AUTHORITIES:
Diodorus Siculus, Corippus, Moevers, etc.
The primitive social and intellectual condition of the populations dwelling along the shores of Africa washed by the Mediterranean sea, can only be inferred from their respective relations with the Ph?nicians and Carthaginians. Other sources of historical information as to that remote period there are none, while later times also give comparatively scanty satisfaction.
Ethnology has not yet positively determined who the aborigines of Libya were, and it is questionable if it can ever be satisfactorily settled. Egyptian inscriptions indicate a white race in the north-eastern corner of Libya, adjoining Egypt; while further to the west lived the blacks. At a period exceedingly remote, the whites mixed with these negro blacks, who probably immigrated from the centre of Africa—Soudan—and spread over the whole of Libya. These remote epochs, however, altogether refuse chronological limitation. But when chronology, even of the most rudimentary kind, becomes possible, history shows us the existence, in Libya, of a nomadic and agricultural people, who can be no other than these cross-breeds, and who had brought a part of the land to a high degree of cultivation. The Libyans may[Pg 28] thus be considered as an autochthonous African population—a theory which is confirmed by other evidence not now necessary to give.
Among these Libyans—called by the Greeks Afri, and by the Romans, Africani—agriculture was in a highly flourishing condition at the epoch of the earliest myths and legends of Greece: all the Hellenic legends relating to the distant sea-wanderings of gods or heroes, carry them to the Libyan shores about the Regio Syrtica—Tripolis. Among these are the Argonauts and Heraklides, Perseus, Kadmos, Odysseus, and Menalaos. So the Greek myths of Atlas and the Garden of the Hesperides have their spring and source in that part of Libya. All this presupposes a very old culture. Herodotus says that the ?gis of the Greek Pallas originated in Libya, as also that Athene here received Gorgona\'s head for her ?gis. Even at the present day, the chiefs of some of the tribes in the southern part of ancient Libya carry the skins of leopards and other wild beasts on their shoulders in such a way that the head of the animal, ?gis-like, covers their breast. The adventurous Ph?nician and Greek navigators of the earliest period accordingly found the Libyans already a highly cultivated people. This culture, too, they possessed previous to their intercourse with the Canaanites, Ph?nicians, or Greeks—anterior even to the wanderings of Astarte, Anna, or Dido.
At this epoch the Libyans were possessed of written language. Their alphabet was, in certain peculi[Pg 29]arities, of an older type than even the Ph?nician—that father of so many eastern and western alphabets. Leptis and Oka are Libyan names for Libyan cities which were in existence previous to any Ph?nician colonizations—though these colonizations are themselves anterior to positive history.
Goats, sheep, and other domestic animals were introduced into Greece and Italy from Libya; and from thence also came the knowledge of how to breed and rear them. The Libyans also, in all probability, first taught them the mode of keeping and rearing bees, as the Greek word for "wax," keros—Latin, cera, is by some deduced from the Berber (Libyan) ta-kir, and the Greek designation for honey, meli, mel—Latin, mel, from the Berber ta-men-t. Others, however, trace both those words to a Sanscrit root.
As an evidence of their advanced civilization, it may be mentioned that the Libyans were highly accomplished in horticulture at a time when the fields of Greece and Italy were only rudely ploughed. From Libya across the Mediterranean, the leguminous or pulse plants seem to have been introduced into Southern Europe, together with the mode of their use and culture; and some investigators consider that the Latin names for "pease" (cicer), for "lentils" (lens, lentis), and for "beans" (faba), have their origin in the Berber ikiker, ta-linit, and fabua. But to these words, also, others give a Sanscrit origin. Cucurbis "cucumber," is in Berber curumb—although, again, it is traced, but forcedly, to the Sanscrit. Whatever[Pg 30] may be the origin of the words, it is an historical fact that the Romans acquired their whole knowledge of horticulture from the Libyans and Libyo-Ph?nicians; and it may even be surmised that the Latin urtus, "hortus," had its root in the Berber urt.
Civilization among the Libyans, therefore, was anterior to any contact either with Ph?nicians or Greeks, and long centuries anterior to the Carthaginian domination over the northern shores of Africa.
The Libyans were a nation of agriculturists and freeholders. No trace of slavery appears among them, and, if it existed at all, was altogether insignificant and accidental. When the Ph?nicians and Canaanitish settlements increased in power and number, the Libyans became tributary colonists, and the Ph?nicians instituted the slave-trade among them, whose victims were confined mostly to the nomads.
As we have before said, the poor white colonists sent from Canaan and Ph?nicia to Libya intermarried with the natives; and from this union came the Libyo-Ph?nicians of history. The relations which the Libyans (and subsequently the Libyo-Ph?nicians, when again subjugated) held to Ph?nician and Canaanitish settlers, were similar to those which free Romans afterward held to the Longobard and Frankish conquerors who settled upon and held the lands of which they were once the masters.