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Topic subjectRE: Honestly...
Topic URLhttp://board.okayplayer.com/okp.php?az=show_topic&forum=22&topic_id=2528&mesg_id=2555
2555, RE: Honestly...
Posted by Sopdet, Wed Dec-17-03 06:22 AM
In Morocco there was many groups of Amazigh people that range from Northern European looking like the Riffian to light brown to dark brown like the Chuleh in Souss. You also have the Haratin in Southern Morocco who are the indigenous people from the Sahara. In Morocco and other Magrebian countries all Amazigh are treated like second class citizens.

The truth is that Costal Northern Africans in Northern Algeria,Northern Morocco and Northern Libya were never black in the first place. Most come from proto-Medditerean stock and from Cor-magnoid stock that existed around the costal regions. Look up the Tarofliat culture,Metcha-al-Arabi culture,and Aflou culture. The Sahara region has always been majority black and this is why the Tuareg look the way they doo as well as the Haratin. This is a very complex issue that requires study of Northern African past to fully understand it.

The Amazigh people were called Libyans by both the ancient Greeks and the ancient Egyptians. One group was called Tamahoua by the Egyptians which had blondish reddish hair;the other Amazigh was called the Technoua that had dark brown skin with tightly curled hair. The later seems to be older than the former because the Tamahou was not depicted up untill the 19th dyansty with the invasion of the Sea peoples.

See the following:

Speakers of Amazight go back 7000 years. They are the Imazigen
of Ta Mazgha (Berbers of North Afrika). Amazight is an Afrikan
language of the Afro-Asian group. The Afro-Asiatic linguistic
phylum developed somewhere between the south-eastern Sahara and
the Horn and began splitting at least 8000 years ago.

Branches and probable date of split:
Kushitic - 8th millenium BCE
Egyptian - before the 7th millenium BCE
Omotic - 7th millenium BCE
Hausa - 7th millenium BCE
Semitic - 6th or 5th millenia BCE
Amazigh - 6th or 5th millenia BCE
(I. M. Diakonoff, Afrasian Languages, Moscow 1988)

Herodotus described Libyans as indigenees of Afrika. Egyptian
records list Libyans or Lebou of two types, the Tehenou and the
Temehou (people created light/white skinned). This is simply
recognizing that there was no uniform phenotype in ancient
Tamazgha. It is not saying there was only one phenotype among
the Lebou.

Tehenou and Tamahou were not the same ethnic type. The first
Lebou people that the Egyptians refered to were the Tehenou.
In color paintings they are dark brown. They were the local
blacks of Libya. They were not Nilotics nor Bantu nor Sudanese.
They were a local Libyan ethnic group. (G. Moller, Die Aegypten
und ihre libyschen Nachbaren, ZDMG, Liepzig 1924 pg 78.)

Oric Bates who wrote on the Eastern Libyans records Afrikoid
features. He says that before 12th dynasty Egyptians colored
Tehenou dark brown. The Eastern Libyans, London 1914, pp 43-45.

C. M. Daniels makes a similar report in The Garamantes of
Southern Libya, Wisconsin 1970, pg 27.

Later in time the Tamahou begin to appear in Egyptian paintings.
They are creamy colored often with light hair and eyes. This
is the type that absorbed and replaced the Tehenou.
(W. Holscher, Libyer und Agypter Beitrage zur Ethnologie und
Geschichte Libyscher Volkerschaften, AFU 5, Gluckstadt 1955)

Surely it is an injustice to the resurgance of Amazigh (Berber)
self-determination to deny this aspect of the ethno-history
of Tamazgha by writing the Tehenou out of history or denying
that they were dark and they were the first Libyan Imazighen.