Archaeological History & Evidence

Archaeological History & Evidence:

The authors of "The Berbers" (1996) came under sharp criticism by a number of scholars and activists for the poor picture they claim to be the first comprehensive guide to the Berbers in the English language. In their Introduction, M. Brett and E. Fentress state that, “No general book on the Berbers is available in English. One of the most unfortunate consequences of this is the total ignorance in both Great Britain and the United States of the existence of the Berbers . . . This book is intended as a step towards answering the question, and perhaps toward a modification of the idea that Mediterranean history can be divided between black Africans and white Europeans.”  

This sounds a good book, especially when its back cover carries the approval of the Journal of North African Studies (JNAS), and perhaps when the cover is black – with the title ('The Berbers') written in 'white'. However, starting Berber history from 7000 BC is either a mistake or 'somethingelse'. No doubt, ignorance could have played its role, as they say, but London is a great city for books about the Berbers and conceivably about any other culture in the world. So what does that say?

Colour too still plays its usual part, where some Afrocentricists, Eurocentricists, Arayanists and other exotic specialists are getting lost in the web, applying colour to the pagan gods of the ancient world. But the most devastating factor is nothing but 'persecution' itself – going back not 42 years (as some now say) but centuries upon centuries, legally depriving the Berbers from expressing "themselves".

Hence it is about time the Berbers start writing their own history. It is about time the Berbers break away from this long period of darkness in which supremacists wrote like tyrants, and in which brutal dictators and democratic conquerors ruled like "brats", barring free speech and the flow of information and hunting down what Gaddafi called "rats".

Simply put, the amount of material available in libraries – especially London's wonderful British Library (in English and conceivably in any other language) – would easily allow any 'independent' student to write a comprehensive Berber history going back not to 7000 BC but to the beginning of Afroasiatic language itself, and perhaps all the way back to the lost civilisations of the Sahara and beyond.

There are several studies and fossil remains from Casablanca, Cyrenaica, Ternifine and Rabat, documenting the existence of the indigenous Berbers (or/and their extinct ancestors) in North Africa for at least one million years (1,000,000) – when the first wave of early modern humans began to leave Africa – presumably to explore the "prim-eval world', still infested with cannibals.

The Lower Pleistocene sites of Algerian Ain Hanech and Moroccan Casablanca have, long time ago, provided some of the earliest evidence for "human behaviour", which arriving at a time when most archaeologists believed no human artifacts older than the Pleistocene can be found can only confirm tool-making humans had lived in North Africa in the Pliocene.

Among the sprung, flourished and vanished cultures of North Africa are the Libyan Pre-Aurignacian culture (85,000 BC); the Libyan Dabba culture (40,000 BC); Aterian culture (40,000-20,000 years); Ibero-maurusian culture (22,000 BC); the Eastern Oranian culture (15,000-9,000 BC); and the Mesolithic culture of Murzuk in southern Libya (10.000-6.000 BC).

The Garamantian civilisation was also one of the cultures involved in the Sahara's cultural proliferation. Rüdiger and Gabriele Lutz (1955) recall the cultures of Fezzan to have evolved over the past hundreds of thousands of years and vanished under adverse conditions. “Stone tools of bygone eras are lying about in millions, from the relics of early and late Acheulian (up to 500.000 years), Levalloisian (100.000 years) and Mousterian (50.000 years).”

The unique Haua Fteah Cave in Cyrenaica was previously documented by McBurney and others to preserve a continuous archaeological history in Libya from about 100,000 BC to the present – one continual line of living entities in one single cave, the largest cave in the Mediterranean basin, and one of the largest caves in the (visible) world. This means that the cave was occupied by Libyans at about the same time African Eve left Africa to colonise the savage world some 100,000 years ago.

Septimius Severus: Libyan-Roman Emperor (193-211 AD); Africa's first Roman Emperor.
Born in Berber Leptis Magna.
Died in York, UK; upon taking part (indirectly) in the brutal massacre of Boudica's indigenous tribes of Britain.
Boudica, dear father, was our friend who defended her nation to death – the bravest of the British.