Its facts are chiefly drawn from the books mentioned in the short bibliography at the end of the volume, in addition to which I am deeply indebted for information given on the spot to the group of remarkable specialists attached to the French administration, and to the cultivated and cordial French officials, military and civilian, who, at each stage of my rapid journey, did their best to answer my questions and open my eyes.]
I
THE BERBERS
In the briefest survey of the Moroccan past, account must first of all be taken of the factor which, from the beginning of recorded events, has conditioned the whole history of North Africa: the existence, from the Sahara to the Mediterranean, of a mysterious irreducible indigenous race with which every successive foreign rule, from Carthage to France, has had to reckon, and which has but imperfectly and partially assimilated the language, the religion, and the culture that successive civilizations have tried to impose upon it.
This race, the race of Berbers, has never, modern explorers tell us, become really Islamite, any more than it ever really became Phenician, Roman or Vandal. It has imposed its habits while it appeared to adopt those of its invaders, and has perpetually represented, outside the Ismalitic and Hispano-Arabic circle of the Makhzen, the vast tormenting element of the dissident, the rebellious, the unsubdued tribes of the Blad-es-Siba.
Who were these indigenous tribes with whom the Phenicians, when they founded their first counting-houses on the north and west coast of Africa, exchanged stuffs and pottery and arms for ivory, ostrich-feathers and slaves?
Historians frankly say they do not know. All sorts of material obstacles have hitherto hampered the study of Berber origins, but it seems clear that from the earliest historic times they were a mixed race, and the ethnologist who attempts to define them is faced by the same problem as the historian of modern America who should try to find the racial definition of an “American.” For centuries, for ages, North Africa has been what America now is: the clearing-house of the world. When at length it occurred to the explorer that the natives of North Africa were not all Arabs or Moors, he was bewildered by the many vistas of all they were or might be: so many and tangled were the threads leading up to them, so interwoven was their pre-Islamite culture with worn-out shreds of older and richer societies.
M. Saladin, in his “Manuel d’Architecture Musulmane,” after attempting to unravel the influences which went to the making of the mosque of Kairouan, the walls of Marrakech, the Medersas of Fez—influences that lead him back to Chaldaean branch-huts, to the walls of Babylon and the embroideries of Coptic Egypt—somewhat despairingly sums up the result: “The principal elements contributed to Moslem art by the styles preceding it may be thus enumerated: from India, floral ornament; from Persia, the structural principles of the Acheminedes, and the Sassanian vault. Mesopotamia contributes a system of vaulting, incised ornament, and proportion; the Copts, ornamental detail in general; Egypt, mass and unbroken wall-spaces; Spain, construction and Romano-Iberian ornament; Africa, decorative detail and Romano-Berber traditions (with Byzantine influences in Persia); Asia Minor, a mixture of Byzantine and Persian characteristics.”
As with the art of North Africa, so with its supposedly indigenous population. The Berber dialects extend from the Lybian desert to Senegal. Their language was probably related to Coptic, itself related to the ancient Egyptian and the non-Semitic dialects of Abyssinia and Nubia. Yet philologists have discovered what appears to be a far-off link between the Berber and Semitic languages, and the Chleuhs of the Draa and the Souss, with their tall slim Egyptian-looking bodies and hooked noses, may have a strain of Semitic blood. M. Augustin Bernard, in speaking of the natives of North Africa, ends, much on the same note as M. Saladin in speaking of Moslem art: “In their blood are the sediments of many races, Phenician, Punic, Egyptian and Arab.”
They were not, like the Arabs, wholly nomadic; but the tent, the flock, the tribe always entered into their conception of life. M. Augustin Bernard has pointed out that, in North Africa, the sedentary and nomadic habit do not imply a permanent difference, but rather a temporary one of situation and opportunity. The sedentary Berbers are nomadic in certain conditions, and from the earliest times the invading nomad Berbers tended to become sedentary when they reached the rich plains north of the Atlas. But when they built cities it was as their ancestors and their neighbours pitched tents; and they destroyed or abandoned them as lightly as their desert forbears packed their camel-bags and moved to new pastures. Everywhere behind the bristling walls and rock-clamped towers of old Morocco lurks the shadowy spirit of instability. Every new Sultan builds himself a new house and lets his predecessors’ palaces fall into decay, and as with the Sultan so with his vassals and officials. Change is the rule in this apparently unchanged civilization, where “nought may abide but Mutability.”
II
PHENICIANS, ROMANS AND VANDALS
Far to the south of the Anti-Atlas, in the yellow deserts that lead to Timbuctoo, live the wild Touaregs, the Veiled Men of the south, who ride to war with their faces covered by linen masks.
These Veiled Men are Berbers, but their alphabet is composed of Lybian characters, and these are closely related to the signs engraved on certain vases of the Nile valley that are probably six thousand years old. Moreover, among the rock-cut images of the African desert is the likeness of Theban Ammon crowned with the solar disk between serpents, and the old Berber religion, with its sun and animal worship, has many points of resemblance with Egyptian beliefs. All this implies trade contacts far below the horizon of history, and obscure comings and goings of restless throngs across incredible distances long before the Phenicians planted their first trading posts on the north African coast about 1200 B.C.
Five hundred years before Christ, Carthage sent one of her admirals on a voyage of colonization beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Hannon set out with sixty fifty-oared galleys carrying thirty thousand people. Some of them settled at Mehedyia, at the mouth of the Sebou, where Phenician remains have been found, and apparently the exploration was pushed as far south as the coast of Guinea, for the inscription recording it relates that Hannon beheld elephants, hairy men and “savages called gorillas.” At any rate, Carthage founded stable colonies at Melilla, Larache, Sale and Casablanca.
Then came the Romans, who carried on the business, set up one of their easy tolerant protectorates over “Tingitanian Mauretania,”[A] and built one important military outpost, Volubilis in the Zerhoun, which a series of minor defenses probably connected with Sale on the west coast, thus guarding the Roman province against the unconquered Berbers to the south.
[Footnote A: East of the Moulouya, the African protectorate (now west Algeria and the Sud Oranais) was called the Mauretania of Caesar.]
Tingitanian Mauretania was one of the numerous African granaries of Rome. She also supplied the Imperial armies with their famous African cavalry, and among minor articles of exportation were guinea-hens, snails, honey, euphorbia, wild beasts, horses and pearls. The Roman dominion ceased at the line drawn between Volubilis and Sale. There was no interest in pushing farther south, since the ivory and slave trade with the Soudan was carried on by way of Tripoli. But the spirit of enterprise never slept in the race, and Pliny records the journey of a Roman general—Suetonius Paulinus—who appears to have crossed the Atlas, probably by the pass of Tizi-n-Telremt, which is even now so beset with difficulties that access by land to the Souss will remain an arduous undertaking until the
