“ Affiliations of the MTsKIM,” or Egyptians.
2 7 . D H lS — L U D IM — ‘ L u d im .’
We have already seen that Mitsraim, read according to the Masorete punctuation, is
a dual referable to the “ Two Egypts,” Upper and Lower; but, stript of the points
which, after all, are but recent and arbitrary embellishments, that MTsRfcwz is a plural,
meaning the Miss’rites, or the Egyptians.
The writer of Xth Genesis, therefore, in his system of ethnic geography, deemed
these personified off-shoots from Egypt to be so many colonies or emigrations from that
principal stock; and as such, we perceive that he suffixes to each name the plural termination
IM ; thereby testifying that he never foresaw modern assumptions in King
James’s version, that the LUDs, the A$NMs, the LHBs, &c., should have been mm;
one yclept Lud, another Anam, and so forth.
As grand-children of KAeM (Ham), the hoary ithyphallic divinity of Egypt, these
outstreams class themselves under the generic denomination of Hamitic families; and
their habitats ought naturally to be sought for in regions contiguous to their ascribed
focus of primitive radiations: without. disregarding either, that the writer of Xth
Genesis, by making them cousins of Palestinic Kanaanites, and of Arabian KUSAzies
(all issues from the same Hamite source), never supposed that they were, or could ever
become, Nigritian races: upon which last “ Type of Mankind” he, as well as every
other writer in the Old Testament, observes the same judicious silence manifested
I throughout the Text towards Tungouses, Esquimaux, Caribs, Patagonians, Papuans,
Oceanians, Malays, Chinese, and other human races; the discovery of whose terrestrial
existence appertains to centuries posterior to the closure of the Hebrew canon, Xth
Genesis inclusive, at some period not earlier than Alexander the Great, b . c. 332; nor
posterior to b . o. 130, when the LXX translations were probably complete at Alexandria.
Hence, to judge by existing nomenclatures of tribes and places, LUD appears both
on the Asiatic and Libyan flanks of lower Egypt. Thus, on the Syrian frontier, a few
miles east of Yaffa, lay the site of Loud, Lydda, Diospolis; inhabited afterwards by
Benjamites. So also Ax%\A.Q6-Berber traditions comprise the LaOUTaA among Sabian
tribes of Yemen, reputed to have immigrated into Barbary. But, whether as exotics
or terrcegeniti, it is on the Libyan side of the Nile, prolonged on the southwestern littoral
of the Mediterranean to the Atlantic — districts cut off through the absence of
camels during primordial ages and by Saharan wastes, from contact with Nigritian families
of remote austral latitudes — that the LUDlwz have left memorials of ancient
occupancy.
Michgelis long ago corrected Bochart, and suggested the probabilities that the Luday,
situate near the river Laud, in Tingitana, were the Ludim: latterly confirmed by
Graberg de Hemso; who shows that the Oluti, Oloti, Louat, exist among Amazirgh
tribes in those Mauritanian neighborhoods to this day; still admitting, too, the national
prefix ait, “ sons of,” to their names (like Mac, Fitz, O’, Ap, among ourselves),
as they did of yore, when the Carthaginian Amon registered in his Periplus the Ait-o-
LUD, “ sons of Lud,” or Aitoloti; resident in the same Barbaresque vicinities where
the Ludayas of Spanish writers are now succeeded by the Beni-Low. There is no
lack of vestiges of primeval LUDs to be met with in the very regions where analogy
would lead us to look for them; and it is surprising that high authorities have altogether
overlooked the facts.
[My former “ Excursus (in Otia JEgyptiaca) on the origin of some of the Berber
tribes of Nubia and Libya,” suggested a ventilation of some disregarded ethnological
data, preparatory to that of Xth Genesis, which, after five years’ suspension, I am
now endeavoring to accomplish. I then submitted authorities on two grand divisions
of Barbaresques — a noun not derived from Barbari, barbarians, but from the aboriginal
African name of BKBR — the Shillouhs, and the t -Amazirgh or Amazirgh-T; both
readily traceable through the Mazices, Maeii, &c., of Latin authors, back to the Ma$ves
of Herodotus. — G. R. G.]
To render perspicuous the view we take of Barbaresque anthropology, it would be
necessary to enlarge here upon generalities before scrutinizing each genesiacal name
in detail; but space being wanting, we must curtail our MS. investigations.
Two human families, the Shillouhs and the Mazirghs, now called Berbers, have
lain, either aboriginally or from antiquity beyond record, scattered from the Cyre-
naica and oases west of Egypt, athwart the northwest face of Africa to the Moghreb-
el-Aksa, or extremest west, of Marocchine territories on the Atlantic; and formerly even
to the Guanches, now extinct in the Canary Isles. Estimated by Graberg de Hemso at
four millions of population in Morocco alone, these Berber families present differences
as well as resemblances comparable to those visible between the French and the Belgians:
they speak dialects of the old “ lingua Atalantica,” subdivided into Berber and Shilha ;
and intermarrying rarely between themselves, have also imbibed little or no alien
blood through amalgamation with others.
Anciently they occupied exclusively that Atalantic zone of oases, littoral or inland,
which lies between the Sahara deserts and the Mediterranean; now called Barbary;
“ Land of B e r b e r s , ” Berberia: and the remoteness of their residence along that tract
so far surpasses historical negation, that geology alone may decide whether the Berbers
can have witnessed those epochas when the now-arid Sahara was an inland sea.
In any case, we may suppose that, in proportion as its salt-lacustrine barriers to communication
with Nigritian plateaux became desiccated, the Berber tribes, driven from
the coast by Punic, Kanaanitish, Greek, Egyptian, and other early invaders, spread
themselves southwards; and, whilst their former invaders have been replaced by
successive Roman, Vandal, Saracenic, Ottoman, and French establishments, that they
themselves gradually crossed the Sahara; and now, under the name of Tuaricks, some
offshoots of this main Atalantic stock, modified by the facilities such passage has
afforded them of possessing Negresses in their hareems, roam along both banks of the
Niger and around Lake Tchad.
But the southerly expansion of Berber families, except in partial and conjectural
instances, is bounded chronologically by one great fact, overlooked though it be by
most writers; which is, that, until the camel was introduced into Barbary from Arabia,
the Saharan wilderness presented obstacles to nomadism almost insurmountable. Now,
the camel was not imported into Barbary until Ptolemaic timeS, Mentioned in hieroglyphics
only as a foreigner, and never used by the Pharaonic Egyptians, the earliest
historical appearance of camels in Africa dates in the first century b . c . The vulgar
notion of camel-diffusion over Barbary before the Ptolemies, is nowadays archseologi-
cally erroneous.610
It therefore follows that, whenever Xth Genesis was compiled, the Barbaresque
affiliations of the MTsRlwz could not have penetrated to the latitude of Negro races,
south of the Sahara, by any other route than up the Nile —^ Negroes never having
existed, in a state of nature, north of the limit of tropical rains. This long journey
was not undertaken by the powerful MTsRim themselves much before the Xllth
dynasty, about b . c . 2300: so that the LUDfcwz, for example, like all their uncivilized
brethren, driven away from the Nile by the Egyptians; restricted from southerly progress
by the Sahara and the absence of camels, from northerly by the Mediterranean
and the absence of ships (Berber habits being the reverse of nautical, and Tyrian privateersmen
hovering on those, coasts); wepe, down to Ptolemy Soter, b . c. 320 (as the
utmost antiquity), confined in their nomadisms within Barbary between Egypt and the
Atlantic littoral of Morocco. ' The lowest historical age possible for the compilation
of Xth Genesis attains to the Esdraic school—-the earliest (if the document be Chaldaic)
may antedate Ezra by some centuries: but, logically, the more remote the antiquity