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What Happened to the Ancient Libyans? Chasing Sources across the Sahara from Herodotus to Ibn Khaldun
Richard L. Smith
Ferrum College
| Piecing together the ethnic history of the ancient world in a systematic way is an impossible mission. One particularly perplexing problem is the fate of groups that lived beyond the bounds of city and empire: hundreds of them come and go in the historical record. We think we know what happened to a few, such as the Franks and the Angles and Saxons. Many others, however, simply disappear from the historical record, presumably the victims of larger or more martial groups, although the disappearance of an entity was more likely to have meant absorption or fragmentation than complete annihilation.1 Even prominent or notorious peoples came to mysterious ends: the Scythians fade away while the Huns lose their storied warlord and make a precipitous exit. What about the people the Greeks called "Libyans," and, in particular, those who lived in the Sahara?2 Were the Libyans, described by Herodotus in the fifth century B.C.E., the same people Ibn Khaldun wrote about under the name "Sanhaja" almost two thousand years later? Ethnic history rarely provides straight yes and no answers. |
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The indigenous peoples of North Africa appear to go for long intervals with little discernable change. Periodically a metamorphosis occurs, usually accompanying some larger cataclysmic event: the Sahara becomes drier and drier still; the Egyptian Empire to the east, or a millennium later the Roman Empire to the north, or another millennium later the Songhay Empire to the south collapses, reverberating deep into the interior; Islam enters North Africa and makes its way through war and trade to beyond the southern fringe of the desert; the Hilalian Arabs, a new ethnic strain, appear, affecting politics, language, and culture. But is this metamorphosis model illusionary, less the result of some drastic change than of the perspective from which we must observe our subject? We are, after all, viewing this history through portals in time rather than along a continuous pane of glass. |
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Four portals appear over the past four thousand years, each a look at the peoples of North Africa from the outside. The first comes from the Egyptians of the third and second millennium B.C.E., who made artistic representations and occasionally commented on their neighbors, the Tjehenu and the Tjemehu, and later the Libu and the Mesh wesh. A second portal opened at the time of the Greeks and Romans, beginning with Herodotus and closing a thousand years later with Procopius. Several centuries pass, and a new portal becomes available, courtesy of geographers and historians who wrote in Arabic beginning with al-Ya'qubi in the late ninth century and reaching its acme with Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth. Herodotus's Libyans have been replaced by the Sanhaja and Zanata. A final portal opens in the second half of the millennium with the work of Leo Africanus and culminates on the brink of the colonial period with Heinrich Barth. The Sanhaja and their kin have become Tuaregs and Moors. |
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Societies are never static; cultural traits and social patterns evolve through time. History lumbers on propelled by myriads of subtle and unassuming changes we interpret as a process of continuity that occurs both within and between portals. An organic model underlies the metamorphosis model. A look through one portal should show neither exactly the same nor an entirely different people than in the previous or subsequent portals. The gaps between portals necessitate transitions that must come from the historian's mind. A little evidence from either side combined with a healthy dose of inference and a steadied measure of conjecture should fill in the gaps between portals. And it does—but not uniformly. |
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