Jdaid rock engravings – Taouz Morocco
Rupest engravings are a very rich raw material that allows to write history. These rock documents, dating back thousands of years, are vestiges and clues of human existence in such a region. As for the Bani-Dra region, in particular the territories of the province of Tata (South Moroccan) occupied by the mountain of Bani and the Oued Dra, contains about 80 major rock sites. We cite as an example: Adrar Metgourine, Tircht, Tiggane, Ighir Ighnain, Melalg, Imaoun, Adroum, Tachoukalt.... Sites visited and studied by foreign researchers since colonial times, such as: O. du Puigaudeau and M. Senones, R. La Fanechere, H. Lhote, A. Rodrigue, A. Simoneau. He said that with the High Atlas "...Draa Middle and Yagour (High Atlas) deserve to be studied comparatively from the point of view of neolithization, because they are the two most important rock ensembles south of Marrakech".
But despite everything that has been published, it is not enough to know more about the content of this national heritage which can carry more details about the man director as an artist and narrator who had described in his way his environment and his way of life.
To know the importance of these engravings in the field of writing history, we will make a chronological passage on the history of the Bani-Dra region based on the analyses and interpretations of the contents of the engravings by our researchers cited The ancient history extracted from engravings is divided chronologically into several periods.
Despite these efforts, however, this division sometimes poses problems, especially the separation between each other in terms of its approximate dating and its characteristics.
The Hunters' Period
The rock figures belonging to this period are almost dominated by wildlife: elephants, rhinoceros, giraffes, ostriches, antelopes... Cattle are very rare.
The dog is present among hunters for defense and hunting for wildlife. Traps and arrows are also means of hunting to attack prey. In addition, we see the presence of various symbols in several forms: spirals, labyrinths, circles, serpentiforms... interpreted as traps especially when associated with animals, or as symbols that have a religious and spiritual aspect and role.
As for anthropomorphs, man was presented as hunter of wildlife by attacking them by bows, arrows, polished axes... A.Simoneau said that "Predynast Egyptians and their Libya neighbours are content with a phallic case, held by a belt that supports an animal tail on the back: This "wild" costume, which disappears from the lower Nile valley at the beginning of the Pharaonic monarchy, persists among the Libyan pastors of the desert steppe who have not changed their kind of life."
The appearance of some figures of cattle in the midst of hunters was interpreted by A Simoneau that we are in a milieu of hunter-pastors where the two cultures mix, that is, we are in a milieu of passage from hunting to pasteurization and domestication. For the majority the dating of this period would be before 3000 B.C., because since that date began the Bovidian period i.e. the beginning of the neolithic in the South Moroccan.
The Bovidian Period
In contrast to the previous period when wildlife is omnipresent, the Bovidian period had experienced a predomination of the figures of cattle (vaches, oxen, buffaloes...) presented with details, absent in the middle of hunters, such as the mamella for the females the sexual limbs for the males, cows on knees (Tighzdarin to Assif n Tmanart), others with pedoloques at the neck (Tachukalt to Imugadir) ... all these details give us the meaning that man had at this time began to rear cattle. It is the transition to domestication and sedentarization.
The representation of several figures in a single rock and "the serpentiform decorations are unrealistic and suggest perhaps serifications or ferrades of belonging to a herd", sometimes these bovids "are wearing pendants... These attributes have sometimes been interpreted as amulets, bells or more simply fanons... oxen are often in fact bulls, either because sex is duly represented." The lines that cross the bodies are also interpreted as ropes that attach luggage, i.e. they are used as means of transport. So we are in a domestication environment where man is very close to animals as a breeder.
This domestication began in a wild environment before the appearance of "beef
"The ritual ox". "So it seems that on the medium Draa, the beef has adapted to a semi-wild medium... we don't have any carrier beef, beef mounted, or beef cart... so we are at the stage of the ritual beef, between wild beef and carrier beef... This original domestication, poorly assured, comes from the late arrival of domesticated bovids on the Draa..." On the other hand, beef mounted (4 examples to Adrar Metgourine Akka) represents an advanced period of domestication where man exploited them as a means of transport before the appearance of the horse and camel. This beef is dated to Akka (South Moroccan) from 2000 B.C., which means a delay in dating this beef to Tassili n-Ajer (Algerian Sahara) which dates back to 3500 B.C. From this point of view, neolithization in the South of Morocco would be 2500 B.C. compared to the Tassili where it dates back to 4000 B.C.
It is also obvious that "the shepherds of the bovids, of Saharan origin, have reached the Moroccan South". This means that there was a permanent relationship between the Moroccan South and the Central Sahara (Tassili). On their part, O du Puigaudeau and Mr Senones announced that the Bovidian group was becoming clearer during the second millennium BC. And that's where we saw the dog as a means of defense and hunting, it was also beside the cattle, "...one of the domestic animals that had a great role in the life of the population of the South
Moroccan". "The neolithization of the Moroccan South is therefore late: the Bovidian wave of the 3rd millennium touches the still mesolithic world: the breeding begins then in the Moroccan South, but the pastor is modeled on the hunter who retains his essential characteristics".
The man appeared in this medium covered with animal skins as a garment (example in Tamggert n tâyyalin Akka), sometimes he wore what is called the Libyan feather symbol of prestige at imazighen.
In the end, despite the Bovidian domination over the figures, there is a presence of some characteristics of the previous period (rhinoceros, elephants, ostriches...), which means that man had not completely changed his way of life.
Moreover, it should be noted that "The Dra-Bani region was a refuge for the Saharan hunters, the atlasic chains, and the Atlantic proximity have long maintained in the Piemonte valleys sufficient humidity for the great fauna. »
But with the degradation of the climate towards drought, the majority of these animals had left the region by gaining more humid ones such as the High Atlas.
The tank period
For H.Lhote, this period is undoubtedly late Bovidian because the figures of the tanks still exist in a Bovidian environment, they are never accompanied by man or animals, which poses a problem of knowing the animal used to shoot them. For his part, G.Camps found that these tanks in the South of Morocco and even throughout the Maghreb are not intended for transport or war, they bear witness to the prestige of a few characters or a particular group. It is also assumed that they are only road signs engraved by passing passengers in order to locate their route to facilitate their return or to guide other travellers.
But the discovery of eight tanks engraved at the site of Tircht (Assif n Tmanart) by O. du Puigaudeau and Mr Senones "provides a new argument in favour of R. Mauny's theory that makes one of his tank tracks pass through the Oued Tamanart". Knowing that "...R.Mauny has established the western route of these tanks from Figuig, 142 mark a road that passes through Tauz, Foum El Hassan, the Zemmour, the Adrar Tmar, the Tagant, the Dhar Tichit, Walata and ends up in Mali, in Tondia near Goundam. A branch line connected to the Atlantic the crossroads of Oued and slopes of Foum El Hassan, by Douroudi, Timguilcht and Tafraout, his headline is in Biougra..." But G.Camps strongly criticized some maps that try to trace tank roads especially in mountainous areas difficult to cross.
On the other hand R.V. Valleverdu believed that the tanks of Tata accompanied the western route headed towards the Sub-Saharan regions in the middle of the I millennium BC.
"The Ait Or Mribet did not lose all memory of the Carthaginians, whom they call Fniks, Phoenicians. One of their traditions attributes to them the construction of the Agadir at the top of the mountain... that's why, they say, they still call it Agadir n Fniks... These Carthaginians, having climbed the Drâa in their conges, came inside to exchange what we would call their milking parlour -ceramics, verroteries, fabrics and perfumes- for cereals, oil, wild beast skins and especially ivory of elephants and rhinocero horns..."
It was also believed that this western route was very important as the eastern route through Tassili. It could be the same route that would be used with camels before the arrival of the Arabs in the 7th century AD.
The horse period
The figures of the horse are very rare throughout the Moroccan South and the Bani-Dra in particular (2 examples in Tighzdarin), and they are not of great importance compared to those of the Central Sahara (Algeria), where the horses are associated with tanks. According to G camps the horsemen came from Egypt by Libya heading west by the Saharan Atlas. This appearance of the horse took place between the second millennium BC and the first centuries of the first millennium BC. They dominated the bovidians. At first they used the tanks as drivers then they would be riders. From the point of view of O du Puigaudeau and M. Senones this period is dated to the Moroccan South of the I millennium B.C. "...The horse made its appearance with the Hyksos and the peoples of the sea...". (O du Puigaudeau and M Senones 1964, p. 8). The same view is taken by A.Gaudio who dated the
come from the horse from Egypt to the west about 1200 BC (A. Gaudio 1992, p 5). For his part S.Searight dated the horse mounted throughout the Maghreb of the I millennium BC.
The libyco-amazigh period
Specialists are used to linking this period to the previous one, as it is difficult to separate them. "The horse group that will melt without very precise limits with the libyco-berber group" This period is characterized by the inscriptions to the Amazigh character Tifinagh, which "...,In the present state of our knowledge...cannot be older than 750 BC". These numerous inscriptions in the High Atlas are rare in the Bani-Dra (2 examples in Assif n Tmanart). In this period appears the use of metallic weapons that A. Rodrigue has found 40 examples engraved in the Moroccan South.
But this subject of metal weapons poses problems especially when they are associated with wild animals. "The rhinoceros-metal axe association thus poses a problem for the time being insoluble. The only satisfactory hypothesis would be to make the late hunting practices of a relictual fauna coincide at the end of Neolithic times with the use of the first weapons of metal (copper?)".
And what is complex about this problem is that we find a few types of axes in the Bani-Dra incomparable to those of the High Atlas where we know that he has a great relationship with the Age of the Iberian Bronze. The first type with "panel edge" is far from being stone. On the other hand, the second type, which is "knit weapons", is far from metal. The third type of "piriform weapons" similar to those found at the Bronze Age station of the High Atlas dated 4000 C.E. All we can say is that
"the metallurgical centres of the High Atlas ... would not have been exclusively dependent on technological innovations coming from Europe via Spain or the Middle East, but would have been in contact with populations of metal-armed pastors of transatlasic origin (Saharian even?)".
In this period the man became armed horseman of the hallebardes, daggers, shields... Very obvious in the High Atlas compared to the Bani-Dra where they are very rare. The very large hands one of the features in the engravings of this period (a single example in Touzirt Assif n Tmanart) dated to the Iberian peninsula between the X and the VII century BC.
The Camelian Period
With climate change in North Africa that had allowed the dry climate to spread over a large part of the region, it is clear that animal species would also change and replace themselves with others that would adapt to the new climate. Then under these circumstances the camel appeared. This animal is brought into Egypt by the Persians around 500 B.C. then it is stretched towards North Africa from the last centuries B.C. to be known at least at the beginning of the fourth century AD. The figures of this animal as well as the horse are very rare in the engravings of the region we are talking about, with the exception of some examples at the rock site of Khaoui El Ktbane (Tata). Abdellah Mezegh
Vikings in Southern Morocco?
From our special envoy Christine Holzbauer
Before the Islamization of Morocco, men from Northern Europe would have come, by sea, to the south
in search of the copper they needed to forge their weapons. A thesis that the recent discovery of funerary megaliths and rock paintings seems to accredit
It was July 2001. Fatimatou Malika bent Benata had planted her khaima, the decorated tent that the nomads of the Sahara love, near the well of Aouinet Azguer. When she came to the narrowest part of the valley, where the gazelles left the trace of their legs in the sand, she started looking for a shelter: the sun hit hard and she feared that her youngest son would take a blow. She had ended up slipping, with the child, under one of those rock tables that cut the cliff like so many slices of cake. What was not then his surprise to see, painted on the ceiling, drawings in a state of perfect conservation. There were naked men, armed with a bow, dancing around an ox – azguer, in Berber, means beef – and all kinds of wild animals: antelope, ibex, deer, feline, elephant, ostrich. Who was the artist who had made such beautiful red ochre drawings in a place so unsuitable for housing and when could all this go up well? Fatimatou was perplexed. His first reflex was to remove these paintings with water. She had not managed to dilute them. She then felt confused that the successive scenes as they slipped under the rock referred to rites dating back to the night of time.
"Where there were engravings, one could be sure that there was a mine"
On her return to the village of Mseied, she hastened to alert the Khalifa Babuzazid al-Mghafri, who, in turn, warns the caid, who informs the governor of the province of Tan-Tan. Once the Rabat authorities have warned, the "photos" that the nomad Fatimatou discovered by chance on the ceiling of his shelter-sub-rock begin to arouse lusts. The khalifa of Mseied, a friendly quinquennial who later became "discoverer" of prehistoric art, informs a journalist author of several specialized guides on the tracks of Morocco, Jacques Gandini, of the existence of rock paintings. The latter, who is closing one of his works on this area, decides to mount an expedition. He invited a French archaeologist who had been living in Morocco for nearly sixty years, Robert Letan, to join him. In addition to the paintings, exceptional for the region – so far, they are mainly engravings that have been found in this western part of the Sahara, unlike the Algerian Tassili or Chadian Tibesti – they will discover, in the upper part of Chebeika's l`oued, about forty megalithic buildings and structures in the shape of large crescents. The presence of these "geoglyph" tumulus – quite similar to those inventoried by Theodore Monod in 1948, which is found throughout the Moroccan and Mauritanian Sahara – is another major finding. These discoveries revive fears of
At the age of 82, Robert Letan keeps a good foot, a good eye when it comes to scraping on archaeological sites. The right gaze, the pinched nostril and the cap firmly riveted on his head as soon as he left his home, this colonial artillery soldier, a Second-time veteran
World War I, spent his life searching the stony deserts of Atlas and Anti-Atlas. "At the time, we had neither the comfort of an air-conditioned 4x4 nor the safety of GPS," he recalls. For this native of Lorraine, who belongs to a self-taught generation forced to leave the school benches "to learn how to kill!", Africa, and more particularly Morocco, where he arrived in 1944, aroused an inextinguishable thirst: that of a quest for the origins that his work in the mines has further sharpened. "Knowing the history of humanity reassures us, opens us ways, because it relativizes the panics to come, shows us that the end of the world is not for tomorrow. Ultimately, the engineer always wins over the merchant!" he insisted, at a conference to explain to his colleagues the rock art too long underestimated in Africa, while he is, according to him, part of the firstfruits of writing. Its purpose? To help the Moroccan authorities develop an "intelligent" tourism that preserves archaeological sites while allowing people to take advantage of the benefits of discoveries they are often robbed of or the last to be informed of. "Without my writings, the finding of Tan-Tan's paintings would never have been attributed to a nomad!" he proudly said. Even if he is the first to denounce vandalism that endangers these treasures of humanity
Preserving archaeological sites
To conjure up a tormented personal history of which this former communist who participated in the trade union struggles of 1936 was "liberated" in his first two novels (Le Pied-Noir et Sofia, insoumise, edited with author's account and on sale in Casablanca), while simultaneously conducting long-term historical research on his country of adoption, "Monsieur Robert" devoted an entire work to the protohistory of the Moroccan South. Currently being reissued to include Tan-Tan's discoveries, he reiterates the thesis of a Scandinavian influence on copper metallurgy in the Anti-Atlas Mountains at the Bronze Age. As well as being a writer, historian and archaeologist, Robert Letan is also a metallurgist. His main discovery, he owes it to an assignment in Irhem, in the mountains of the Anti-Atlas, which are full of copper mines in which he discovered a great profusion of rock paintings. "To such an extent that, where there were engravings, one could be sure that there was a mine." For him, the copper trade was produced before and during the Bronze Age. The "red men from the heart of the sea", spoken of in the ancient Hebrew manuscripts of the Upper Draa, were probably the ancestors of the Vikings, the Dans, who came to the South of Morocco looking for the raw material they needed to forge their weapons. The use of copper developed around 3000 B.C. around the pond
A mysterious people in the eyes of Arab conquerors and Western explorers, the Tuaregs derive their origins from the Saharan Berber civilization. The myth of Amamellen, designer of own writing, ancestor of the tifinagh, refers to a writing
cuneiform is similar to that exhibited at the National Museum in Copenhagen. As for the founding myth of women, he said that Queen Ti-n-Hinan ("Celle des tentes") and her handmaid Takama, who had come from the Tafilalet (Morocco) on their white mehari, would have found on their arrival in the Haggar a primitive people, the Isebaten, with whom they would have had daughters. Thus, the noble tribes of Hoggar would descend from the three daughters of Ti-n-Hinan, while those of Takama would be the mothers of the vassal tribes. According to this legend, Ti-n-Hinan was buried in the fifth century, long before Islam arrived in the Sahara. The Tuaregs are said to have inherited their language in addition to a tribally organized matriarchal society.
The search for Berberity, Lahoucine Faouzi, 32, made it the key to its success. For this explorer from Agadir, a great lover of desert and nomadic life, the jackpot arrived with the broadcast in 2001 on Moroccan television, for the first time in Amazigh language, of a feature film that his production house, Faouzi Vision, produced and directed. "When I proposed a series of 24 documentaries as part of a new program dedicated to travel, Amouddou, the RTM (Moroccan Radio-Television) signed immediately," he says. The first episode, Mémoire de Tagmoute, which tells the story of a prehistoric village, a real living legend because of the presence of rockstones, old attices and the tomb of the prophet Daniel, received the award of the best director at the Cairo Festival in July 2002. Lahoucine Faouzi, a great enthusiast of speleology, founded in 1996 with some friends an association of about thirty members, which allowed him to explore a large number of caves. "It was normal for us to be interested in rock paintings," explains Aziz Iguiss, president of the association and official at the Ministry of Finance. Passionate about prehistory, he pushed for an Amouddou program to be devoted to Azguer's paintings, which he considers as "a unique heritage for Moroccan archaeology". With Robert Letan's complicity, Faouzi Vision has set up a new ex
Close links between Berberity and Negritude
The expedition started with the blessing of the khalifa of Mseied, very proud to show a tifinagh inscription evoking recent times when elephants still lived in Tazzout Ouarkziz. Once there, she slipped under the shelters in the middle of the desert, crawling as best she could. The diffusion of light, the smallness of the passage, the scarcity of air, all formed like a magical halo around the fragile pictograms millennia. Robert Letan seemed to have regained his 20-year-old dexterity. He was inexhaustible. Under the spell of charm, we crossed the centuries. Steatopyges – the development of a fat mass in the area of the sacrum and buttocks – of the characters represented, most naked, with a penile case, dancing around animals. Was it Bochimans from South Africa, even Hottentots or Bantus? The existence of natural barriers difficult to cross made this hypothesis unlikely. Even if the dancers of Azguer confirm that, like those found in neolithic deposits in southern Tunisia, Algeria or Morocco, negroid pastors could have settled in the Draa Valley, which remained very fertile after the drying up of the third millennium before Jesus Christ.
More importantly for Robert Letan, the presence of painted tanks, which, unlike those found in Central Sahara, are not coupled. In his view, this type of "humanly driven" tank reinforces the hypothesis that Azguer's paintings are more recent than they seem – "a date close to the final European bronze". If these tanks are mainly for the transport of copper, as he says, then it is possible to think that these (black) populations have been in contact with manufacturers of surface megaliths (Vikings) from northern Europe. In his book on the First
Berbers. Between the Mediterranean, Tassili and Nile, the Algerian Malika Hachid, director of the Tassili des Ajjer National Park, claims that "there are much closer links than would have been thought between berberity and negritude". According to her, Libyans and Ethiopians yesterday would be Tuaregs and Izzegaren-Harratine today. The paintings of Azguer add to the complex human mosaic of the Sahara the Yemeni Jews and the Christianized northern populations who, at the time of the metallurgists who had preceded Islamization, could have contributed to the missing link of Berberity.
