Berbers or Amazighs (Berber languages: ⵉⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵏ Imaziɣen; singular: ⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖ Amaziɣ / Amazigh) are an ethnic group indigenous to North Africa, primarily inhabiting the Maghreb. They are distributed in an area stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Siwa Oasis in Egypt, and from the Mediterranean Sea to the Niger River in West Africa.
Historically, they spoke Berber languages, which together form the Berber branch of the Afroasiatic family. Since the Muslim conquest of North Africa in the seventh century, a large number of Berbers inhabiting the Maghreb (Tamazgha) have in varying degrees used as lingua franca the other languages spoken in North Africa.
After France’s colonization of North Africa, “the French government succeeded in integrating the French language in Algeria by making French the official national language and requiring all education to take place in French. “Foreign languages, mainly French and to some degree Spanish, inherited from former European colonial powers, are used by most educated Berbers in Algeria and Morocco in some formal contexts, such as higher education or business.
Most Berber people live in North Africa, mainly in Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. Small Berber populations are also found in Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, and Egypt, as well as large immigrant communities living in France, Spain, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and other countries of Europe.
The majority of Berbers are Sunni Muslims. The Berber identity is usually wider than language and ethnicity and encompasses the entire history and geography of North Africa. Berbers are not an entirely homogeneous ethnicity and they encompass a range of societies and ancestries. The unifying forces for the Berber people may be their shared language or a collective identification with Berber heritage and history.
There are some twenty-five to thirty million Berber speakers in North Africa. The number of ethnic Berbers (including non-Berber speakers) is far greater, as a large part of the Berbers have acquired other languages over the course of many decades or centuries, and no longer speak Berber today. The majority of North Africa’s population is believed to be Berber in origin, although due to Arabization most ethnic Berbers identify as Arabized Berbers.
Berbers call themselves some variant of the word i-Mazigh-en (singular: a-Mazigh), possibly meaning “free people” or “noble men”. The name probably had its ancient parallel in the Roman and Greek names for Berbers, and Mazices. Some of the best-known of the ancient Berbers are the Numidian king Masinissa, king Jugurtha, the Berber-Roman author Apuleius, Saint Augustine of Hippo, and the Berber-Roman general Lucius Quietus, who was instrumental in defeating the major wave of Jewish revolts of 115–117.
Dihya or Kahina was a religious and military leader who led a fierce Berber resistance against the Arab-Muslim expansion in Northwest Africa. Kusaila was a seventh-century leader of the Awraba tribe of the Berber people and King of the Sanhadja confederation. Yusuf ibn Tashfin was king of the Berber Almoravid dynasty; Tariq ibn Ziyad the general who conquered Hispania; Abbas Ibn Firnas, a prolific inventor and early pioneer in aviation; Ibn Battuta, a medieval explorer who traveled the longest known distances of his time.
Name
The name Berber derives from an ancient Egyptian language term meaning “outlander” or variations thereof. The exonym was later adopted by the Greeks, with a similar connotation. Among its oldest written attestations, Berber appears as an ethnonym in the 1st century AD Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.
Despite these early manuscripts, certain modern scholars have argued that the term only emerged around 900 AD in the writings of Arab genealogists, with Maurice Lenoir positing an 8th or 9th-century date of appearance. The English term was introduced in the 19th century, replacing the earlier Barbary.
The Berbers are the Mauri cited by the Chronicle of 754 during the Umayyad conquest of Hispania, to become since the 11th century the catch-all term Moros (in Spanish; Moors in English) on the charters and chronicles of the expanding Christian Iberian kingdoms to refer to the Andalusi, the north Africans, and the Muslims overall.
For the historian Abraham Isaac Laredo, the name Amazigh could be derived from the name of the ancestor Mezeg which is the translation of biblical ancestor Dedan son of Sheba in the Targum. According to Leo Africanus, Amazigh meant “free man”, though this has been disputed, because there is no root of M-Z-Gh meaning “free” in modern Berber languages. This dispute, however, is based on a lack of understanding of the Berber language[neutrality is disputed] as “Am-” is a prefix meaning “a man, one who is […]” Therefore, the root required to verify this endonym would be (a)zigh, “free”, which however is also missing from Tamazight’s lexicon, but may be related to the well-attested aze “strong”, Tizzit “bravery”, or jeghegh “to be brave, to be courageous”.[original research?]
Further, it also has a cognate in the Tuareg word Amajegh, meaning “noble”. This term is common in Morocco, especially among Central Atlas, Rifian, and Shilah speakers in 1980,but elsewhere within the Berber homeland sometimes a local, more particular term, such as Kabyle or Chaoui, is more often used instead in Algeria.
The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines mentioned various tribes with similar names living in Greater “Libya” (North Africa) in the areas where Berbers were later found. Later tribal names differed from the classical sources but were probably still related to the modern Amazigh. The Meshwesh tribe among them represents the first, thus identifying them from the field. Scholars believe it would be the same tribe called a few centuries afterward in Greek as Mazyes by Hektaios and as Maxyes by Herodotus, while it was called after that Mazaces and Mazax in Latin sources, and related to the later Massylii and Masaesyli. All those names are similar and perhaps foreign renditions of the name used by the Berbers in general for themselves, Imazighen.
Prehistory
The Maghreb region in northwestern Africa is believed to have been inhabited by Berbers from at least 10,000 BC. Local cave paintings, which have been dated to twelve millennia before the present, have been found in the Tassili n’Ajjer region of southern Algeria. Other rock art has been observed in Tadrart Acacus in the Libyan desert. A Neolithic society, marked by domestication and subsistence agriculture, developed in the Saharan and Mediterranean region (the Maghreb) of northern Africa between 6000 and 2000 BC. This type of life, richly depicted in the Tassili n’Ajjer cave paintings of southeastern Algeria, predominated in the Maghreb until the classical period. Prehistorical Tifinagh scripts were also found in the Oran region. During the pre-Roman era, several successive independent states (Massylii) existed before king Masinissa unified the people of Numidia.
History
Berber Kingdoms in Numidia, c. 220 BC (green: Masaesyli under Syphax; gold: Massyli under Gala, father of Masinissa; further east: the city-state of Carthage).
In historical times, the Berbers expanded south into the Sahara (displacing earlier populations such as the Azer and Bafour). Much of Berber culture is still celebrated among the cultural elite in Morocco and Algeria.
The areas of North Africa that have retained the Berber language and traditions best have been, in general, Morocco and the Hautes Plaines of Algeria (Kabylie, Aurès, etc.), most of which in Roman and Ottoman times had remained largely independent. The Ottomans did penetrate the Kabylie area, and to places the Phoenicians never penetrated, far beyond the coast, where Turkish influence can be seen in food, clothes, and music. These areas have been affected by some of the many invasions of North Africa, most recently that of the French.[citation needed]
