Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/40

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THE FIRE OF DESERT FOLK

farther and farther toward the north until it reached the territories of contemporary Algeria, Tripolitania, Tunisia and Morocco. They assume also with Tissot that two human streams met here, this one working outward from the borders of the Sahara and the other migrating from the north across the Spanish and Italian straits. The union of these two streams gave birth to the Berber race, which has the anthropological characteristics of the darker types of Europeans and of the brown race of the Sahara region, quite different and distinct from the African black peoples. The white races from ancient Spain, or Iberia, formed a part of this amalgamation. One can trace this origin of the Berbers on Egyptian monuments of the nineteenth dynasty, where they were referred to as "Libou." From this was derived the name of Libya, which phonetically resembles the names of the oldest Berber families, such as Liwata and Lwata. Among the Libu the Egyptians differentiated one tribe, distinguishing it as "Tahennou," which translates "people with a light skin."

Subsequent anthropology and history had to deal with the streams of newcomers arriving in Africa from everywhere—Chaldeans, Phoenicians and colonists from Rome; then a new wave of white men in the Vandals, Greeks and Normans; following these, the Arabian and Turkish flood. Under these influxes the question complicates itself and is finally drowned in a stream of names without meaning—Moors, Numidians, Lotophagi, Gaetuli, Gindans and Garamantes. Meanwhile the tribe of Nefzua has preserved in its ancient chronicles records of its relations with Egypt, just as Egyptian documents also refer to this relationship. Already in the fourteenth cen-