Berber History: The Amazing Complete History Of The Berbers

Berber History

Berber History: At the turn of the first millennium BCE, Phoenicians from Tyre, now organized into a flourishing mercantile society, began to settle along the North African coast, ushering in a new cultural era in the Maghrib. The rise of Phoenician and Roman culture in North Africa resulted in patterns that can still be seen in the Maghrib’s landscapes and societies: a coastal civilization linked to the outside Mediterranean world; and an interior Maghrib that was Berber and mostly contained within itself. 

During antiquity (which in North Africa lasted from around 1000 BCE until the arrival of the Arabs in the late 600s CE), a series of alien cultures—Phoenician, Greek, Roman, and, in many ways, a separate Christian one—created a succession of cultural overlays that blended Berber society and culture with their own. Punic and Roman histories, which are occasionally disjointed tales, have primarily shaped our understanding of the Berbers.

What unfolds is the development of three cultures: (1) the mercantile Mediterranean civilizations of the littoral, which, depending upon their levels of power and defensive organization, had varying reach into the Maghribi interior and fused Berber culture to their own within their perimeter of rule and formed part of the great interconnective cultures of the day;

(2) A series of indigenous Berber societies, eventually recognized mostly as kingdoms, the most important of which are the Numidians and the Mauri of Mauritania, who surrounded the Mediterranean civilizations and interpenetrated their histories and who seem to have had levels of organization that competed directly with the Mediterranean cultures; and (3) peoples deeper in the Maghrib (the Atlas mountains and the desert fringe), also Berber, who lay outside the framework of the Mauri, Numidians, and others, whose ethnic names occasionally surface in history and about whose social organization and history we know almost nothing. 

The earliest Phoenician arrivals (in pursuit of gold and silver) outside the Strait of Gibraltar were at Gades (Cadíz) in Spain and Lixus (Larache) in Morocco at the end of the 12th century BCE, according to Greek and Latin traditions. However, Phoenicia in North Africa shifted its focus to Carthage, founded near the Bay of Tunis in 800 BCE. Here, civilization flourished for 1500 years, first in its Phoenician form—known in North Africa as Punic after their culture or Carthaginian after the city—and later, after Rome destroyed Carthage in 146 BCE, in a synthesis of Punic and Roman civilizations. The original North Africans mixed with the new, forming a new society.

A similar situation occurred east of the Gulf of Sirte, when Greek towns were established in Cyrenaica, named after their largest city, Cyrene, in the country of the Libyans of many known tribes. 

After the arrival of the first colonists from the Greek island state of Thera in 639 BCE, Greek settlements expanded in size and scope. They absorbed “Libyan” (read: Berber) elements into their culture, primarily focused on agriculture and known for their monopoly export of silphion, an elusive and extinct native plant of the desert steppes used widely in the Mediterranean world for culinary and medicinal purposes. In 322 BCE, Ptolemy I of Egypt annexed the Greeks of Pentapolis, or “Five Cities,” as Cyrenaica was often known, followed by Rome in 74 BCE.

A comprehensive blend of local and Berber cultures formed here, as it did over most of Western North Africa, and persisted until antiquity. In the Maghrib, the Berber kingdoms of Numidia (Latin Numidae; Greek Nomades, and the origin of the word nomad)—which extended westward from the boundary of Carthage to the Moulouya River in Morocco; and Mauritania, land of the Mauri, who were in northwest Morocco beyond the river—enter history in a significant way during the First (241-237 BCE) and Second Punic Wars (218-202 BCE). 

During the Roman conflict with Carthage, the Numidians split into two kingdoms: the Masaeylii, located in the west near the mouth of the Oued Tafna in Algeria, and the Maseylies, located in the east with their capital city at Cirta (Constantine). Masinissa (d. 148 BCE), the long-lived king of the Maseylies, sought territorial expansion by fighting first Carthage and then Rome in Spain; he formed a secret alliance with Scipio, the Roman commander and conqueror of Carthaginian territories in Spain, to secure his throne against domestic challengers. 

In 202, Masinissa took complete control of Numidia at the Battle of Zama (northern Tunisia), which ended the Second Punic War. Repeated aggressions by Masinissa against Carthage, now prohibited from waging war, led to Carthaginian attempts to rearmament, ultimately leading to a Roman declaration of war against Carthage and its complete destruction in 146.

For the next 150 years, North Africa was mostly left to its own devices, and Phoenician culture thrived and even spread among the North African populace. The Berbers adopted Punic alphabetic writing at some point and utilized it in various fashions, with only the Tuareg’s archaic tifnagh script remaining to this day. Rome established the new province of Africa (named for its indigenous people), built the fossa regia (royal ditch) to mark its border with Numidia, and planned to keep the rest of the Maghrib to itself. 

However, as time passed, internecine Numidian politics resulted in Roman involvement against Jugurtha, Masinissa’s grandson, and the final separation of Numidia into east and west. Later, Numidia found itself embroiled in the Roman civil wars, first between Marius and Sulla’s partisans, then between Caesar and Pompey. In 46 BCE, Caesar invaded the Pompeians’ province of Africa from the Mauritanian territory. Following his victory, the province of Africa annexed eastern Numidia, forming Africa Nova.

Later, Africa Nova expanded by incorporating Western Numidia and the previously independent city of Tripolitania. During the Jugurtha period, the Mauritanian king Bocchus, who was strongly associated with the Numidian royal line, betrayed him and signed a separate peace treaty with Rome in 105 BCE. Caesar Octavian eventually entangled Mauritania in Rome’s civil wars, annexed the kingdom in 33 BCE, and reformed it as a client-country with Juba II of Numidia as king in 25 BCE.

Octavian’s household in Rome raised Juba, the son of Caesar’s opponent. He created a new capital at Caesarea (Cherchel, Algeria), and Selene, Antony and Cleopatra’s daughter, became his consort. Juba’s strong scholarly interests distinguished his long reign, which ended around the year 23. Juba authored a lost Greek compendium on African and Asian geography. He dispatched expeditions to distant lands and bequeathed his empire to his son, Ptolemy, in honor of his mother’s Egyptian-Macedonian ancestry. 

Caligula summoned Ptolemy to Rome in 40 BCE and assassinated him, annexing Mauritania in the process. This placed all of the coastal Maghrib, Tripolitania, and Cyrenaica under direct Roman administration, where it stayed in various sizes and administrative configurations until the fall of Roman rule in the early 400s. The littoral people of northern Africa, already heavily influenced by Punic civilization, gradually Romanized. 

Rome expanded agriculture and trade, while North African cities grew in population and size. The empire encouraged Roman settlers to inhabit the African and Numidian provinces, allowing a large number of individuals to enter and exit North Africa via its economic and administrative routes. North Africa earned the nickname “granary of Rome” due to its widespread export of wheat and olive oil.

In the towns, Latin superseded Punic as the vernacular; in the countryside, Berber was the dominant language. Roman life reached a climax, both in terms of riches and geographic dominance, under the reign of the Severi emperors (193-235), an African dynasty. 
Eastern Algeria and Tunisia were densely urbanized and Romanized in every sense; Morocco, by this time the province of Mauritania Tingitana, was Romanized significantly less, resulting in a tiny triangle stretching from Lixus to Volubilis to the Tangier Peninsula. Rome ordered a retreat in 285, severely diminishing Mauritania’s size.

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