claimed for this ethnic geographical chart, the less possible, physically, becomes
intercourse' between Berber tribes (athwart the Sahara and Without darnels) and the
true Negro races of Central Africa. -
Content with offering this dilemma, we pass onwards, and remark, that the Berbers
were generically termed Mauri by the Romans, and Moors by “ moyen age” writers-
« whilst, if we adopt Egypt as the geographical pivot of eccentric radiations, we shall
find, that these Mauritanian Berbers on the west are to the Egyptians what we have
shown the Arabian Kushites to be on the east, viz., “ gentes subfusci coloris ” ; .¿Ethiop
i a n s , in its Homeric sense of sun-bumed-faces. All of them were possibly distinguished
by the red color on Nilotic monuments ; and the term Hamitic would be, genpsiacally,
ethnologically, and geographically, the best designation for these races ; were it not for
modern Negro theories, which ignorance and charlatanism have foisted upon that
mystified name.we now spell “ Ham.” “ One almost blushes,” Agassiz has sarcastically
observed, “ to state, that the Fathers of the Church, in Northern Africa, have
even more recently been quoted as evidence of the high intellectual and moral
developments of which the Negro race is supposed to be capable, and that the monuments
of Egypt have been referred to with the same view. But, we ask, have men
who do not know that Egypt and Northern Africa have never been inhabited by Negro
tribes, but always by nations of the Caucasian race, any right to express an opinion
on this question ? ”
[Five years ago, Luke Burke’s Ethnological Journal, and the writer’s Otia Ægyptiaca,
pointed out several analogies between some names of twenty-five Berber tribes men-
* tioned by Ebn Khaledoon, and various other ethnic cognomina preserved by. the writer
of Xth Genesis. The former are certainly reliable, inasmuch as Ebn Khaledoon was a
Berber himself and the historian of his nation: who contests their.common descent
from such legendary sources as Abraham, Goliath, Amelek, Afrikis, Himyar, and other
fabulous origins; claiming, however, that the Berbers “ descend from K e s lo to im
(Casluhim), son of M i t z r a im , son of H am .” So, also, through Mohammedan harmonizing,
we meet, in the “ Bozit ul Suffa,” with a similar example of pious genealogical
frauds -—“ God bestowed on Ham nine sons : Hind, Bind, Zenj, Nowba, Kanaan,
Kush, Kopt, Berber, and Habesh ! ”
It will be seen, further on, that the C a s l u h im undoubtedly dwelt in Barbary when
Xth Genesis was written, as their descendants do “ unto this day but it need: scarcely
be insisted upon, with the reader of these pages, that Ebn Khaledoon, an Arabicized
Berber, no less than a most learned and conscientious Muslim, naturally felt anxious
to connect his own pedigree with that of the genesiacal Patriarchs, to him rendered
orthodox and respectable through the Koràn : and the fact that, overlooking the Hebrew
plural terminations, he deemed K e s l o u d j im (the Skillouks !) to be a man, son of
M i t s r a im (the Egyptians!), another individual, indicates his'literary sources; while it
serves to illustrate what we have maintained elsewhere, viz. : that the Berbers (their own
indigenous traditions being unrecorded) appropriated instead the language and religious
ideas of their civilizers, the Arabs ; who certainly, when the Koràn was composed,
had never taken Berber origins into consideration.
Nevertheless, this sentimental bias of Ebn Khaledoon does not touch the archæo-
logical fact gained from his pages that, in his time, the LAOIITE are recorded, as one
of twenty-five Berber tribes then inhabiting Barbary.
“ Six hundred lineages of Berbers” — the enumeration of Marmol and of Leo Afri-
canus -—resolved themselves, about the fifteenth century of our era, into five main
stems ; who, already imbued with longings after' Islamite respectabilities, said that
their progenitors were Sabæans of Yemen: at the same time Leo adds the noteworthy
remark, “ subfusci colons sunt.” The same quintuple division reappears in the “ quinque-
gentani Barbari” of Roman writers of the fourth century ; which is important, because
it establishes an identical quinary repartition of Berbers prior to Mohammedan impressions
; and, although it does not contradict, this fact renders it less likely that pagans or
semi-Christians should have leaned towards an Arabian origin, before religious motives
for such honorary attribution existed in Berber minds. To trace whence Barbari, or
Berbers, from about 1400 years ago, through the “ Misulani Sabarbares, Massylii” of
Pliny ; the Sabouboures of Ptolemy ; and possibly, in some instances, the Barbaroi
of Strabo, Diodorus, and Herodotus : to resolve the Zilia, Zilca, Zelis, Salimi, Zilzactæ,
Massyli, Xilahes, into the Mae<m¡\l¡¡ves = AMAZIG-Libyans, or the Massoesj/lli into
hMKTAG-Shillouhs ; and then to deduce the Amazirghs of the present day from the
Ma(Ws of Herodotus, B. c. 430 : — these are tasks which, following chiefly Castiglione,
have been already executed.
History, philology, and analogy unite, therefore, in establishing that the T-Ama-
eirghs, or real Berbers, distinct in that day from Asiatics or Negroes, existed, about
the fifth century b. o., in their own land of Berbería, now called Barbary. With the
exception of their having embraced IsIàm ; exchanged the bow, for which they were
celebrated long before that age, for the musket ; added the. camel to the horse ; and
appropriated Arabic words to make up for deficiencies in their native vocabulary ; the
Berbers of Mt. Atlas are precisely the same people now that they were twenty-five
centuries ago; dwelling in the same spots, speaking the same tongues, and called by
the same names, as we shall see presently.
We are now prepared to accept an opinion pronounced by a man of science eminently
qualified to judge ; which, coupled with Forster’s attestation [supra, p. 483] of
the indelibility of color as a criterion of type, when we recall how all Berbers “ subfusci
coloris sunt,” ought to possess sufficient weight'.
There is bul one veritably indigenous race in Barbary, says Bodichon; viz., the GÆ-
TULIAN: — “ Ainsi, Atlantes, Atarantes, Lotophages, Occidentaux, Troglodytes,
Maurusiens, Maures, Pharusiens, Garamantes, Augéliens, Psylles, Libyens, même
Canariens, et toute cette multitude de peuples à qui les anciens donnent l’Afrique septentrionale
pour patrie, se confondent en une seule et même race, la GÉTULIENNE.”'
The Arabs, foreigners in Barbary, caH the present descendants of this race “ Berbers
and Kabyles.” Indeed, as tillers of the soil, i. e., as,human animals brought into
direct contact with the earth of Barbary (rank with exhalations so mortiferous, even
now, to Europeans), no type of humanity could have outlived, not to say flourished
amid, the climatic and geological conditions of Atalantio Africa, but a few furlongs
from the sea-beach, except the Gcctulian. For proofs, read Dr. Boudin’s Lettres sur
l'Algérie.
Cut off from escape on the west by the ocean ; on the north by the Mediterranean ;
on the south by the Sahara (once a sea also), and, until the Christian era, by the absence
of camels; and on the east by the MTsRIM; these “ quinquegentani Berberi,”’
have survived the extinction of the elephant, together with the depressions of temperature
consequent upon the destruction of their primeval forests : and, repugnant
through natural constitution to any alien institutions but those of the Koràn (construed
after their own liberal fashion), they remain now, what they were at their
unknown era of creation, Goetulians, and nothing else.
Inquire of history.
Phoenicia planted her standards at the Carthaginian ports she occupied: Greece
built her strongholds on the littoral of the Cyrenaica : Rome, prostrating all, sent her
eagles further into Africa than any Europeans: Persia, inscribed her westernmost
tablet at Tripoli : Byzantium, after Belisarius’s triumph, has been obliterated, even in
name: Vandals, massacred in detail, or extinguished by climate more murderous to
white races than Numidian arrows, have vanished, physiologically, like other heterogeneous
foreigners on the sea-board : Ottoman and Frank invaders still surround their temporary
havens with bastions strongest towards the mainland ; and French prowess over
the Berber race is confined to the-letter’s preparations for the next razzia. The Saracens
alone, themselves “ gentes subfusci coloris;” apostles of a genial polygamous religion ;
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