What was the “ethnicity” of the peoples of North Africa during, say, the Roman Era? Were they what we now call Arabs, or did those come later, during the Islamic conquests? Were they dark-skinned Africans? Were they “southern European” types?
I know all these categories are mushy but hoping there’s some real information out there.
Not Arabs. They were pretty much all in Arabia prior to the Islamic era.
Egypt was, of course, full of Egyptians.
To the West, you used to have the Carthaginians. They were the descendants of the Phoenicians, who originally lived in the vicinity of modern Lebanon. North Africa was full of Greek and Phoenician settlements.
In late antiquity, you had the Vandals ruling Northwest Africa. And they really wandered around to get there because they started out in what’s now Sweden.
I know some Amazigh activists from Morocco who will basically claim that everyone before the Arab conquest (Including the Carthaginians) were Amazigh, and that they looked similar to Amazigh and “Southern European types” today. They also insist that the vast majority of North Africans today are ethnic Amazigh even if they identify as Arabs.
I think Little Nemo’s post is more accurate, personally.
If by “dark-skinned Africans” you mean black, then no, that wasn’t what you mostly found north of the Sahara, although there were some around. The people ñañi referred to as Amazigh are most commonly referred to as Berber (Amazigh or Imazigh are transliterations of their own name for themselves, Berber is what their neighbors called them); they were around way back when and had their run-ins with Carthaginians (that would be in Tunis, although they had settlements of their own all along the Mediterranean shores and on the mouth of the Atlantic), Romans, Egyptians, Greeks… the usual, what’s unusual is that they managed to stay Amazigh through all those comings and goings, where other peoples of the area changed identity along with religion, nationality, etc.
There were settlements along the northern coasts from the other shores of the Mediterranean, as Little Nemo said; as I expect you know, the last Egyptian dynasty were of Macedonian blood, but that’s actually an ethnic minority within their population; the locals generally came in similar shades of brown as they come now, so dark compared with your average Swede but light compared with Nubians and Ethiopians.
Thanks for your replies. I knew and should have said I knew that the Egyptians were Egyptians; but would or could one group them with Arabs, in the same way that Spaniards and Poles are both European? I mean today there seems little difference, but that may have not been the case in antiquity.
I was really thinking about everything west of Egypt though. My impression is that the Sahara was then much smaller, and North Africa much greener, which made me wonder if black Africans had more of a presence in North Africa back then–because travel would have been easier.
I’ll look into the Berbers; I was aware of them too, but not as the possible Ur-populace of North Africa.
“Arab” is a linguistically-defined ethnicity. Basically, if you speak Arabic, you’re an Arab. Egyptians today are Arabs for that reason; they became so when they largely abandoned Coptic for Arabic.
The population of North Africa are now largely Arab; this wasn’t so in the past. But this change has not been wrought by waves of migration from Arabia so much as by indigenous populations adopting Arabic.
As for the Sahara being smaller in the past, yes. But I think not so much smaller as to make much difference to its role as a barrier to population movements.
If Arabia you mean up into the Levante where there were Arab Kingdoms in the desert fringe, yes.
The Nile Valley, yes, but in the Western ouases, the population was and is Berber, now called the Tasawite, or Siwi, and even to the ancient Egypt the population to the West was recorded with names that are clearly Berber.
It is useful to note that the Berber languages are distant relations to the Egyptian language.
The Greeks were only essentially in Cyreniaca, the Eastern part of modern Lybia. And these were colonies in a see of Berber populations.
The same is true for the Punico-Carthaginian colonies, where the numbers of phoenicians settling are small, but there was assimilation. No matter, the vast majority of the population outside of their trading cities remained Berber and the hinterland was ruled by Berber kings (which is easy to verify, the Romans allied with them against the Carthiginians, you need only look for the mention of the Mauretanians (which the modern country has nothing to do with).
Europeans make much out of the Vandal, but they only were in the Maghreb for a short number of years and their numbers were nothing that had any impact. And they ruled only some parts of the old Roman lands. The vast majority of the area west of the Nile was in the hands of local kingdoms that emerged as the Roman rule collapsed or withdrew (except where it remained).
That is only a slight exaggeration. It is very clear and of no doubt that the populations of the Maghreb, which is the lands West of the Egypt were essentially populated by Berbers - in old classical terms these were “Lybians and Mauretanians”
The majority phenotype, I think this is the word, should have been something like a common southern mediterranean. It is often easy to see a difference between Maghrebines and the ‘true’ arabs of the East.
But there are traces of other populations, as certain black Saharan populations who were documented with languages related to Songhai
No it is much less accurate as it mistakes some points of colonization and control for a population of the regoin.
In effect there is a history of some black populations on the Sahara fringe speaking languages like Songhai that seem to have ended up on the other side of the Sahara as the Sahara dried out.
There is also the tradition in the Morocco of the ouases farmer population sometimes called Haratine, who are black, who are today speakers of Chleuh (Tachelhite) language but by local tradition are “the original masters of the land” and in local tradition were considered a different people than the sub-saharan people brought as slaves.
This is correct, although the name Amazight is a modern consolidation, as it is most often the case people have identified by regional identities, like as in Morocco which has the largest population keeping a native berber language as primary tongue, the Chleuh (Ichilhine, Tachelhite) normally identify as Chleuh (shleuh) and not Amazight, which is properly the name for another berber group in the middle Atlas, but then they call other Berbers ‘different kinds of Chleuh’ so there is a common sense of identity.
In fact there is quite a strong distinction between Egyptian and for example the Gulf or the Levant.
Maybe not much smaller in historic times (although if we go back 10 000 years yes), but it was much less severe even into historical times.
It is not “possible”- they are without any doubt, although maybe not the only one, as the limited evidences of some of the Songhai related speakers in the Ouases and the Haratine of the Morocco (this is different than the Mauretania) can suggest that some of the black populations that archaeology shows being in the Sahara during its green period up to I think ~11,000 years ago, ended up on the north side of the Sahara as it became true desert.
Yes.
Yes.
No even in historical times the Sahara was less severe at least until maybe 3000 years ago, with more ouases etc. The emerge of the Garamantes and then their collapse from apparently water crisis is an example. But this depends on what time frame we speak of.
And I’m pretty sure they’re right. There’s no way the Phoenicians, Greeks, etc… “colonists” could have replaced the original population. They were just founding coastal cities. The culture might have been Carthaginian, but these Carthaginians must have descended for the largest part from the original Amazigh population. Same with Arabs, in fact. They overcame large, in some case very densely populated, areas. And there weren’t many of them to begin with, with Arabia being small and mostly desert. Their culture took hold, but the people are mostly descending from the previously existing populations.
Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Arabs were probably just adjunctions to the Amazigh “base” population. Note that the Berber culture is still there and a large part of those population still identify as Berbers, and speak Berber. If 2500 years of being dominated by a variety of people couldn’t stamp them out or integrate them, I can only assume that during the antiquity, an even much larger part of the population identified as such. And again, not even taking into account the fact that most people who self-identified as “Carthaginians” or now “Arabs” had/have in all likelihood much more Amazigh than Phoenician/Arab ancestors.
And of course, some Greeks, like Cleopatra, particularly around Alexandria, where she lived.
Although the Ptolemic empire ended when the Romans occupied Egypt, the Greeks continued to be powerful until Nasser pushed them out.
“Arab” is a culture, not an ethnicity. Berbers are supposed to have been distantly related to Semite people. But we’re talking about prehistoric times, here. So, I guess you could regroup North African Berbers and Arabs in the same way you can regroup Spaniards and Poles because both are Indo-Europeans.
But these distinctions are quite arbitrary and not very relevant IMO. Poles don’t look like Spaniards, typically, they don’t speak the same language, the respective populations didn’t mix, so I’m not sure exactly on what basis you regroup them. If you were to define your criteria, maybe we could tell whether a similar grouping of Arabs/Hebrews/Egyptians/Berbers would make sense.
Physically, Berbers are known for a significant part of the population having green or blue eyes, contrarily to Arabs. But then again there are much more Poles than Spaniards who are blue-eyed, too…
Yes this is an important point, that most of the Maghreb was densely populated, it was not open.
No.
Those are not Greeks descending from ancient times. The Greek population expelled by the Nasser regime was 19th century in origine, from Cypriote and other Ottoman territories. There is not a direct connection.
Although the population of the Alexandria are is physically more Greek european looking and I am sure many descend from the classical Greek populations.
This is an interesting article I just found by accident fromthe PLOS journal which I think conveys what I wrote, although I think what they say for the Moroccan sub-saharan flow which is old, to 1 200 years in their estimation misses what I noted of the local Maghrebi tradition of the black population that ‘was there before’ - as 1 200 years is too old for the islamic trade to make a large impact and maybe they did not know of this other tradition on the population so perhaps the data is not clearly described… or maybe the tradition is wrong although it seems a strange tradition to have if not having some truth to it as it is not usual to ascribe to a people brought as slaves a tradition of being older people than the white Chleuh.
Archaeologists have found now now well-known paintings comparing Egyptians with other peoples surrounding them. This one, of a Libyan, a Nubian, an Asiatic, and an Egyptian, is probably most famous.
A somewhat more interesting set can be found on The Enemies of Ancient Egypt page.
I had to work to find a neutral page to cite. The majority of top hits on Google Images go to white supremacist sites belligerently opposed to afrocentic theories. Those guys are diligent, admittedly, but I don’t want to up their hit count.
We also know that a large number of black tribal peoples now found along the fringes of the Sahara were pushed south when the climate turned drier and the desert rapidly spread. They would have been in today’s North Africa but not along the Mediterranean itself.
All peoples in this era are tribal. It is not needed to say ‘black tribal’ when we mean the ethnic groups.
I think he means they’re still tribal.
I am aware of the American stereotypes. So are the Berber in Lybia still tribal, but it s Black people who are labeled tribal when an ethnic group is really meant. This grows extremely tiresome, this automatic attachement of tribal to a skin color. Extremely.
Moderator Note
Ramira, if you want to make allegations like this, please take it to Great Debates or the Pit. There’s no need for you to try to pick a fight in GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
These groups are interesting because they are lactose tolerant, a set of highly unusual exceptions to the generalization that Africans are almost uniformly lactose intolerant. It appears to be exactly their tribal nature, as nomads who cling to a precarious existence at the unwanted fringes of the Sahara, that selected for the lactose tolerance mutation so that they could digest the milk that is one of the few staple foods available to them. It’s their way of life that characterizes them, and referring to that as ethnicity would spectacularly miss the point.
this is a **factual **observation. It is black Africans who are labelled as tribal, here even in a case where “non black” are as “tribal” in organization and society.
