Session 12 July 1997

[Persej]

Whereas the Arabs accepted the tutelage of Islamic caliphs, the “fiercely independent” Berbers abhorred the idea of central authority and were prepared to defend their liberty to the death.

At the same time, these Berbers were seen as endowed with values consistent with liberté, egalité, fraternité. In the words of Col. Daumas, head of Algerian affairs for the French government, “They have accepted the Koran but they have not embraced it.” The Berbers were described as economically frugal by nature, with a “commercial instinct” distinguishing them from the frivolous Arabs. Finally, on the political level, the Berbers’ “natural anarchy” was seen to represent an underlying democracy, symbolized by the egalitarian village council or tajmaat. In sum, Berbers were seen as “almost European” in their nature, with members of the collectivity singled out as the preferred agents of the colonial project in Algeria, the privileged targets of the mission civilisatrice.

Berbers in France and Algeria - MERIP

merip.org

The description of Berbers sounds like a description of Celts.

 

[Persej]

After centuries of calling all North Africans Moors, Europeans didn’t feel the need to change their practice, even when they realised that not everyone they called a Moor thought they belonged together.

‘Moor’ was the name that Europeans had used to describe a variety of North African groups since Roman times. For those who found old designations more compelling, it had the advantage of being very old. It might not have been what North Africans called themselves, but using Moor skipped over the more complicated question of North Africans’ self-identification and the fact that what was known about the ancient Moors came from their Roman masters. When the Arab Muslims conquered North Africa in the 7th century, they used the term ‘Berbers’ to describe those peoples whom the Romans had called Moors, as well as those the Romans called barbarians or something else.

Confusingly, Europeans held on to ‘Moor’ as a name for the people but called the land Barbary, a word they did not imagine had anything to do with Berbers. Over a few decades in the 19th century, the French began to try to sort all this out and to devise a new way of representing the locals, one that adapted native nomenclatures to the project of French colonialism in Algeria. In the process, Barbary gave way to North Africa (Afrique du Nord), Arabs became Oriental Semites, and Berbers became a white race – or at least a non-black one – and the true indigenous inhabitants (indigènes, autochtones) of North Africa.

(...)

In spite of all the imprecision, and a good deal of confusion, Europeans were also certain that the Moors were not Berbers. Shaler spoke for the still-reigning conventional wisdom when he wrote: ‘The Berbers … are a white race of men, who inhabit the chain of Mount Atlas, and extend to the borders of the Desert of Sahara.’ The Berbers might live under the political authority of the Moors, Shaler wrote, but ‘the Moorish governments’ have never succeeded in subjugating them because, politically, the Berbers, ‘like ultra-Mississippian Indians, live in a state of savage independence’. Shaler’s intended audience was Americans, and so his comparisons sometimes took on an American hue. He portrayed the Amazigh, Kabyles, Tuarycks and Siwah – the putative four nations of Berbers – all as white, and so were the Moors and even the Asiatic Arabs. While he didn’t elaborate on what criteria he used to decide their whiteness, Shaler meant that the Berbers were not Negroes.

How the West made Arabs and Berbers into races | Aeon Essays

When Europeans colonised North Africa, they imposed their preoccupation with race onto its diverse peoples and deep past

aeon.co

 

[Persej]

The derivation of Hibernia
By Jacques Pauwels

What is the derivation of the Roman name for Ireland - Hibernia? According to Jacques Pauwels it comes from an ancient Afro-Asiatic word iber meaning a land surrounded by water.

Jacques goes on - " Anybody interested in this topic may want to take a look at my book, 'Beneath the Dust of Time: A History of the Names of Peoples and Places', London and Colombo, 2009, which is available on my Academia site. I agree with the theory that the pre-Indo-European “substrate languages” of pre- and proto-historical Europe were related to the language family that is now called Afro-Asiatic. I am a historian, not a linguist, but my book is based on the research done by a formidable Italian palaeolinguist, Giovanni Semerano. Here are two excerpts relevant for this discussion.

p. 27:
The homeland of the Berbers, North Africa, was and is a gigantic land, surrounded by the waters of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. In their Usko-Mediterranean language [i.e. pre-Indo-European language, belonging to the Afro-Asiatic family of languages], the Palaeo-Berbers had a specific term for ‘sea’, ilel, while ‘land’ was called iber. Iber contains the same root as the Sumerian bireti, the Akkadian ep[e]ru, and the Phoenician afar.

The meaning of words based on this root is always the same: ‘earth’, ‘land’, and more specifically ‘land in contrast to water’, ‘land surrounded by water’, therefore occasionally also ‘island’, though more typically ‘mainland’ in contrast to the sea and its islands. When using the term iber, the Palaeo-Berbers appear to have had in mind their own land, i.e. the homeland of their people, but also ‘earth’ or ‘land’ in contrast to water, ‘mainland’.

Not surprisingly, they also used that word to refer to the great European peninsula that stretched to the north of their own North African homeland, which they named Iberia. In fact, many thousands of years BCE, Iberia was settled by Berbers or other Saharans related to the Berbers; the present-day Spaniards and Portuguese are the descendants of these “Iberians” of Antiquity, as genetic tests demonstrate.

(In this sense too, the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa form one single world, a “bicontinent”, as Fernand Braudel has emphasized in his masterful study of the Mediterranean. [Footnote 29: Braudel (1990.1: 137). See also Blake & Knapp (2005: 5):

“The cultural differences that separate Europe and Africa in the present day are projected back onto the past with little justification”.] Like North Africa, Iberia too was a vast land surrounded by the waters of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean; it therefore amply merited the name Iberia in the sense of ‘land in contrast to water’, ‘mainland’. In addition, Iberia was also a ‘mainland’ in contrast to the islands scattered in the surrounding seas, for example the Canary Islands and the Balearic Archipelago, which were likewise settled by Palaeo-Berbers.

Interestingly, in Antiquity there were other “lands in contrast to water” that were called Iberia, as we shall see later. [Footnote 30: More will be said about the root iber and its significance of ‘land in contrast to/near water’ in chapter 5, in the section dealing with “primeval hydronyms”.]

p. 125:
The British Isles, too, were conquered by the Romans, except some isolated parts of it that were left in peace, for whatever reason, by Caesar, Augustus, and the like.

A notable example is Ireland. That island had a Celtic name, Iveriu, or Iberiu, of which “Erin” is a cognate we are familiar with. An Old English version of Erin was Yra, but Yra was really an ethnonym, meaning ‘Irish’. As a corresponding toponym, the English introduced Yraland (or Iraland), and thus were born the modern English Ireland and its international cognates. In Antiquity, then, the term Ireland did not yet exist, but Iveriu (or Iberiu) and Erin did. The Greeks adopted the latter as Ierne.

To the Romans, on the other hand, Iveriu/Iberiu conjured up the Latin hibernum, ‘winter’, and so they baptized Ireland Hibernia, or sometimes Invernia, meaning ‘winterland’. This name belied the fact that Ireland’s climate happens to be rather mild. Moreover, the Romans knew lands that were far more “wintery”, for example Scandinavia, and it was the aforementioned term Thule that in Roman minds evoked the true ‘winterland’. Hibernia may have sounded like Iveriu, but it was obviously an absurd name for an island that was far from ‘wintery’. But what was the real meaning of Iveriu? ‘Land of the warriors’, say some, fertile country’, say others; still others think that the answer to the riddle is ‘western land’.

Such theories are far from convincing. In contrast, there is no denying the striking similarity of Iveriu/Iberiu and Iberia, and it is instructive that in Latin one not only used Hibernia, but also Hiberio and Iberio. The latter names do not evoke winter but, like Iveriu, appears to reflect the same Usko-Mediterranean [ = pre-IE] root as Iberia, referring to ‘land’, more specifically, ‘land surrounded by water’.[note 81:

In this respect there is an interesting remark in Deroy & Mulon (1992: 73): “In the beginning of the Roman Empire, the beta of the Greek alphabet was already pronounced like a ‘v,’ as it would be in Byzantine and in modern Greek.”] The Iberian Peninsula is a land surrounded by water, and so is Ireland. The suggestion that Ireland may have an Usko-Mediterranean name is not that outlandish when one considers that intensive relations had already existed between the Iberian Peninsula on the one side, and the world of the Celts in Gaul and on the British Isles on the other, since the Bronze Age.[ Note 82: See the study by Ruiz-Gálvez Priego, La Europa Atlántica en la Edad del Bronce.]

These relations consisted not only of seaborne trade – for example the famous tin trade – but also of migrations from south to north. The so-called Celtic language and culture of the British Isles and of much of the Western European mainland possibly emerged as the result of the arrival of Usko-Mediterranean people from the south. [Note 83: Semerano (1984: 359) notes in this respect that “the most ancient population of Ireland is supposed to be of Iberian origin”; see also his remark on pp 377-78 about the inhabitants of Ireland in the Neolithic being “di razza ‘iberica’ e ‘mediterranea’, bruna di carnagione e di capelli, di statura piuttosto bassa”.]

The culture we refer to as “Celtic” may well have been a kind of fusion between the cultures and languages of, on the one hand, Usko-Mediterranean people [i.e. migrants from the Sahara] who had already moved there from the south many thousands of years earlier and, on the other hand, Indo-Europeans who joined them some time during the course of the second millennium BCE.

With respect to the Iberia of Antiquity, or at least to the peninsula’s northern reaches, conventional historiography often cites the “Celtiberians”. Of this kind of Iberians it is assumed – without any substantial evidence – that they were Celts or that they were strongly influenced by Celtic neighbors to the north. It would be more useful to postulate the opposite and to look among the Celts for indications of Iberian migrations and influences; perhaps we will then have to reverse our terminology and speak of “Ibero-Celts”! In any event, the toponym Iveriu appears to reflect an Usko-Mediterranean origin on the part of the so-called Celtic culture or, at the very least, a potent Usko-Mediterranean linguistic influence on the Celtic world.

The derivation of Hibernia

 

[Persej]

Another interesting city in Spain, once ruled by Berbers, is Toledo.

Toledo preserved its status as a cultural centre; and a tag-team translation centre was established in which books in Arabic or Hebrew would be translated into Castilian by Muslim and Jewish scholars, and from Castilian into Latin by Castilian scholars, thus letting long-lost knowledge spread through Christian Europe again.

Toledo, Spain - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The Toledo School of Translators (Spanish: Escuela de Traductores de Toledo) is the group of scholars who worked together in the city of Toledo during the 12th and 13th centuries, to translate many of the Islamic philosophy and scientific works from Classical Arabic into Medieval Latin.

The School went through two distinct periods separated by a transitional phase. The first was led by Archbishop Raymond of Toledo in the 12th century, who promoted the translation of philosophical and religious works, mainly from classical Arabic into medieval Latin. Under King Alfonso X of Castile during the 13th century, the translators no longer worked with Latin as the final language, but translated into Old Spanish. This resulted in establishing the foundations of a first standard of the Spanish language, which eventually developed two varieties, one from Toledo and one from Seville.

Traditionally Toledo was a center of multilingual culture and had prior importance as a center of learning and translation, beginning in its era under Muslim rule. Numerous classical works of ancient philosophers and scientists that had been translated into Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age "back east" were well known in Al-Andalus such as those from the Neoplatonism school, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Ptolemy, etc., as well as the works of ancient philosophers and scientists from Persia, India, and China; these enabled Arabic-speaking populations at the time (both in the east and in "the west," or North Africa and the Iberian peninsula) to learn about many ancient classical disciplines that were generally inaccessible to the Christian parts of western Europe, and Arabic-speaking scientists in the eastern Muslim lands such as Ibn Sina, al-Kindi, al-Razi, and others, had added significant works to that ancient body of thought.

Al-Andalus's multi-cultural richness beginning in the era of Umayyad dynasty rule in that land (711-1031) was one of the main reasons why European scholars were traveling to study there as early as the end of the 10th century. As the Arabic-speaking rulers who initially came in 711 intermingled and intermarried with local populations, the co-existence of Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and the local Romance vernacular had seen the emergence of new pidgin vernaculars and bilingual song forms, as well as the creation of new bodies of literature in Arabic and Hebrew. The environment bred multi-lingualism. This era saw the development of a large community of Arabic-speaking Christians (known as Mozarabs) who were available to work on translations. But translating efforts were not methodically organized until Toledo was reconquered by Christian forces in 1085. The new rulers inherited vast libraries containing some of the leading scientific and philosophical thought not only of the ancient world, but of the Islamic east, the cutting edge of scientific discourse of the era—and it was all largely in Arabic.

Another reason for Al-Andalus's importance at the time is that some Christian leaders in certain other parts of Europe considered a few scientific and theological subjects studied by the ancients, and further advanced by the Arabic-speaking scientists and philosophers, to be heretical. The Condemnations of 1210–1277 at the medieval University of Paris, for example, were enacted to restrict the teachings of several theological works, among which were the physical treatises of Aristotle and the works of Averroes (the Latinized name of the Muslim philosopher-physician of al-Andalus, Ibn Rushd).

Toledo School of Translators - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The cathedral of Toledo is one of the three 13th-century High Gothic cathedrals in Spain and is considered, in the opinion of some authorities, to be the magnum opus of the Gothic style in Spain.

Toledo Cathedral - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

So the Toledo in Spain was a centre of knowledge in Europe at that time. And of course, the matrix control system had to suppress the spreading of that knowledge and created the Inquisition.