Mingling with the native tribes they fused together into the wide-spread Liby-Phoenician people. This extended much further to the West, if we may trust the local belief connected with the inscription said by Procopius (Bell. Vand. 2. 10) to be still existing in his day on pillars of white marble at Tangier (Tiyois). 'We are the fugitives who fled from the face of the brigand Joshua (ἡμεῖς ἐσμεν οἱ φυγόντες ἀπὸ προσώπου ̓Ιησοῦ τοῦ λῃστοῦ υἱοῦ Ναυῆ). The genuineness of the inscription may be doubted, as also the precise form in which the narrative is given, but native traditions seem to point to widely extended settlements in Northern Africa of fugitives from Canaan, who made their way across the sea more probably at different times as they were pushed from their old homes by the invading tribes of Israel. Though of kindred race to the Phoenicians, the influence exerted by them was distinct in type, and it was spread too far in the interior to be due merely to the energy of the merchant colonies upon the coast, and in this way may be best explained the enduring traces of the Punic language in wide lands over which even Carthage in the days of her empire held no sway. In the twelfth century B.C. Tyre stepped into the place of primacy which Sidon had long held upon the sea, and carried on with energy the work of colonial enterprise in the far West. Utica was the first founded, and was long the centre of Tyrian influence and trade along the northern coast, which was surrounded by a chain of settlements reaching to the Emporia of the Syrtes. These were convenient halting places on the way to Spain, the South of which was occupied before long by the Tyrian traders, while Liby-Phoenicians were transplanted from the other continent to spread the arts of agricultural life among the natives. Colonies were planted also on the western coast of Africa, in favoured regions where the advantages of soil and climate were so great that they spread rapidly till some three hundred of them could be counted up, though their prosperity was not of long duration. A new epoch began when a band of aristocratic exiles quitted Tyre in 872 B.C., and founded Carthage on the ruins of the old Sidonian Cambe. She soon eclipsed her sisters on the coast, survived the attacks of her Numidian neighbours, pushed her influence far inland, sent out fresh streams of colonists through Zeugitana and Byzacium, and when Tyre fell in 574 B.C., she stood forth to assert her claims to the colonial heritage, and became an imperial power, while respecting the nominal independence of some of the older settlements upon the coast. Of the peoples of the interior the names are less definite, and the history is more obscure. There is first the strange tradition, quoted by Sallust (18.4) from the books of the Numidian prince Hiempsal, which makes the Medes and Persians cross over from Spain, where the army of Hercules had been scattered at his death. The names themselves of course are in such connexion quite fantastic, but Hercules constantly appears in the legends both of Africa and Spain as a symbol of Phoenician enterprise, conducted to new scenes by the Tyrian god Melkarth, and supported often by the swords of mercenary bands, such as those of the Carians, who are so often found connected with them. The story may therefore simply point to the arrival of the Tyrian colonists on the Atlantic coast, and to the soldiers of fortune who followed in their service. These last could be only traced to Asia, and in a later age the familiar names of Medes and Persians were added to the legend. Sallust, or Hiempsal his informant, goes on to tell us of the fusion between the so-called Persian immigrants and the native Gaetulian tribes, which gave rise in course of time to the Numidian people. Other accounts of native origin point also to the ruin or decay of the colonies on the western coast, and of the growth of a widespread inland power in the ninth century before our era. It is probable, as Movers has suggested (Phoenizier 2. 448), that the colonies fell before the attacks of nomad tribes, for the history has often been repeated in other lands and ages. The mercenaries may also have made common cause with the invaders, and turned their swords against their masters, and it is possible in this way to account for the growth of a Numidian power, which made itself felt even far away, and dominated for a while the new Tyrian settlement at Carthage. The native dynasties thus founded show clear traces of intermarriage with Phoenician women, and their personal and local THE LAND AND PEOPLE OF NUMIDIA. 37 names, together with the inscriptions on their coins, bear witness at a later age to the continued influence of the colonizing race. If such a theory seem too bold, it may be thought again that Celtic tribes, pushed forward by invading races, may have crossed the straits at some time and made their way still onwards till their advance was barred by wastes of sand. Fair-complexioned tribes are found to this day among the ranges of the Atlas, and Mount Aures, and these may be possibly the isolated remnants of a people distinct in stock from all the neighbouring races. Or we may think of the Libyan Maschouasch, and their confederates across the seas, who repeatedly invaded Egypt during the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties, and who are spoken of as spreading far away along the coast, and were known possibly to Herodotus under the name of Maxyes (4. 191) beyond the Lake Tritonis. The invaders in the West may have formed part of such a general migration, which is thought to have left some traces of an Aryan type, though little can be really known upon the subject. But whatever may have been the various elements thus superposed, all indications point to the existence of one wide-spread race-identical at least in its substratum-which extended from the Syrtes to the Atlantic Ocean. On one side it was known to Greek and Romans as the Nomads or Numidians, who gave a name to the country that lay South of the confines of Carthage, and stretched to the West as far as the Mulucha. They occupied therefore all the modern Algeria, and most of the Regency of Tunis. Among them in earlier times two tribal aggregates had struggled for the mastery, the Massaesyli ruled by Syphax in the West and the Massyli of Masinissa to the East. The rivalry was ended by the final victory of the latter, when both were fused in one coherent kingdom. Beyond these were the Mauri to the far West, whose name and boundaries have still remained with little change in the modern Empire of Marocco: while to the South the Romans heard of the Gaetuli in the wide border region of the oases and Salt Lakes that lies between the mountain ranges and the interminable sands of the Sahara. We need not go over the muster-roll of the local names recorded by Herodotus, most of which were of narrow range and otherwise unknown. Modern insight or fancy, it is true, can discern in the Mágues (4. 191) the Maschouasch of the Egyptian monuments, and the Amazigh of Marocco, in the Zavŋkes (4. 193) the ancestors of the Zouaves of Algeria, and the Ziguenses, Zeugi of Zagouan and Zeugitana and in the Búgavres -also spoken of by Scylax-the origin of the names given to Byzacium in later times. But most of these were probably but different branches of what is now best known as the Berber race, which stretched almost from the Nile to the Atlantic, and of which pure types may still be found in the Kabyles of the French province, and the Touaregs of the Sahara. The language and written character belonging to the race are believed to be preserved in the bilingual inscriptions found at Thugga and elsewhere, and analogies are traced between them and the native forms which have survived only among the Touaregs. The names indeed just mentioned are not properly their own, and have no purely ethnic value. The Arabs spoke contemptuously of the berbera or unintelligible jargon spoken by the races which they fought in Africa, or of the K'bails (Kabyles), the scattered clans that seemed to have no national centre. The native race has seen Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, Arabs, French, pass as conquerors through their land: has heard first one tongue and then another spoken as the language of government around them. But it has held its own in spite of all the vicissitudes of conquest; retiring to the mountains or the wilderness before the storm, but still retaining with tenacious grasp the characteristic features of its natural life. The different types of outward customs are the same in the main as in the days of Sallust, for they depend on the unchanging features of the soil and climate. Near the coast settled habits are determined by the richness of the products, as when the Liby-Phoenicians sowed and harvested of old, and the Carthaginian rulers did their best to encourage skilful tillage, and King Mago wrote the books on agriculture which the Roman senate found worthy of translation. The Numidians somewhat farther from the sea had been gradually brought under the same influence, and had forsaken the nomad habits of their fathers. Italian traders were attracted to the towns (Jug. 26 and 47). We hear of Greeks even drawn to Cirta by the liberal policy of King Micipsa (Strabo, 17. 3); and the great funeral monuments which still remain, though they may remind us by their size of the pyramids of Egypt, show in their architectural forms more of the spirit of Hellenic art. Frenchmen, Italians, Jews, now represent among them the more developed modes of civilized life, and have stamped their influence on the face of the old towns. But in the country villages the native gourbis, of rough stones plastered with mud and roofed with thatch, and fenced with a hedge of cactus, reproduce the rude huts (tuguria) of which the Roman writers speak; while others, more peculiar in shape, exactly correspond to the description of the inverted boat which Sallust thinks a reminiscence of the ships on which the first immigrants arrived (oblonga incurvis lateribus tecta quasi navium carinae sunt, Jug. 18. 8). The highlands are the home of pastoral life. Herdsmen and shepherds still wander slowly over those vast plains as when Pomponius Mela wrote (sequuntur vagi pecora .... atque ubi dies deficit, ibi noctem agunt, 1. 8). The monotony of that lonely life, and the weary length of the way they have to travel to the markets of the coast are still rendered faithfully by the expressive lines of Vergil 'Saepe diem noctemque, et totum ex ordine mensem Armaque Amiclaeumque canem Cressamque pharetram.” Beyond that are the horsemen of the desert, whose douars (mapalia) still present the household of the patriarchal type. Invading Arabs have occupied the plains, but they too have found a sanction in their Koran for the arrangements of the family which were described in the ancient natives of that region ('Quamquam in familias passim et sine lege dispersi, nihil in commune consultant, tamen quia singulis aliquot simul conjuges, et plures ob id liberi agnatique sunt, nusquam pauci, Pomp. Mela 1. 8). |