Arabia Berberised?

[ninebucks]

In OTL, the Berber identity, as it existed in North Africa, was gradually eroded with the expansion of the Arabs. Yes, Berbers still exist, but the majority of the descendants of people who two thousand years would consider themselves Berbers, are now linguistically, and culturally Arab.

But is it possible that this could be reversed? How strong could the Berber identity be? Could a solidly homogeneous ethnic Berber identity spread from the Rif Mountains to the Nile? Or perhaps even further, into Arabia itself?

 

[Lysandros Aikiedes]

Somehow ensure the survival of the Kingdom of Numidia during the reign of Jugurtha before his capture by the Quastor Lucius Cornelius Sulla in 106 BCE. Maybe even have Gaius Marius die in an earlier military engagement. Thats all I could recommend on the subject.

 

[Tyr]

I'd think you'd have to mess with Islam.
At the very least not make it so Arabic focussed.

 

[Leo Caesius]

Keeping a "Berber" identity in the Maghreb is entirely feasible - all you need to do is preserve Egypt or even Carthage as a bulwark against Islam. Of course, then the Berbers have to contend with Romance rather than Arabic...

Spreading the Berbers to Arabia is much less plausible. What do they have to gain by conquering Arabia, and how would they displace the local population, especially since the region is already pretty much at "carrying capacity". They'd basically have to slaughter most of the Arabs and colonize the territory.

 

[Abdul Hadi Pasha]

Keeping a "Berber" identity in the Maghreb is entirely feasible - all you need to do is preserve Egypt or even Carthage as a bulwark against Islam. Of course, then the Berbers have to contend with Romance rather than Arabic...

You don't even need to go that far. It you remove the migration of the Banu Hilal into the Maghreb, there's no reason why the already Islamicized Berbers wouldn't retain their own language and culture.

 

[Leo Caesius]

I'd think you'd have to mess with Islam.
At the very least not make it so Arabic focussed.

There was a sect in the Rif mountains during the first half of the eight century, the Bargawata, that used a Berber Qur'an of only 80 surahs. It seems to have survived four centuries, although it never really caught on.

 

[Lugal]

Shoshenq I was a Berber who ruled Egypt and founded the 22nd Dynasty. He pursued an aggressive foreign policy in Palestine. You could have him going even further conquering the Nabataeans. Or sending expeditions of mainly Berber armies down through the Red Sea to Arabia itself.

 

[Leo Caesius]

Somehow ensure the survival of the Kingdom of Numidia during the reign of Jugurtha before his capture by the Quastor Lucius Cornelius Sulla in 106 BCE. Maybe even have Gaius Marius die in an earlier military engagement. Thats all I could recommend on the subject.

Shoshenq I was a Berber who ruled Egypt and founded the 22nd Dynasty. He pursued an aggressive foreign policy in Palestine. You could have him going even further conquering the Nabataeans. Or sending expeditions of mainly Berber armies down through the Red Sea to Arabia itself.

I'm not sure how comfortable I am with these identifications. These guys were "Libyans" (a primarily geographic designation first used by the Egyptians and later the Greeks). We know next to nothing about their languages (they may very well have spoken something somehow related to the Afroasiatic "Berber" languages - but not necessarily as their direct ancestor). Leaving aside the appropriateness of the term "Berber", using it to describe any peoples or languages before the Islamic period is simply anachronistic, a bit like talking about the Roman English.

 

[Lysandros Aikiedes]

I'm not sure how comfortable I am with these identifications. These guys were "Libyans" (a primarily geographic designation first used by the Egyptians and later the Greeks). We know next to nothing about their languages (they may very well have spoken something somehow related to the Afroasiatic "Berber" languages - but not necessarily as their direct ancestor). Leaving aside the appropriateness of the term "Berber", using it to describe any peoples or languages before the Islamic period is simply anachronistic, a bit like talking about the Roman English.

Which part of "Kingdom of Numidia" do you have a problem with?

 

[Leo Caesius]

Which part of "Kingdom of Numidia" do you have a problem with?

The fact that it is appearing in a thread about Berberisation. For all we know, Numidia might have used Punic as its court language, considering that the Numidians read and presumably wrote the language (the libraries of Carthage were part of the loot that Masinissa carried off back to Numidia). Certainly they were lettered in Latin as well. Whether they also spoke "Berber" or one of its ancestors is a lot more speculative.

 

[Lysandros Aikiedes]

The fact that it is appearing in a thread about Berberisation. For all we know, Numidia might have used Punic as its court language, considering that the Numidians read and presumably wrote the language (the libraries of Carthage were part of the loot that Masinissa carried off back to Numidia). Certainly they were lettered in Latin as well. Whether they also spoke "Berber" or one of its ancestors is a lot more speculative.

Whatever Punic cultural influences they absorbed, however urbanized their civilization was, ethnically they WERE Berbers. Certainly, they were the most powerful native state in western North Africa until the Jugurthine Wars, which is why I suggested it. Whether the Numidian Royal Court chose Punic, Greek, or Latin, the rest of the population, down to the merchants, shopkeepers, soldiers, herdsmen and farm labourers, would still have spoken some Berber dialect among themselves.

Even the First Arabic Caliphate, after the conquest of Damascus, used Greek as the language of administration before the Ummayyads took charge. There weren't quite that many actual Phoenicians in North Africa compared to the Berber tribes even during Carthage's heydey.

If Carthage never lost any of its wars with Rome, how long would it have been before they succumbed to invasion by one of the developing Berber states to its west?

Besides, whatever POD one chooses to prolong the existance of Numidia, it may change quite a bit in 2-3-4-5 hundred years after Massinisa's time. Perhaps by then they would be speaking a standardized Berber language on all social levels with a few Punic loanwords, or the Punic language would have become a liturgical language if their Pantheon was adopted by the the Numidians.

 

[Leo Caesius]

Whatever Punic cultural influences they absorbed, however urbanized their civilization was, ethnically they WERE Berbers. Certainly, they were the most powerful native state in western North Africa until the Jugurthine Wars, which is why I suggested it. Whether the Numidian Royal Court chose Punic, Greek, or Latin, the rest of the population, down to the merchants, shopkeepers, soldiers, herdsmen and farm labourers, would still have spoken some Berber dialect among themselves.

How do you know this? I've organized three international conferences on Afroasiatic linguistics and I would never claim to know that the Numidians ethnically WERE Berbers. For all we know, they could have been speaking some other related (but now extinct) Afroasiatic language... or even something unrelated to Afroasiatic at all. The evidence of the "Libyan" inscriptions is pretty inconclusive.

What's more, the fact that the "Berber" languages are so close to one another (apart from the Tuareg in the deep Sahara) despite the fact that they are quite divided geographically and politically, and there has never been a "standard Berber" to impose uniformity, suggests that the dispersion of the present day Berbers is a relatively recent phenomenon. Had the languages of the ancient Libyans, Mauretanians, Numidians, and the rest survived to the present day, one would not expect such a high level of comprehensibility among the surviving dialects or such as clear cut dialect continuum.

 

[Lysandros Aikiedes]

How do you know this? I've organized three international conferences on Afroasiatic linguistics and I would never claim to know that the Numidians ethnically WERE Berbers. For all we know, they could have been speaking some other related (but now extinct) Afroasiatic language... or even something unrelated to Afroasiatic at all. The evidence of the "Libyan" inscriptions is pretty inconclusive.

What's more, the fact that the "Berber" languages are so close to one another (apart from the Tuareg in the deep Sahara) despite the fact that they are quite divided geographically and politically, and there has never been a "standard Berber" to impose uniformity, suggests that the dispersion of the present day Berbers is a relatively recent phenomenon. Had the languages of the ancient Libyans, Mauretanians, Numidians, and the rest survived to the present day, one would not expect such a high level of comprehensibility among the surviving dialects or such as clear cut dialect continuum.

Every other source about the Numidians I've read about describes them as "Berbers". They may not have qualified overmuch on their ethnicity of linguistic background, but since there was no allusion made regarding their origins being anywhere else apart from North Africa, it seemed a safe assumption. Especially as this was prior to the Islamic era.

So excuse me, but I don't regret for a minute trying to be helpful to the author of this thread by giving out a suggestion. However misguided you think it is.

 

[Leo Caesius]

Every other source about the Numidians I've read about describes them as "Berbers".

You must be getting your information off the internet, then. Describing the Numidians as "Berbers" is like describing the inhabitants of Roman-era Gallia as "the French".

I dedicate a couple of weeks to the Berbers in a course I teach regularly, and the book I use is this one, which is an excellent source on the Berbers, and discusses the peoples of North Africa in the ancient world as well, although it is a bit more circumspect about identifying them with Berbers than most online sources are.

So excuse me, but I don't regret for a minute trying to be helpful to the author of this thread by giving out a suggestion. However misguided you think it is.

Thank you for your contributions.

 

[Abdul Hadi Pasha]

So excuse me, but I don't regret for a minute trying to be helpful to the author of this thread by giving out a suggestion. However misguided you think it is.

Do you think it's helpful to get defensive and irritated when an actual PhD specializing in ancient Middle Eastern languages gives you insight into something he's a world expert in and with which you might not have equivalent experience? I realize the internet is a wondrous tool, but in some matters, a cursory perusal doesn't quite match decades of intensive study.

 

[Lysandros Aikiedes]

Do you think it's helpful to get defensive and irritated when an actual PhD specializing in ancient Middle Eastern languages gives you insight into something he's a world expert in and with which you might not have equivalent experience? I realize the internet is a wondrous tool, but in some matters, a cursory perusal doesn't quite match decades of intensive study.

I had no reason to think that the Numidians were anything other than "Berber", or "Libyan". I was never sure whether or not that they were related to the modern-day Kabyle, Tuaregs, or the Chaoui groups.

I was pretty sure that despite their relationship with the Carthaginians, the Numidians weren't Punic. Both Punics and Berbers/Libyans practiced agriculture. But while the Phoenicians often colonized coastal regions, native North Africans were often nomads and pastoralists as well.

And I never thought for one moment that the Numidians were Iberian or Subsaharan Africans.

For lack of a better term, I thought of the Numidians as native North Africans. The term "Berber" was incidental. Never mind the internet, thats what I read in books, although that was years ago. I didn't think there was a major distinction between the terms before today. This is the first I've heard of it.

 

[Leo Caesius]

I had no reason to think that the Numidians were anything other than "Berber", or "Libyan". I was never sure whether or not that they were related to the modern-day Kabyle, Tuaregs, or the Chaoui groups.

[...]

For lack of a better term, I thought of the Numidians as native North Africans. The term "Berber" was incidental. Never mind the internet, thats what I read in books, although that was years ago. I didn't think there was a major distinction between the terms before today. This is the first I've heard of it.

Well, if you really have followed the subject closely, you'd realize just how problematic the term "Berber" is, on many levels - not merely in this instance, where we're anachronistically projecting a decidedly post-Islamic term back into classical antiquity, but also for its pejorative connotations and lack of any meaningful semantic content.

Contra your first paragraph, "Libyan" and "Berber" are definitely not the same thing. "Libyan" is purely a geographic designation whereas "Berber" is a linguistic one. The people who speak "Berber" languages really have little else in common with one another - they are sedentary and nomadic, live in the countryside and the city, occupy mountain valleys and desert oases (and perhaps even Atlantic islands), have black skin, white skin, and every shade in between - in short, the term only makes sense as a linguistic term.

The use of the term "Berber" to describe the peoples of North Africa in antiquity is a relatively recent phenomenon--no later than the 80s, really. There have always been (IMHO quite reasonable) conjectures about the relationship between the contemporary population and the population in antiquity, but these never went beyond the linguistic level, and frankly we just don't know enough about the languages of North Africa at that time to say one way or the other. Some scholars discern Berber in the so-called Libyan inscriptions from Tripolitania and Algeria, but despite the fact that we have considerable research on modern Berber languages and even bilingual Latin-Libyan and Punic-Libyan texts, no scholar has yet succeeded in "breaking the code" and satisfactorily classifying the language of these texts. Furthermore, Berber isn't the only game in town; at least one Nilo-Saharan language, Kwarandzyəy, is spoken in Algeria. That's not to say that there's a Nilo-Saharan substrate underlying the Berber in the Maghreb... that seems unlikely to me, but we can't completely discard the possibility.

 

[Abdul Hadi Pasha]

Well, if you really have followed the subject closely, you'd realize just how problematic the term "Berber" is, on many levels - not merely in this instance, where we're anachronistically projecting a decidedly post-Islamic term back into classical antiquity, but also for its pejorative connotations and lack of any meaningful semantic content.

Contra your first paragraph, "Libyan" and "Berber" are definitely not the same thing. "Libyan" is purely a geographic designation whereas "Berber" is a linguistic one. The people who speak "Berber" languages really have little else in common with one another - they are sedentary and nomadic, live in the countryside and the city, occupy mountain valleys and desert oases (and perhaps even Atlantic islands), have black skin, white skin, and every shade in between - in short, the term only makes sense as a linguistic term.

The use of the term "Berber" to describe the peoples of North Africa in antiquity is a relatively recent phenomenon--no later than the 80s, really. There have always been (IMHO quite reasonable) conjectures about the relationship between the contemporary population and the population in antiquity, but these never went beyond the linguistic level, and frankly we just don't know enough about the languages of North Africa at that time to say one way or the other. Some scholars discern Berber in the so-called Libyan inscriptions from Tripolitania and Algeria, but despite the fact that we have considerable research on modern Berber languages and even bilingual Latin-Libyan and Punic-Libyan texts, no scholar has yet succeeded in "breaking the code" and satisfactorily classifying the language of these texts. Furthermore, Berber isn't the only game in town; at least one Nilo-Saharan language, Kwarandzyəy, is spoken in Algeria. That's not to say that there's a Nilo-Saharan substrate underlying the Berber in the Maghreb... that seems unlikely to me, but we can't completely discard the possibility.

Now you're just showing off.

 

[Lugal]

I'm not sure how comfortable I am with these identifications. These guys were "Libyans" (a primarily geographic designation first used by the Egyptians and later the Greeks). We know next to nothing about their languages (they may very well have spoken something somehow related to the Afroasiatic "Berber" languages - but not necessarily as their direct ancestor). Leaving aside the appropriateness of the term "Berber", using it to describe any peoples or languages before the Islamic period is simply anachronistic, a bit like talking about the Roman English.

Interesting. I mentioned Sheshonk because several Amazigh groups claim him as one of their own. There are a few few that even follow a calender dated from his reign. I have no doubt modern politics played an influence, but I would consider their connection stronger than many political claims.

I always wondered if something similar to the Italic languages could have happened with the Berber languages: there were many different branches/languages but all modern descendants are only descended from one of them.

 

[Leo Caesius]

Interesting. I mentioned Sheshonk because several Amazigh groups claim him as one of their own. There are a few few that even follow a calender dated from his reign. I have no doubt modern politics played an influence, but I would consider their connection stronger than many political claims.

Actually, the (now sadly defunct) Académie berbère d'echanges et de recherches culturelles (established 1966 in Paris) first made the connection with Chechonq in 1968, setting "year zero" for the new ère Chachnaq at 950 BCE.

I always wondered if something similar to the Italic languages could have happened with the Berber languages: there were many different branches/languages but all modern descendants are only descended from one of them.

Undoubtedly there were other Afroasiatic languages spoken in North Africa; to the east, you have Egyptian and Coptic. Likewise, Nilo-Saharan languages have always been spoken north of the Sahara; in addition to the aforementioned Kwarandzyəy, you have the various Nubian languages spoken in Egypt and the Sudan, as well as Old Nubia, their putative ancestor, of which a few manuscripts remain.