of the permanently inhabited places. To-day they are Tebu, a name which seems to mean “The People of the Rock,”[312]with an incorrectly formed Arab version, Tibawi. The racial problem which they present can only be solved when they are better known. Keane[313]assumes that they are the descendants of the Garamantes, whose primeval home was perhaps in the Tibesti mountains. He notes the similarity of the names of their northern branch, the Teda, and a tribe called theTedamansii, who seem, however, to have lived too far north to be connected with them.[314]The Southern Tebu or Daza section is certainly more negroid than the northern, and there are reasons for not accepting the view that the Garamantian civilisation was the product of a negroid people. Leo[315]records the discovery “of the region of Berdeoa,” which from the context is probably a misreading fora“region of the Berdeoa” in the Libyan desert of Egypt. The area is described as containing three castles and five or six villages. It is probably the Kufra archipelago of oases. The story of accidental discoveries of oases is also told of other places; Wau el Harir,[316]an oasis in the Eastern Fezzan, was reported to have been found by accident in 1860, and the Arab geographers relate similar stories of other points in the Libyan desert. The accounts of Kufra by Rohlfs and Hassanein Bey go to show that before it became a centre of the Senussi sect, with the consequent influx of Cyrenaican Arabs and Libyans, the population was Tebu. The identity of Berdeoa, which I think must be Bardai, was the subject of some controversy before circumstantial accounts of its existence were brought back by travellers in modern times. The name was for long assumed to be a misreading for Borku or Borgu, as D’Anville suggested. In Rennell’s map accompanying the account of Hornemann’s travels at the end of the eighteenth century the town (sic) of Bornu north of what is presumably meant to represent Lake Chad is a mislocation for Bornu province, while Bourgou in Lat. 26° N., Long. 22° E. is intended to represent Bardai in Tibesti, the Berdeoa of Leo. The “residue of the Libyan desert”[317](i.e.other than that of the Tebu people of Berdeoa), namely, Augela (Aujila oasis) to the River of the Nile, we are told by Leo was inhabited by certaine Arabians and Africans called“Leuata,” a name which coincides with the Lebu or Rebu of Egyptian records. Idrisi places them in the same area as Leo, calling them Lebetae or Levata. The stock is referred to under the general name of Levata or Leuata by Ibn Khaldun in several connections. An ethnic rather than a tribal name seems to be involved, and this is natural if they are the descendants of the Lebu. Bates concludes that in the name of this people is the origin of the classical word “Libyan.”[318]The Leuata[319]assisted Hamid ibn Yesel, Lord of Tehert, in a war in Algeria against El Mansur, the third Fatimite Khalif. InA.D.947-8, when El Mansur drove Hamid into Spain, the Levata were dispersed into the desert; some who escaped found refuge in the mountains between Sfax and Gabes, where they were still living in Ibn Khaldun’s day; others he places in the Great Syrtis and in the Siwa area. In Byzantine times they are shown in the Little Syrtis. El Masa’udi states that the Leuata survived in the Oases of Egypt. Their principal habitat is, in fact, not far from the country of the Lebu, who were in Cyrenaica according to Egyptian records. Both the Tehenu further east and the Lebu are known to have been subjected to pressure from the Meshwesh in the west, and some fusion between the two may well, therefore, have occurred. The ancestors of the Levata of Arab geographers and the modern Libyan inhabitants of Siwa and the northern oases of the Western Desert of Egypt are either the product of this fusion or the descendants of the Lebu alone. The Levata and Lebu seem to have this in common, that they are probably a non-Tuareg Libyan people immigrant from across the Mediterranean at the time of the invasions of Egypt by the Libyan and Sea People. In the course of history they were displaced and reduced; only in the north-east of the Libyan desert did they remain at all concentrated or homogeneous.

The Targa who inhabited the third area of Leo concernthis volume most particularly, as their zone includes Air as well as Ahaggar. So long as the Tuareg were believed to be only a tribe they were identified with the Targa, but when the former term was discovered to have a wider or racial significance it was not clear, unless it was a proper name, why Leo used it of any one section of the Muleththemin. The exact significance only appears when Ibn Khaldun’s narrative is considered.

In his History of the Berbers Ibn Khaldun attempted to make a comprehensive classification of the Libyans. After working out a comparatively simple system which emphasises both the obvious diversity as well as the superficial appearance of unity[320]of the population of North Africa, he proceeds to elaborate more complex schemes of classification which are difficult to reconcile with one another. He seems throughout to have derived his information from two or more sources which he was himself unable to co-ordinate.

Ibn Khaldun divides the Libyans into two families descended from the eponymous heroes, Branes and Madghis, a theory which recognises the difficulties involved by the assumption that they all belonged to a single stock. The division may be traced even to-day. In many Libyan villages the inhabitants are divided into two factions which, without being hostile, are conscious of being different. The factions are not found among the nomadic tribes, where opportunities for living in separate places are greater than in the sedentary districts, but their existence among the latter, however, is hardly otherwise explicable than by the assumption of separate racial origins. This view is suggested by Ibn Khaldun’s classification, and also by the result of a detailed examination of the different constituent elements of the Libyan population. Among the Tuareg, whom I consider belong to a single stock, different from that of the various races which composed the other Libyans, these factions do not exist even in the villages where tribal organisationis in process of breaking down and people of different clans live together under one headman.

Out of deference to the patriarchal system of the Arabs—a habit of mind which pervades their life and often distorts their historical perception—Ibn Khaldun has given to the two Libyan families of Branes and Madghis a common ancestor called Mazigh. Both “Madghis” and “Mazigh” are probably derived from the common MZGh root found to be so widespread in North African names.[321]All three are almost certainly mythical personages. The selection of Mazigh as the common ancestor points to an attempt having been made, in accordance with patriarchal custom, to explain the one characteristic which is really common to all the Libyans including the Tuareg, namely, their language. While the MZGh root is not at all universally used as the root of a national appellation, its occurrence in various parts of North Africa might well allow one to talk of “Mazigh-speaking People,” or, as we might more comprehensibly say, “Berber-speaking People.” And so I would confine the use of both “Berber” and “Mazigh” to a linguistic signification, analogous to that of the word “Aryan,” which simply denotes people, not necessarily of the same racial stock, speaking one of the Aryan group of languages.[322]

Ibn Khaldun places the home of most of the divisions of the Beranes and Madghis Libyans in Syria. They were, he says, the sons of Mazigh, the son of Canaan, the son of Ham, and consequently related to the Philistines and Gergesenes, who did not leave the east when their kinsmen came to Africa. All Moslems possess a form of snobbishness which is displayed in their attempt to establish some connection, direct or indirect, with an Arabian tribe related to the people of the Prophet Muhammad. In Morocco this feeling is so strong that it is common to find Libyan families free from all admixture with the Arab invaders, boasting ancestral trees descended from the Prophet. The Maghreb is full of pseudo-Ashraf; a term in the Moslem world which is properlyreserved for the descendants of the Leader of Islam. The same occurs in Central Africa. Much of the legendary history of the Libyans relating to an eastern home may therefore be discounted as attempts on the part of Moslem historians to connect them with the lands and race of Islam. Nevertheless, even when all allowances have been made for this factor there remains to be explained a strong tradition of some connection between North Africa and the Arab countries. Not only is it commented upon in all the early histories, but it is to some extent still current to-day among the people. I am not convinced that it cannot be explained by the presence among the Libyans of one element which certainly did come from the East in the period preceding and during the invasions of Egypt, when the people of the Eastern Mediterranean co-operated with the Africans in their attacks on the Nile Valley. The undoubted occurrence of migrations within the historical period both from Syria and from the east coast of the Red Sea are alone sufficient, if the characteristic of Moslem snobbishness is taken into account, to account for such traditions regarding their home. It is unnecessary to attribute these stories to the original appearance of the Libyans proper in Africa even if their cradle is to be looked for in the East. This may be inherently probable, but must be placed at so remote a date as to ensure that traditions connected therewith were certainly by now forgotten.

Ibn Khaldun divides the families of Branes and Madghis respectively into ten and four divisions. Four of the ten Beranes people, the Lemta, Sanhaja, Ketama and Auriga, are called the Muleththemin, or People of the Veil.[323]The descendants of Madghis, with whom we are not concerned, include the Louata or Levata. The hypothesis previously brought forward for their non-Tuareg origin gains support from the fact that in Ibn Khaldun’s classification they are not placed in the same family as the People of the Veil.

We now come to Ibn Khaldun’s views regarding the origin of the Muleththemin. The four divisions of Lemta, Sanhaja,Ketama and Auriga, though in the Beranes group, he regarded as of a different origin to the other six sections. The inconsistency of the patriarchal classification is apparent. He states that certain traditions which he is inclined to accept as true connect the Sanhaja and the Ketama with the Yemen.[324]They were Himyarite tribes which came from the east coast of the Red Sea to Africa under the leadership of Ifrikos, the hero who gave his name to Ifrikiya, which is now called Tunisia. In examining the organisation and history of the Aulimmiden Tuareg who live between the Air mountains and the Niger bend, Barth[325]found that they also claimed to be descended from Himyer. Now the Aulimmiden in name and history are a part of the Lemta who migrated from the area in North Africa where the rest of the section still lives under the name of Azger, and where we are first able to identify them from our records. What is true in this respect of a part is true of the whole, and three out of the four divisions of the Muleththemin thus seem to be racially different from the other six Beranes divisions, the fourth section in question being the Auriga people, who are also called Hawara. The latter present one of the most difficult problems in the early history of North Africa. Suffice it here to state that in the course of the early Arab invasions many of them lost so much of their individuality that we must rely largely on Ibn Khaldun’s classification of them among the four divisions of the Tuareg for their early identity.

There are then, according to Ibn Khaldun, two separate families of Libyans, and in one of these is a group apparently different racially from the remainder of the two families.

[Illustration]

It is a complicated classification which attempts to establish some sort of unity among all the Libyans, and at the same time indicates without room for doubt that the learned historian felt he was dealing with a mixed population. His difficulties are clear. His statements support the view that the Tuareg are separate from the rest of the people called Libyans, who are themselves composed of at least two stocks, though more than this regarding the origin of the Tuareg I should not yet feel entitled to deduce from his account.

At a later stage, when the origins of the People of Air come to be examined, another reference will be found, in the writings of an authority in the Sudan, to the migration of a people from the east coast of the Red Sea into Africa. This Himyaritic invasion is so much insisted upon in various works that the presumption of a migration from that direction, with which the Tuareg were associated, is tempting, though it is not clear whether the Sudanese authority was merely copying Ibn Khaldun’s statements or whether he was working on independent information. I have mentioned the theory because it is one of the more usually accepted explanations of the origin of the Tuareg, but I do not think the problem can be so easily resolved. My own view is that the Tuareg are not Himyarites, but that the memory of an invasion from that quarter which undoubtedly did contribute to the population of Central Africa was adopted by their own traditional historians and accepted by Ibn Khaldun to establish a connection for the People of the Veil with the land of the Prophet. The migrations across the Red Sea are far more likely to have accounted for the early Semitic influence in Africa, especially in the Nilotic Sudan before the rise of Islam, and in Abyssinia, than for the origin of the Tuareg, who, I am convinced, were already in the continent at a far earlier date.

Ibn Khaldun now introduces a further classification which again emphasises the separateness or individuality of the Tuareg. He states that among the Beranes were certain divisions collectively known as the Children of Tiski. Amongthese were the Hawara, Heskura, Sanhaja, Lemta, and Gezula. The Hawara we know were the same as the Auriga; the Sanhaja and Lemta have already been mentioned. The Heskura and Gezula may therefore be subdivisions of the Ketama, and the Children of Tiski, therefore, probably a collective term for all the Muleththemin as a whole.

Ibn Khaldun’s writings are voluminous and have a baffling tendency to jump about from subject to subject. Having given us these explanations, which though complicated are comprehensible, he suddenly brings in a host of new names, and proceeds to inform us that the Muleththemin are descended from the “Sanhaja of the second race” and to consist of the Jedala or Gedala, Lemtuna, Utzila, Targa, Zegawa and Lemta divisions. It is not within the scope of this work to examine all the Tuareg groups in Africa in detail. To investigate the Zanziga of Leo’s second area or the Utzila or Jedala of Ibn Khaldun would only serve to complicate the issue which deals with the Tuareg of Air. But the Sanhaja, although they lived in the furthest west of the Sahara, played such an important part in the history of all the Tuareg that they must be briefly mentioned in passing.

At one period nearly all the People of the Veil were united in a sort of desert confederation under the dominion of the Sanhaja. The era terminated with the death of Ibn Ghania in aboutA.D.1233, some 150 years before Ibn Khaldun wrote, even by which time, however, the inner parts of Africa had hardly recovered. The memory of the Sanhaja empire, which extended from the Senegal River to Fez and eastwards perhaps as far as Tibesti, survived in the additional classifications of Ibn Khaldun and in the stories about the Tuareg collected by his contemporaries. It is possible to suppose that the first ethnological systems he gives refer to the state of the Muleththemin before or during the Sanhaja confederacy, but that when he gives the list of names of six divisions descended from the “second race of Sanhaja” he is referring to the People of the Veil after the death of Ibn Ghania. At that time the name of the dominant group inthe confederation had been given by the other inhabitants of North Africa generally to all the Tuareg. In the process of disintegration of the empire several truly Sanhaja tribes were absorbed by other Tuareg groups. It is difficult to accept the alternative view that the Sanhaja of the second race are a different people from the earlier Sanhaja, for such a conclusion would imply that the Muleththemin were made up of more than one racial stock, whereas their most obvious characteristic is unity of type and habit.

The Sanhaja division of Ibn Khaldun’s first grouping are obviously the same as the people of Leo’s first area on the western side of the great desert which extends between Beni Abbes and Timbuctoo. After their period of fame they came on evil days, and were reduced to the position of tributaries when they lost many of their Tuareg characteristics. Their remnants are the Mesufa and Lemtuna tribes. The relationship of the Sanhaja and Lemta noted by Barth either means nothing more than that they were both Muleththemin, or dates from their association with each other during the Sanhaja empire; for they were ever separate ethnic divisions of the People of the Veil.

Much trouble has been occasioned by the confusion of the names Lemta and Lemtuna. The apparent derivation of the latter from the former may also have been due to the association of the two main divisions: it is important only to emphasise that while the one is a subdivision of the Sanhaja now living in the north-west corner of the Sahara near Morocco, the other is a branch of the Tuareg race co-equal with the latter. It is in this confusion of names that the explanation is to be found of the statement so often heard and repeated by Barth, that the Lemta were the neighbours of the Moorish Walad Delim of Southern Morocco. The position of the Lemtuna makes this statement true of them, but not of the Lemta, whose home, both on the authority of Leo and on other evidence, was far removed from Mauretania, and, to wit, in the Fezzan. The erroneous association of the Lemta with the Walad Delim is largely responsible for the wrong account of the migrations of various sectionsof the southern and south-eastern Tuareg given by Barth and his successors.[326]

But let us return to the people who were the ancestors of the Air Tuareg. The Hawara, according to Ibn Khaldun, El Bekri and El Masa’udi, inhabited Tripolitania, the deserts of Ifrikiya, and even parts of Barca. They lived, in part at least, side by side with the Lemta, Wearers of the Veil, who were “near,” or “as far as” Gawgawa. It has been assumed that this Gawgawa was the Kaukau of Ibn Batutah’s travels, and consequently Gao or Gaogao or Gogo or Gagho on the Niger. But it is more reasonably identified with Kuka on Lake Chad, and if this is so, the Lemta according to Ibn Khaldun extended precisely as far as the place referred to by Leo, in speaking of his fourth area.[327]It is clear that Ibn Khaldun meant “as far as” and not “near,” for in referring to the Hawarid origin of a part of the Lemta people he says that they may be so recognised “by their name, which is an altered form of the word Hawara: for having changed the و (w) into a sort ofkwhich is intermediary between the softgand the hardq, they have formed “Haggar.” The latter are, of course, the Ahaggaren, who then, as now, lived in mountains called by the same name a very long way from Kuka on Lake Chad; even so they were coterminous with the Lemta, a point which coincides with the evidence of Leo and others. Further indications of the extension of the Lemta as far as Lake Chad will be dealt with in the next chapter; they are confirmed both by the sequence of events in Air and by the occupation of Tademekka by the Aulimmiden-Lemta, culminating inA.D.1640 when the former inhabitants of that area were driven towards the west.[328]All this would be incomprehensible if Gawgawa were identified with Gao on the Niger, or if Ibn Khaldun’s “near” were not interpreted as “towards” or “as far as.”

It may appear strange to find Ibn Khaldun referring to the Hawarid origin of the Lemta when they are repeatedly given elsewhere by him as separate and co-equal divisions of the Muleththemin. It is possible that originally “Hawara” or “Auriga” may have been the national name of all the Tuareg, and that on the analogy of what we know happens in the case of tribes which have split up, one group may have retained the name of the parent stock. But if this ever did take place it must have happened long before the Moslem invasion, by which time the Tuareg had already become established in the divisions which we know; such an occurrence would have no practical bearing on conditions prevailing to-day. It is therefore easier to assume that all he meant to convey was the existence of a certain rather close connection between the Hawara and Lemta. We know in fact that, though not identical, the two groups have interchanged tribes, some of each division being found in the other one. This connection would account for the suspicious etymology of the word “Haggar,” which sounds uncommonly like an attempt on his part to prove philologically what is known traditionally to be the case.

The Hawara as we know them to-day are not all Tuareg or even Libyans, although they were included among the Beranes families under the name of Auriga, and were specifically numbered among the People of the Veil. They were described as an element of great importance among the pre-Arab Libyans and reckoned co-equal with the Sanhaja. Ibn Khaldun does, however, add that at the time of the Arab conquest of North Africa they had assimilated a number of other tribes of different stock, which probably explains the rapid “Arabisation” of a part of them. It was the non-Tuareg part which became readily proselytised and so passed under the influence of the new rulers of North Africa. The Hawara were much to the fore in the occupation of Spain and generally in the Arab doings of the Fatimite era. Some of them in common with other Libyans supported the Kharejite schism in Islam; yet another part which hadbecome “Arabised” established itself under the name of the Beni Khattab in the Fezzan, with their capital at Zuila. But those of them who most retained their Tuareg characteristics represent the original stock. In referring to certain Libyans by the name of Hawara, Ibn Khaldun is obviously not speaking of Tuareg people; one may therefore conclude that he means the strangers whom they assimilated.[329]Consequently I prefer to use the name “Hawara” for the whole group, but when the section which preserves its Tuareg characteristics is indicated the name “Auriga” is more applicable.

It may be conceived that a people of such importance left some trace of their name among the Tuareg of to-day, in addition to the name “Haggar,” where Ibn Khaldun’s etymology seems suspicious. The name can be recognised in the form “Oraghen” or “Auraghen,” or in an older spelling “Iuraghen,” a tribe in the Azger group. The root also occurs in the name “Auraghiye” given to the Air dialect of the Tuareg language. These instances are valuable evidence.

Duveyrier[330]records of the Oraghen tribe that “according to tradition they originally came from the neighbourhood of Sokna.[331]Before establishing themselves where they are now located, the tribe inhabited in succession the Fezzan, the country of Ghat, and Ahawagh, a territory situate on the left bank of the Niger, east of Timbuctoo. It was in this locality that the tribe divided; one part, the one under review, returned to the environs of Ghat, the other more numerous part remained in the Ahawagh. . . .” The Ahawagh or Azawagh is some way east of Timbuctoo, it is, in point of fact, as Barth rightly points out, the area south of Air. He says:[332]“Their original abode was said to be at a place called Asawa (Azawagh)[333]to the south of Iralghawen (Eghalgawen)in Southern Air.” While the exact sequence of movements thus recorded may not be accurate, the indications are of importance in considering the origin of the people of Air as they refer to a southward migration through Air and a partial return north. But whereas in the Azger country the Auraghen are a noble tribe, in the Southland they are a servile tribe of the Aulimmiden.[334]This fact is very significant and seems to provide an explanation of the ancestry of the Tademekkat and of some of the People of Air,[335]who are in part of Hawarid origin. The date of the expulsion of the Tademekkat people towards the west and north by the Aulimmiden prior and up to aboutA.D.1640 coincides with the legend recorded by Duveyrier of a party of southern Auraghen who came to the assistance of their cousins among the Azger and helped to break the domination of the Imanen kings of the Azger. Those Auraghen who remained behind in the Tademekka country were eventually reduced to a state of vassalage and pushed westward during the general movement which took place in that direction.

But in spite of the occurrence of a tribe with this name among the Azger, it is not the latter group but the Ahaggaren who were originally Auriga, even as the Azger were in essence Lemta, notwithstanding the considerable exchange of tribes which has taken place between the two groups.

In another place I have had occasion to doubt whether the usually accepted derivation of the word “Tuareg” applied, as it now is, to all the People of the Veil was entirely satisfactory. The derivation seemed founded on the fallacy of “post hoc, ergo propter hoc.” The name Targa in Leo and Ibn Khaldun appears to be the same word as Tuareg, in a slightly modified form; but in these authors it is not used of all but only of a part of the Muleththemin. It is a proper name like Sanhaja, or Lemta, and the group whichbears it is as important as the other main divisions. Now in one place Leo names the divisions of the Muleththemin as the Sanhaja, Zanziga, Targa, Lemta and Jadala; in another as the Sanhaja, Targa, Jedala, Lemta and Lemtuna, of which we can eliminate the last named as a subdivision of the Sanhaja. Elsewhere again he calls them the Sanhaja, Zanziga, Guenziga, Targa and Lemta. Further, in Ibn Khaldun we learn that the Sanhaja, Hawara, Lemta, Gezula and Heskura are in one group as the Children of Tiski, and again he divides the race into four divisions only, the Sanhaja, Auriga, Ketama and Lemta. Of these we can eliminate the Lemtuna as a part of the Sanhaja. Leo’s Zanziga and Guenziga are modifications of the latter name and were given to the Tuareg immediately east of them, probably during their desert confederation; Ibn Khaldun’s Heskura and Gezula seem to be two names for one division which possibly was the Ketama. Now if the remaining names are considered, it is noteworthy that in no one of the lists do the two names Targa and Hawara or Auriga occur. They are therefore quite likely to be different names for the same group. Furthermore, in Leo’s third area the veiled inhabitants of the Air and Ahaggar mountains are both called Targa, and the latter and a large part of the former are known to be Hawara. The conclusion is that “Targa,” so far from being merely a descriptive or abusive term, is another name for Hawara-Auriga. The fact that the dialect spoken in Air is called Auraghiye alone would justify Leo classifying the inhabitants both of Air as well as of Ahaggar under one term, namely, Targa, if, as is highly probable, the name is an alternative for Auriga or Hawara, or for at least a large part of them.

Having suggested this equivalent we must return to the question, already foreshadowed, namely, whether, from an examination of the present tribes of the Ahaggaren and Azger groups of Tuareg, any conclusion can be drawn showing that at one and the same time a connection between the two divisions and a separate ancestry existed. It is necessary to postulate for the moment, as has already been done, thatthe Azger were the old Lemta, for the evidence can only be considered in detail a little later. It might have seemed more rational to deal with it now, especially as their history is of greater importance to Air than that of the Ahaggaren, but for various reasons which will become apparent it will be found more convenient to examine the latter first.

In Air and in the south generally the two divisions are referred to collectively by the name of Ahaggaren. The reason is that the Azger are now so reduced in numbers that the world has tended to forget their name for that of their more powerful and prosperous western neighbours; the Ahaggaren on account of their trading and caravan traffic have also come more into contact with the outside world. The Azger, on the other hand, instead of becoming better known, as a result of the French penetration of the Sahara have migrated eastwards further and further away from Europeans into the recondite places of the Fezzan mountains, which they now only leave to raid Air or Kawar in company with rascals like the northern Tebu and the more irreconcilable Ahaggaren, who have refused to submit to French administration. Although in Air “Ahaggaren” has come to mean just Northern Tuareg, it has no strict ethnic signification.

Many travellers in the Ahaggar country have heard the tradition current among the population that the Ahaggaren are considered originally to have formed part of the Azger division. Duveyrier[336]records that the Ahaggaren and cognate Tuareg to the north-west are divided into fourteen principal noble tribes:

Bissuel,[340]however, declares that the Taitoq, Tegehe n’es Sidi and Ireshshumen form a separate group of people living in the Adrar Ahnet, who are sometimes called collectively the Taitoq, but should more correctly be described as the Ar’rerf Ahnet. The noble tribes of this confederation, the Taitoq proper and the Tegehe n’es Sidi, claim to be of independent origin and not related either to the Ahaggaren or the Azger. The Ireshshumen are said to be a mixed tribe composed of the descendants of Taitoq men, and women of their Imghad, the Kel Ahnet. There are also four Imghad tribes: the Kel Ahnet and Ikerremoin, who depend from the Taitoq, and the Tegehe n’Efis (probably n’Afis) and the Issokenaten, who depend from the Tegehe n’es Sidi. These Imghad live in Ahnet, but in 1888 were as far afield as the Talak plain west of Air.[341]The Ikerremoin of the Ahnet mountains—though probably of the same stock as the noble tribe of the same name in Ahaggar—are a distinct unit; they were probably a part of the latter until conquered in war by the Taitoq. The Tuareg nobles of Ahnet may be considered a separate branch of the race, possibly descended from the Ketama. They are neither Auriga nor Lemta and probably not Sanhaja either. The Taitoq tribes must therefore be omitted from Duveyrier’s record.

He states that a split occurred between the Azger and Ahaggaren. About fifty years before he was writing, or,in other words, about a century ago, the Kel Ahamellen, like other Tuareg tribes in the area, were under the rule of the Imanen kings of Azger. The latter rulers are described as of the same stock as the Auraghen and as “strangers” among the Azger. Such a description is logical if they were, as we may suppose, an Auriga stock living among the Lemta or Azger. The Kel Ahamellen were settled on the extreme west of the country held by the latter division, and according to the story became so numerous that they divided up into the sub-tribes whose names occur in this list, and so broke away from the allegiance of the Imanen kings. But if in Duveyrier’s day the Kel Ahamellen had only broken away from the Azger confederation as recently as fifty years previously, and were, as he also says, in a state of internal anarchy, it is out of the question for one clan to have increased sufficiently rapidly to form fourteen large noble sub-tribes covering an area reaching from Ghat to the Ahnet massif. The supposition is that the Kel Ahamellen did in fact break away from the Azger about then, for tradition is strong on this point, but that instead of being alone to form the new division they joined a group of other tribes already in existence, namely, the descendants of the original Auriga-Ahaggaren stock. It is immaterial whether the latter were also under the domination of the Azger Imanen kings a century or so before, though it may be remembered that this reigning clan was itself from Ahaggar.

Back to Index Next