The following notes, prepared by www.temehu.com, may serve as a short introduction to the Libyan Berber Temehu (Temeḥw) and Tehenu (Teḥenw)
tribes. For further information about the
ancient Libyan Temehu and Tehenu people the reader can refer to the rare work of Oric
Bates (The Eastern Libyans, London, 1914).
The Ancient Egyptians called the land and the people
west of the Nile Valley the Tehenu, whom appear to
have been a numerous group, as attested by Egyptian references,
such as
"the countries of the Tehenu"
and
"the chiefs of the Tehenu". But since the Temehu were also referred
to as
"the Westerners", those who inhabited the area immediately west
of the Nile, it becomes difficult to separate between the two
Berber groups. Hence, according to Oric Bates, the ancient
Egyptians often did not always discriminate between the Temeḥu (Tmḥ) and the Teḥenu (Tḥn), and that both names (Tmḥ and
Tḥn) were used almost generically for "Libyan" (p. 252).
Those writers who claimed that the Temeḥu tribes were
comprised of two groups – the Teḥenu in the north and the Neḥesu in
the south – may have been confused too, since according
to the Egyptians themselves the Neḥesu are a distinctive group, and in
all probability what they meant to say was that the Libyans comprised two
groups: the Teḥenu in the north and the Temeḥu in the south, and
thus the Teḥenu were rightly identified with Lower Egypt, and the Temeḥu
with Middle-Nubia. This makes sound sense when one refers to the ancient
Egyptian's classification of humankind:
The Egyptians divided the human race into four classes,
the Egyptians, the Temeḥu, the Neḥesu, and the A’mu. To place themselves in a separate class clearly reflects the pharaohs' attempt to fabricate history to their ends; the Temehu covers
all Africans bordering Egypt from the west (the Berbers); the Nehesu refers to all Africans bordering Egypt from
the south, like the Ethiopians; and the
A'mu are obviously the Semites (Sam) bordering Egypt from the north-east (beyond the Sinai desert: the Middle East),
like the Akkadians and the Phoenicians, whom originally were Saharan
groups split from the Afro-Asiatic family around the 5th
millennium BC.
Biblical
HAM (the cursed African son of Noah: the “servant of servants”, so Genesis says [09:25]),
appears to be a metatheses of the older TMH, as also indicated by the fact that in the
Bible the Libyans appeared as the Lubim, the Lebahim of the
Old Testament, the son of Mizraim, and thus back to Imazighen (or Imaziren: 'Berbers'), as
Oric Bates was the first to mention. It is apparent here
that both the Egyptians and their later students
must have based their written traditions on an earlier and much older oral lore,
and as such the original classification myth must have been much older than the
written version of the later pharaohs – making the Temehu even more ancient.
Since neither Europeans nor any other Asian group apart from the Semites featured in the classification myth, it is plausible to infer that the myth originally referred to the Afro-Asiatic group. However, by the 1st Millennium BC, Europeans were very much involved in the drama and hence the authors of the Bible grouped the Hamitic members of the Egyptian myth (Temehu, Nehesu and Egyptians) under Ham, left the Semites under Sam, and added a new member, Japhet to represent Europeans (or Aryans) as the third son of Noah. The natives of America and Australia did not feature in any of the myths because their continents were not discovered until recently and therefore were unknown to the authors of the ancient myths.
Of course, modern genetic, anthropological and linguistic
discoveries conclusively relate both the Egyptians and the Semites (and
all the ancient Mediterranean peoples) to the Sahara, and therefore this kind
of genealogy is politically motivated and serves no purpose to our present
enquiry, except that it clearly shows the Nehesu as a separate group from
the Temehu, and that the Temehu designates the whole of the Libyan peoples
west of the Nile – that is all the Imazighen west of the Nile including
the Tehenu, the Ribu, the Nasamons, the Garamantes, etc.
This is also
apparent from the extent of the Temehu's territories,
which appear to have been comprised of various communities
and tribes, occupying much of the Sudan and possibly all the way to Fezzan; and
hence several scholars, starting from Oric Bates, have openly discussed the
possibility of the Temehu being the distant ancestors
of the present day Tuareg tribes of the great Sahara Desert, "The Speakers
of Tamaheqt" (*Temehaght
> Temejeght
> Tamazight, the language of the entire Berber population
of North Africa, currently spanning 10 countries,
from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Mediterranean Sea to
Lake Chad).
The name Tamaheqt (or
Temasheght) differs according to tribe, as it is given in various forms by different scholars. For example, the title given by H. Stanhope Freeman (1862) to his book about the Tuareg is "Temahuq", which he used to refer to Tifinagh ('the Temahuq alphabet') and also to the language spoken by the "Towarek".
Few years after the publication of Bates' unique book,
'The Times' (20 March 1928) published a study drawing
similarities between the Temehu and the images of prehistoric drawings found
in the Air Mountain in the southern Sahara desert.
This begs the simple question:
if the Temehu were recent sea-people invaders of Egypt then how come the ancient Egyptians included them in their genealogy
of humankind long before the arrival of the sea-people?
Surely the Egyptians knew enough about their neighbours
as not to confuse natives with foreign pirates and
include the latter in their classification of the human race! Therefore the Egyptian
classification myth by itself is more than enough
to put all other theories concerning the European origin of the Temehu tribes
out of their misery.
This means that
"internet-chat experts", who confuse the recent sea-people
with the Libyan Tehenu and/or Temehu and subsequently made the Temehu a foreign
blond group, are committing a grave mistake, in the same way their predecessors
related the ancient Egyptians to Sumer or
Mars! We have plenty of evidence, as we shall see, to the fact that these Berber groups were natives to the area since
Predynastic times. And to ignore this monumental evidence, or, like other scholars
had pointed out, to
make it intentionally obscure,
serves no purpose other than illustrate Amen-like motives!
The land of the Rebu, Tehenu and Temehu tribes of ancient Libya.
The Temehu and Tehenu territories
extend
all the way to the Nile.
According to Herodotus Libya began west of the
Nile.
Source of map: Oric Bates.
According to this ancient map there was no Egypt;
just Libya, inhabited by various Berber tribes, and the Aethiopes (Ethiopians) in the far south.
Note that the Berber Garamantes (click here for larger image) were located immediately west of the Nile, which is the same location given by various classical geographers and historians to the Temehu tribes (as shown by the previous map); connecting the ancient Temehu tribes with the speakers of Temahuq, the Berber Tuareg of the later Garamantian kingdom in Fezzan, southern Libya. The editor of UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, who stated that "it is uncertain" whether the early Temehu and Tehenu tribes of the early dynastic period spoke Berber (p. 7), is certainly "weird".
The Delta was called Tameḥet, one interpretation of which is 'the lotus land', just as pictured by its hieroglyph of three lotus
flowers rising from a circle (the sign for 'city'). In relation to Meḥ, a mention must be made of the Seven Wise Ones of
the goddess Meḥ-urt, who in the beginning of time came from water at the feet
of Nun, and who in very early times resided over the
“weighing of words”
in the Hall of Meḥ-urt and thus rightly identified with
Libyan Maat and Neith. This simple fact was known to many scholars and Egyptologists,
like Sir Alan Gardiner according to whom the name of
the Libyan tribe Temeḥw means
“Lower Egypt”
as well as the
“Delta”, whence mḥs “the crown of Lower Egypt”.
The name was also mentioned as Henet-Temehu, the princess daughter of Thenet-Hep, the wife
of Ahmose I, which further illustrates the Libyan element in the Egyptian dynasties,
as we shall see below. In fact there was a district within the Delta itself that was called "the Land of the Temeḥw", indicating the district was exclusively populated by the Temehu tribes within the country of the Tehenu.
This was the subject of several studies including the one presented at the Symposium
On
"Libya Antiqua", held in Paris between the 16th and the 18th of January 1984, and
titled: The Tehenu In The Egyptian Records. The paper, written
by A.H.S. El-Mosallamy and prepared at the request of Unesco, told us nothing
we do not already know, but nonetheless it was a recent summary
of the basic facts put forward in the last century by
Petrie, Breasted, Bates, Galassi, Maspero, Borchardt and was largely drawn from the ancient records preserved
by Eratosthenes, Manetho, Plutarch, Plato, Strabo, Herodotus, Diodorus and the ancient
Egyptian records, as those of the pyramid papyri of
Berber Unas (the god who swallowed all the gods).
The ancient Egyptian Timḥy Stone of Wawat, found in one of the Egyptian
lists of royal gifts, may indicate that the stones were
of a particular type purveyed to the Egyptians by the Temehu masons, and hence G. W. Murray ('The
Road to Chephren's Quarries') relates that the Temehu Libyans were employed in
the labour gangs at the quarries; while other sources affirmed that the Temehu
were famous for being skilled stone workers and that
the monuments built of polygonal masonry in Cyrenaica were the work of the Temehu
people whom often referred to as “the Westerners” ('those who dwell west of the
Nile'). Oric bates (p. 49) adds that the Temehu of the time of Harkhuf were traders in "Timḥy stones". It is tempting here to recall English "mason" ('stone worker', proposed to be from Germanic base *mak, from which we have 'Freemasons') in relation to -Mazighen ('Berbers' — widely interpreted to mean 'Freemen')!
To be fairer
to the truth, from
the extant preserved material one can safely ascertain
the pharaohs to have been the invaders of the region,
who, as told by their own history, forcibly unified Libyan Lower Egypt and Nubian
Upper Egypt into what is known as Egypt: the House of [Libyan] Ptah. In relation to the two kingdoms (of the predynastic period), Petrie (1912, 1920) proposed that a “dynastic race” could have invaded Upper Egypt, then continued to invade Lower Egypt, to ultimately bring Menes to forcibly unite the two kingdoms. Additionally, Oric Bates (p. 50) points out that the "Egyptians invaded the Rebu and their neighbours" during the Merneptah invasions. Of course, invasions do and did occur in both directions, and carried out by both sides, but to always speak of one while keeping the lid on the other is far from the truth.
Not only the Libyan struggle to free the taken land of Neith is far older than the recent so-called "Libyan invasions", but also stretches all the way back to the first dynasty, and even to predynastic times; and therefore their recent pact with the maritime bandits, who came to plunder Egypt as
others had done before and after, was no more than
another tactic in their long war against the armies of the conquering pharaohs.
There was never such thing as Libyan
Invasion (or
invasions); they only appear so if they were mentioned
in isolation, by the enemy, of course.
And even then, contrary to common belief, the Tehenu Libyans initially opposed the invasions of the so-called sea-people; and so continues Oric Bates (p. 216), the origin of the "federation" had its place not among the Tehenu but among the Berber Rebu tribes farther west, commanded by king Meryey, son of Ded, who allied themselves with various tribes of Ekwesh, Teresh, Luka, Sherden, Shekelesh and "the Northerners coming from all land"; who united fell upon the Tehenu who were not able to stand against such allied force; and who then, allied with Heta (Hittites) and the Berber tribes of the Meshwesh and Seped, began the invasion of Egypt. Unfortunately some authors often confuse the numerous Libyan tribes (or peoples) with one another, referring to them collectively as "Libyans".
In
addition to the fertile and rich Delta, which as we shall see below was coveted by the conquering pharaohs, the Tehenu of Lower Egypt were also the inhabitants of
the Faiyum and other oases in the Libyan Desert (the region immediately west of the Nile). The earliest known Neolithic cultures in Egypt have been found in the Faiyum region, on the southwestern edge of the Delta. and in the Western Desert as well as in Nubia and Sudan. The Faiyum Oasis gave rise to the culture known as Faiyum A (c. 9000-6000 BCE), where the natives, the Berbers, lived around the large lake in reed huts (with underground cellars for storage of grains), practicing agriculture, pottery making, hunting and fishing, as they also domesticated cattle, sheep and goats. The Faiyum A Culture gave rise to the Merimde (c. 5000-4000 BCE). Egyptologists agree that these Faiyum cultures grew and flourished in Lower Egypt long before civilization developed in Upper Egypt around 4500 BCE when the Badarian culture emerged.
There were also Libyan settlements in Memphis, and along the area between Memphis and Herakleopolis. In fact, these
Berber oases were not invaded by the pharaohs until the time of the New Empire,
and were not totally colonised by the pharaohs until the time of Rameses III,
against whom the Libyans became known for their attacks on Egypt. Breasted asserts
that these oases dwellers, from which the Egyptians of Hatshepsut extracted
much tribute, were none other than the Libyan Tehenu of the Delta.
In summary Oric Bates points out that the whole of Africa west of the Nile was to the Egyptians a terra incognita, which they called imnt ('the west'); signifying both: the Libyan country and the land of the dead (or the souls), the land of Libyan Amen & Ament whom the Egyptians adopted as Amun-Ra before they made him the King of the Gods, in the same way the Greeks titled him Zeus-Amon. Libyan Amun was considered by Alexander the Great to be his Father (Diodorus, Book XVII, 51), who saved Alexander's army from being scorched to death by the terrible heat of the Libyan goddess Sekhmet.
It seems fairly reasonable to assume the Berbers (the Libyan tribes west of the Nile), the Nubians, the Ethiopians and the Ancient Egyptians were all natives to the land; living in various settlements across the region when "state boundaries" were yet to be defined. All the aforementioned groups (except the Nubians) were in fact one single group who spoke proto-Afro-Asiatic language somewhere between East Africa and Lake Chad, and therefore they could have gradually moved out in various directions to explore the "free world"; some of whom probably ended up living in adjacent territories as brothers and sisters long before the harsh conditions of the environment, desertification and merciless time gradually led them to contest the scarce resources; ultimately leading to the emergence of borders, "State", wars, then grand-scale invasions.
As stated by professor James H. Breasted, the Ancient Egyptian
Nomes can be viewed as early "Petty States", whose vessels bore standards representing their place of origin, such as those represented by the crossed arrows of the Libyan Goddess Neit of Sais, and which are "strikingly similar to those later employed in hieroglyphic as the standards of the local communities, and their presence on the early ships suggests the existence of such communities in those prehistoric days . . . Hence traces of these prehistoric petty states should perhaps be recognized in the said administrative or feudal divisions of the country in historic times . . . each with its chief or dynast, its local god, worshipped in a crude sanctuary; and its market" (A History of The Ancient Egyptians, 1908, pp. 30-33).
Professor James Breasted also points out that the gradual fusion eventually merged these petty states into two kingdoms: one in the Delta (Lower Egypt), and the other comprising the states of Upper Egypt. Regarding the scarcity of archaeological evidence, Breasted notes that the Delta is so deeply overlaid with deposits of Nile mud, that the material remains of its earliest civilization are buried forever from our reach.
In summary, most researchers agree that the Delta, the Faiyum and the other oases of the Libyan Desert were populated by Berbers. However, Simon J. Holdaway
and Willeke Wendrich, in their reinvestigation of the Faiyum Desert, point out that their research suggests "variability across the landscape, with different archaeological records preserved in different places dating to different times" (p. 240); indicating that the Faiyum region is part of a wider settlement system that cannot be attributed to "a particular people".
Hence according to a recent paper, published by the European Journal of Human Genetics (2014), Eyoab Gebremeskel and Muntaser Ibrahim point out that the proto-Afro-Asiatic group carrying the E-P2 mutation may have appeared between 21,000 and 32,000 years ago somewhere between East Africa and Lake Chad and subsequently gave rise to the different major population groups including current speakers of the Afro-Asiatic languages. They also point out their "network dating suggested a divergence of North Western African populations from Eastern African as early as 32 000 YBP, which is close to the estimated dates to the origin of E-P2 macrohaplogroup" (p. 1390).
The researchers also
inferred that the high frequency of E-M81 in North Africa and its association to the Berbers "may have occurred after the splitting of that early group, leading to local differentiation and flow of some markers as far as Southern Europe", and that a branching in the network may have "carried the haplogroup E-M35 and its subhaplogroups farther to the western coast of the Red Sea to Yemen, Oman and Saudi Arabia and concurrently down to Southern Africa" (p. 1390). Note the distribution of the "grey circles" across the whole of North Africa including all of Egypt (representing the Berbers).
Recent research also calls for revising our "stereotyped views" about the Libyans of Egypt. For example, the Third Millennium BC settlement of Ḥwt jḥ(w)t (around 5000 years ago), in Lower Egypt, according to Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia, was a a kind of administrative checkpoint regulating access to grazing land and plant resources in the Western Delta, and that it was in a region where Libyan populations historically settled." Thus, concepts such as 'Libyan invasions', stereotyped views of Libyans as poor wandering nomads, or the alleged contrast between sedentary Egyptians and nomad Libyans as distinct, opposed ethnic and productive entities should also be revised". For full conclusion see "Ḥwt jḥ(w)t, The Administration Of The Western Delta And The 'Libyan Question' In The Third Millennium BC".
It is in the Western Delta of the Fifth Millennium BC, points out A. Stevenson, "that the most convincing signs of fully sedentary village life occur"; that "recent excavations at Sais (Sa el-Hagar) in the Delta have demonstrated that habitation was focused principally on the sand hills (geziras) and levees of the Delta plain"; and that "new archaeological data from around the Faiyum’s Lake Qarun have reemphasized that groups living there between 6500 and
6200 BP were more mobile than is usually expected for an agricultural society" (The Egyptian Predynastic and State Formation).
Sir E. A. Wallis Budge (The Mummy, 1972, pp.2-3), in quoting Professor Owen (and also Jequier), had pointed out that taking the sum of the correspondence notable in collections of skulls from Egyptian graveyards the Egyptian race was certainly not of the Australioid type, but "more suggestive of a northern Nubian or Berber basis". Budge then concluded that the archaeological evidence suggests that the Libyans entered Middle Egypt in Predynastic Period, bringing with them a "civilization of a higher class than that of the Egyptians" (p. 10).
Wallis Budge (1914, 26) further points out that, "The successors of Horus continued to press more and more northwards . . . and the time soon arrived when they began to fight with the robust dwellers in the Delta [the Libyans] . . . How long the struggle for the possession of Lower Egypt lasted is not known, but it is certain that the northern confederates were not easily conquered. They were strong men, and better armed than the Southern folk whom Horus had overthrown, and their civilization stood at a higher level than that of the successors of Horus".
Professor Breasted also notes that it was the Berbers of the Delta who invented the solar calendar, when he wrote: "That civilization was probably earlier and more advanced than that of the valley above. Already in the forty third century B. C. the men of the Delta had discovered the year of three hundred and sixty five days and they introduced a calendar year of this length beginning on the day when Sirius rose at sunrise, as determined in the latitude of the southern Delta, where these earliest astronomers lived, in 4241 B. C. It is the civilization of the Delta, therefore, which furnishes us with the earliest fixed date in the history of the world" (A History of The Ancient Egyptians, 1908, pp. 31-32). As we shall see below, Diodorus also spoke of Libyan Atlas being the inventor of Astronomy and of the doctrine of the sphere.
Ancient Libyan archers were said to have been the best archers of the ancient world.
According to Professor V. Giuffrida-Ruggeri the Delta was the source of the Egyptian pharaonic civilization; it was king Menes who conquered the Delta and transferred his capital to Memphis (ironically also inhabited by Berbers as well as Egyptians); the most important religious episodes are placed in the Delta; the most ancient tombs of Lower Egypt (those of Saqqara [II and III Dynasties] and those of Giza [IV, V and VII Dynasties]) show the existence of a leptorrhine Mediterranean type akin to the Libyans; and that all the kings mentioned by the "Palermo Stone" before Menes are kings of Lower Egypt.
In conclusion, Professor Giuffrida-Rugger agrees with Eduard Meyer who deduced that "the predynastic Egyptians from Lower Egypt must have been a Libyan tribe which had penetrated into the Delta", and although he was not sure, he did concede that "it is possible that the Libyans were the same as the Predynastic Mediterraneans of Lower Egypt" (Harvard African Studies, The Ancient Egyptian Populations, pp. 3-6).
The invasion of Lower Egypt by the pharaohs, according to Robert Graves (Greek Myths, I, 8.2), appears to have forced large number of goddess-worshipping Libyan refugees to flee the Western Delta who arrived into Crete; soon after which the first minoan Age began and Cretan culture spread to Thrace and Early Helladic Greece. Robert Graves in fact spoke of an earlier Libyan immigration into Crete as early as 4000 BC.
The Tehenu and Temehu and other Libyan tribes are predynastic inhabitants of all land west of the Nile, together with the Nubians and Ethiopians farther south, long before the menace of Menes forcibly unified Egypt and invaded the Tehenu territories
in the north and that of the
Temehu and the Nubians farther south about 3100 BC (or 3400 BC according to other
sources).
That they (the Berbers or Libyans) were more advanced than any other group along the Nile, and that they were ahead in the domestication of cattle, the discovery of agriculture and the firing of pottery is certain. The Libyan monarch held court at Tanis, in the Delta, the oldest state in Egypt, before the Libyan kings moved to Bubastis, and many of the Theban high priests who married into the families of the Libyan Tanite kings were peculiarly Libyan names. As we shall see below, Breasted suggested the transfer of the capital from Sais to Memphis in later periods (meaning the period of Menes) was due to the fact that Sais was "too extremely Libyan" for Menes to use as his capital. According to Manetho, the "Fortress of The White Walls" (or Memphis) was built by Menes himself — probably to protect his office from the natives.
Control of the north, Lower Egypt, was entirely in the hands of the Berbers (else known as the Libyans). The Berber Meshwesh (or Meshwash) tribes occupied the principal towns of the central and eastern Delta (Tanis, Bubastis and Mendes); the Berber Ribu tribes occupied the western parts of the Delta. The Delta city of Sais was the centre of the worship
of the Libyan Goddess Neith, the inhabitants of which were mostly of Libyan Berber origin. Other
Libyan Delta cults include those of the Libyan Cat-Goddess
Bast at Bubastis, who then became one of the most venerated goddesses throughout Egypt, and the Libyan Osiris &
Isis
at Buziris, who went on to dominate the Egyptian and
Roman pantheons, and even survive to the present day
in Europe as the illuminating secret cults of Isis
&
Osiris. Isis weaned the Egyptians and the rest of the savage world of cannibalism, and Osiris taught them the arts of sublime civilisation.
The archaic name of Sais is "Ha-Nit" (House-[of]-Neith), probably because, according to one myth, the Libyan Goddess Neith, having emerged from the primeval water of Nun to create the world, followed the course of the Nile to the sea and upon reaching the Delta she founded the city of Sais; and hence most sources agree that it was the Libyans who founded the dynasty of Sais. It is probably this myth that led some Wikipedia amateur editors to misinterpret Diodorus and claim Sais was founded by the Athenians. Greek writers always refer to foreign gods by their Greek names, and therefore it should not surprise us if some confuse Athena with the Libyan Goddess Neith. The worship of Neith is thousands of years older than the birth of Athena around Lake Tritonis in Libya.
To add to the confusion, Diodorus himself says (Vol. 1, 28) Athens was created by a colony from Sais. But then quickly he claimed a flood destroyed all written records together with the majority of humankind [Vol. 1, Book V, 57], after which the Athenians, although he claims were the founders of the city of Sais, became ignorant of their history. Here is what Diodorus wrote:
"Even the Athenians, they say, are colonists from Sais in Egypt, and they undertake to offer proofs of such a relationship for the Athenians are the only Greeks who call their city “Asty,” a name brought over from the city Asty in Egypt . . . Moreover, certain of the rulers of Athens were . . . originally Egyptians, they say . . . [29] In the same way, they continue, Erechtheus also, who was by birth an Egyptian, became king of Athens . . . After he had secured the throne he instituted the initiatory rites of Demeter in Eleusis and established the mysteries, transferring their ritual from Egypt . . . They are also the only Greeks who swear by Isis, and they closely resemble the Egyptians in both their appearance and manners. By many other statements like these, spoken more out of a love for glory than with regard for the truth, as I see the matter, they claim Athens as a colony of theirs because of the fame of that city".
From the language used by Diodorus, it is evident that there was some kind of tension between many of the ancient nations, leading some to claim being the "chosen ones" of the Creator while cursing others (such as the Berber Ammonians being branded "the slaves of the slaves" by Genesis). Hence the translator of Diodorus's volumes (C.H. Oldfather) noted that the "claims of the Greeks here set forth are empty boasting". This tendency to boast was also noted in volume IV when Diodorus spoke of the Greeks defeating the Persians first then having made a truce agreed to leave Egypt through Libya where they voyaged via the port of Cyrene
to safely reach their native home by a miracle. Again, the translator noted (note 1, Book XI, 77) that most of the Greeks had in fact "perished” (quoting Thucydides, 1. 110); meaning that they never reached home by a miracle or otherwise. In summary, such subjects were ancient even to classical writers at the time and therefore with lack of written records confusion and mistakes are naturally expected.
Going back to the subject of Sais, as noted earlier,
the goddess Meḥ-urt, who in the beginning of time came from water at the feet
of Nun, was rightly identified with
the Libyan Goddess Neith. The name Sa el-Hagar (Sais) appears to be an Arabised form of *Ha-Djer. The Ancient Egyptians referred to the indigenous people of the Nile as "Intiu" ('Pillar People'), in reference to the Djed (or Djer) of Libyan Osiris and Tjat of Libyan Isis.
The name given to the "Mount" of the first creation, Ta-nen or Ta-hen (relating to pre-creation Nun), is probably related to the name Tehenu (Te-hen-u), the Libyan people of Neith. The skin of the Teḥenu in Egyptian representations is dark, while Neith sometimes appeared with dark-olive skin – the same colour applied to some images of Osiris, in reference to trees and nature and thus Isis & Osiris are accredited with the invention of agriculture. The name Tehenu recalls a name of a tribe in today's Zuwarah, a small Berber town in western Libya (my home town), namely Ind-Ḥnaya (*Int-Ḥnaya) tribe ('People of Ḥnaya'), whom, interestingly, are known for their dark-olive skin. Henna (ḥenni in Berber), which is also dark-olive in colour, was said by Catherine Carthwright to have originated in North Africa, although she appears to be mistaken in suggesting the name is Arabic in origin. Tattoos too are dark green in colour.
A bronze statuette of an ancient Libyan, Louvre museum.
Oric Bates "thinks" it represents a Libyan from the Meshwesh tribe (?).
It appears that the statuette once had the usual Libyan beard.
Source:Wikimedia Commons.
Hence, Neith's temple in Sais, in the Delta, bore the name
"House of the King of Lower Egypt", and the Egyptian
"uraeus"
serpent was deduced, from a scene of four Libyans in Sahure's temple
at Abusir, to have been descended from an early Libyan king of the Delta. Robert Graves (I, 39) noted that Plato's version of Atlantis (Timaeus And Critias) was based on Solon's version which he learned from his friends the Libyan priests of Sais. Of course, the subject of Atlantis has mystified the minds since prehistoric times, with more than 5000 books written about the subject, but according to Robert Graves its location was simply "western Libya" as an ancient civilisation, around legendary Lake Tritonis, around which Zeus was struck by a terrible headache; and to relief him of pain a hole was dug in his head, out of which Athena sprang to life (meaning Athena was adopted from Libyan Neith); thus recalling the accounts of Diodorus who spoke of the "Atalantian" Berber tribes and the Libyan Amazons inhabiting Western Libya, around the Atlas region, by the Atlantic Ocean, from which we have the Atlas Mountain in North Africa, which Diodorus rightly considered to be the birth-place of "the gods" and of mythology (Book III, 56); and hence such civilisation must go back thousands of years before the predynastic period. The Libyan priests of Sais could have preserved its memory from once being the inhabitants of western Libya before they moved to the Delta, or because they kept contact with their cousins in western Libya. Diodorus also spoke of Libyan Atlas, the inventor of Astronomy and of the doctrine of the sphere, the son of Poseidon, whom Plato said was the King of Atlantis and whom Herodotus was adamant that he was a Libyan god in origin and that no one knew of Poseidon before the Libyans. Adding up just these simple facts may not solve the mystery, but certainly leads to one conclusion: Berber history and predynastic Egyptian history remain to be written.
According to Professor Breasted, the Delta was distinctly Libyan in character, "and the earlier kingdom of the North will therefore have been strongly Libyan, if indeed it did not owe its origin to this source. The temple at Sais, in the western Delta, the chief centre of Libyan influence in Egypt, bore the name “House of the King of Lower Egypt” (the Delta), and the emblem of Neit, its chief goddess was tattooed by the Libyans upon their arms. It may possibly therefore have been an early residence of a Libyan king of the Delta, although the capital of the Northern Kingdom was traditionally Buto, which, we may conjecture, owed this distinction to the later predominance of Egyptian influence, Sais being too extremely Libyan to be retained as the seat of government" (A History of The Ancient Egyptians, 1908, pp. 31-32).
It is also interesting to note that Herodotus (Book II, 169) referred to the inhabitants of Sais as "the natives of Sais" who buried all the kings which belonged to their nome within the temple of Neith (the "House of the King of Lower Egypt"). Herodotus mentioned the word "natives" only 3 times in the entire Book II, all of which were references to Lower Egyptian inhabitants (including the natives of Bubastis); whereas he mentioned the term "Egyptian(s)" over 172 times in the same Book II; leading us to ask: why?
More importantly, Herodotus also said Psammetichus (of the later Nubian period) was helped by "the natives" and "the Egyptians" to attack and vanquish the Carians and
Ionians who were
carried by stress of weather to Egypt (Book III, 152).
Here Herodotus speaks of two different groups: the natives and the Egyptians. As another example, Herodotus (also in Book II) spoke of the "natives of Cyrene" in Libya (meaning the Berbers of Cyrene), because at the time Cyrene was run by Greek invaders who legitimised their invasions on divine orders.
Modern historians too refer to the indigenous inhabitants of countries invaded by others as "natives", say when speaking of the Berbers of Libya or of any other North African country (invaded by Arabs relatively recently), in the same way the terms "native Americans" and "Americans" are totally different. Such distinction implies the invaders to be in power, while the natives always mere subjects of the ruling party. Of course neither the Arabs nor the Americans are expected to speak of themselves as invaders, and so it follows it is not far-fetched to assume the pharaohs to have done so. To the contrary, they claim to be the land owners, while suppressing evidence to the contrary (as we shall see below).
In the Old Testament (the Bible) the natives of whole Delta (and of Egypt) were mentioned as "Mizraim" (Genesis x. 6). The -m in Mizraim [MZR-m] denotes the plural form of the name, in the same way the -n does in Imaziren 'Berbers' [MZR-n]. Some Biblical scholars say the dual name-form in Mizraim is a reference to the two "native divisions of Egypt": Lower Egypt and Upper Egypt. The name Mizraim survives to the present day in the current Arabic name for Egypt, namely Meṣer ( مصر ), just as it does in the Libyan city of Meṣrata (مصرطه, some 200 km east of the capital Tripoli). Interestingly, Meṣrata (Meṣra-ta) was a Berber settlement until about 250 years ago when it was Arabised – making it one of the last Berber settlements to loose its foothold.
Manetho alleges that after the flood Noah's son Ham begat "Mestraim" (Mizraim) whom he also called "Aegyptus", the founder of "Egypt" from whom, Manetho adds, "the first Egyptian dynasty must be held to spring". And on pages 7-9 he further states that the first king Mestraim is also called Menes who ruled for 35 years. According to T. Nicklin, in his Studies in Egyptian Chronology (1928, p. 8), Manetho was born in Sebennytos in the Delta, settled in Libya, and that Suidas describes him as Libyan in origin. Hence according to other scholars the name "Manetho" or "Manethon" means 'the Lover of Neith'. If this indicates anything at all, it has to be the simple fact that it is most likely that the majority inhabitants of the Delta were Libyans. Of course, such Biblical genealogy, likewise Egyptian genealogy, relates our ancestry to eponymous ancestors who had their origin in folk-lore (oral lore), and therefore the relation between TMH (Temehu) and HAM (Ham) still speaks for itself, where various oral traditions share the same basic elements.
The Temehu's
territories however began immediately south of the Tehenu's and extended all
the way down to Middle Nubia – an area where Oric Bates, during his short life,
conducted an extensive study of its cemeteries and came to conclude that the
Nubians and the Libyans were more related than previously thought, and thus
the Temehu Berbers were also known to archaeologists as
"the C-Group of Nubia".
Even today, the Arabs of modern Egypt (not to be confused with the Berber-related Ancient Egyptians) call
the Nubians
"Berabera". Most scholars and writers of history books seem quite happy to repeat the fake etymology of "Berber" being derived from Latin or Greek "barbarous", when the name actually existed long before the Greeks and Romans learnt to write, as it was preserved by an Ancient Egyptian inscription as "one of the 113 tribes recorded in the inscription on a gateway of Thutmes, by whom they were reduced about 1700 B.C."; and whom, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica , in a later inscription "of Rameses II. at Karnak (c. 1300 B.C.) Beraberata is given as that of a southern conquered people". (See Berbers for more on this.) Conquered by the pharaohs, of course.
In addition to all the oases west of the Nile and the Delta, the Libyans also held stretches of land along the west bank of the river Nile itself, above the First Catarat (Bates, p. 48). Strabo (xvii, p. 786, p. 822) also spoke of the Libyans by the west bank when he wrote: "Above Meroe is Psebo, a large lake, containing a well-inhabited island. As the Libyans occupy the western bank of the Nile, and the Aethiopians the country on the other side of the river, they thus dispute by turn the possession of the islands, and the banks of the river, one party repulsing the other, or yielding to the superiority of its opponent".
Obviously, or not, the region west of the Nile is mostly barren, hostile desert (apart from the oases) and therefore the fertile region along the Nile was a highly-contested region, ultimately leading to both the native Berbers and the Egyptian pharaohs to disappear completely from the entire region (apart from the Berber survivors of Siwa) shortly after the Arab invasions of North Africa, following the Roman invasions, following the Greek invasions, following the Persian invasions. The Arabs of today's Egypt bear no connection to the Ancient Berber-related Egyptians apart from some genetic markers, since the majority of the current Arabs in North Africa are genetically Arabised Berbers.
This fertile region along the west bank of the Nile was also mentioned by Diodorus (Book III. 10) as follows: "In that part of the country which lies along
the Nile in Libyathere is a section which is remarkable for its beauty ; for it bears food in great abundance and of every variety and provides convenient
places of retreat in its marshes where one finds
protection against the excessive heat ; consequently
this region is a bone of contention between the Libyans and the Ethiopians, who wage unceasing
warfare with each other for its possession". Note that Diodorus, likewise Strabo, spoke of the conflict between the Libyans and the Ethiopians, rather than between any of those two and the Egyptian pharaohs. Hence nearly all Old Kingdom settlements and cemeteries in Middle Egypt were located on the east bank of the river Nile.
The Predynastic "Libyan Palette" (also known as "The Tehenu Palette"), which preserves samples of one of the earliest written documents in
known history, was dated back to the Naqada III period, else known as
the Proto-dynastic Period of Egypt (c. 3200 to 3000 BC); just as the established Libyan
royal line of kings of the Palermo Stone; and just as the inscriptions found in Neith's temples, showing
the usual Libyan signs and Neith's tattoos as well as the names of queens
and princesses, which usually contained the element Net or Nit; and just as Narmer's ivory
cylinder commemorating his so called victory
over the Libyans; and just as the Predynastic Kerki knife bearing similar representations of Predynastic Libyans
as those of the later Egyptians; and, of course, the name
"Tehenu"
itself, found on King Scorpion's statue (ca. 3300 BC), from which respected Egyptologists
convincingly deduced the struggle between the ancient Libyans and the
Egyptians goes back to Predynastic times, as pointed out by Breasted (1906),
and also to the beginning of the Northern Kingdom of the Delta when the invading
pharaohs were forcibly trying to unify the two kingdoms: the northern Libyan
Lower Egypt and the southern Nubian Upper Egypt, and also to the early dynastic period as we shall see below.
W. B. Emery (Archaic Egypt, p. 126), who saw the mythical struggle between Osiris and his brother Seth (ironically both Libyan in origin) as a reflection of the prehistoric struggles between the dynastic peoples and the indigenous of the Nile valley, had pointed out that in order to legitimise their claim to rule the North the Thinite kings "married Lower Egyptian princesses: three of the earliest queens of whom we have knowledge have the name of Nit as part of their names of Nithotep, Meryet-nit, and Her-nit". Please note the Thinite kings of Upper Egypt must not be confused with the Libyan Tanite kings of Lower Egypt.
One side of the Predynastic 'Libyan Palette' has 4 registers, three of which showing walking animals, mainly cattle, rams and donkeys, and the fourth shows trees. The other side of the palette has 7 enclosures, each identified by a sign and surmounted by an emblem holding a hoe, which Egyptologists say points to the Tehenu-Land as a "wooded country rich in livestock" inhabited by "potentially hostile populations". Of course, the natives appear hostile only to those who were trying to conquer their rich territories, as all animals do when it comes to protecting their "marked territories".
This means that if the wars
between the Tehenu-Temehu, the Nubians, the Ethiopians and the Egyptian pharaohs were predynastic, then the existence
of the Tehenu and the Temehu tribes in Egypt surely goes farther back in
time (as noted above by various scholars and Egyptologists).
This conclusion is also supported, in addition to the
above Egyptian records, by the fact that several
scholars generally agree that the Egyptians always referred to the Tehenu and
the Temehu with titles indicating their native origin and not
as foreigners (i.e., "the countries of the Tehenu", "The Land of the Temehu", "the land of Tehenu on its knees", and "the Westerners" [in relation to the Nile]); and also by the fact that the Egyptians were indeed very
careful not to adopt any foreign gods, as pointed out by most Egyptologists,
and as such their adoption of Libyan Neith, Amun (Amen) & Ament, Bast, Sekhmet, Isis & Osiris, Seth and
many more is a strong indicator that they did not consider the Libyans and Libyan gods as
"foreigners".
From the surviving fragments of history it appears that the wars were almost continuous from predynastic
times right down to the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2200-1700 BC). During the start of the dynastic period the
name Tehenu was found inscribed on the "Narmar
Palette", and also reappeared during
the second and the third dynasties, when, according to Manetho,
the Libyans continued the struggle against the pharaohs.
As stated by Breasted, the reconciliation of the Northern Kingdom and its fusion with the Southern Kingdom was a merely personal bond, since both administrations remained distinct; and that the "North rebelled again and again. King Narmer . . . was obliged to punish the rebellious Libyan nomes in the western Delta. He took captives to the number of “one hundred and twenty
thousand,” which deed must have involved the deportation of a whole district . . . Later king Neterimu smote the northern cities of Shemre and “House of the North"" (p. 47).
Narmer's macehead, found in the temple at Hieraconpolis, also confirmed the territories of the Tehenu to be fertile and rich. The macehead shows bearded men (Libyans) and mentions 400,000 cattle, 1,422,000 goats, and 120,000 prisoners; while in another relief carving the name Tehenu was mentioned in connection with 3 bearded prisoners, and thus in an ivory label Narmer commemorated his victory over the Berber Tehenu people of Lower Egypt.
Then during the II Dynasty similar emblems reappeared during the reign of king Khasekhemwy, depicting victories over the Libyan Tehenu territories and the destruction of their land and grazing enclosures, as well as listing the bounties and prisoners captured from the Berbers' territories.
Manetho (pp. 22-23) also reported that the Libyans of the III Dynasty rebelled against the Egyptian king Nefer-ka-ra (Nepherocheres). Manetho could have used the word "invaded" (which even then still 18 dynasties before the so-called "Libyan invasions"), but he did not. He used the word "rebelled", which indicates their native nature, as it also indicates tyranny, just as the Berbers today (in the 21st century) still rebelling against the Arab tyrants of North Africa and their Western allies who are more than happy to do business with them regardless.
During the the Third Dynasty a war with the Northern Berbers gave king Khasekhem occasion to name a year of his reign the “Year of Fighting and Smiting the North” — a war in which he captured 47,209 Libyan rebels , and which he also commemorated in the temple of Horus at Hieraconpolis (Breasted, p. 47).
* * *
Then during the IV Dynasty the pharaoh Snefru reportedly
took 11,000 Libyans as prisoners of war. In fact the wars
were so rife during this early period (the IV Dynasty) that they were brought to a temporary
lull during the Old Kingdom by king Khufu (Greek Cheops), the second king of
the 4th Dynasty and the builder of the great pyramid
of Giza, by marrying a Libyan princess in order
to bring peace to the region so that he could concentrate on his monumental
work.
"Bringing peace to the region",
"during the building of the great pyramid of Giza",
"so that he can concentrate on his work"
is not a sign of 'menace' but a powerful indicator of
the long conflict between the Libyans and Egyptians right
from the start,
long before the recent Shishenq and Tefnakht returned
to continue the work of the ancestors!
According to Herodotus, after Cheops (Khufu) became king he brought "every kind of evil" and "wickedness" to Egypt, he shut up all the temples, enslaved all the Egyptians to work for him, and even forced his own daughter to work as a prostitute in the brothels: "that being in want of money he caused his own daughter to sit in the stews" (Book II, 121). For some bizarre reason, Khufu ordered his (beloved) daughter "to admit all comers" and require every man to tell her what was the wickedest thing he had done in the whole course of
his life. In a review of the film: Land of the Pharaohs (1955), London's Guardian said "the film leaves out the part where . . . [Khufu] caused his own daughter to sit in the stews" – ie brothels".
Khufu's attempts however were not fully successful,
as we are told that both the kings Sa-Hu-Re and Ni-User-Re
(of the fifth dynasty) continued to 'brag' about defeating the Libyan
armies and about the bounties they brought as offerings to their divine fathers (most of whom are Libyan in origin). Oric Bates (p. 211) points out that it is clear from reliefs in the Pyramid temples of Ni-User-Re and of Sa-Hu-Re that the Libyans defeated by Sa-Hu-Re dwelt to the south of Memphis, probably in the Faiyum.
Bates also reported that a state of war existed in the VIth Dynasty between the Temehu Libyans and the Africans of Yam; and that the Rebu and Tehenu Libyans who held territories along the Nile itself rebelled (or revolted) against king Mentuhotep I of the XI Dynasty. This indicates that the Libyan rebellions reported by Manethon continued to take place 8 dynasties later, which must not be confused with "the Libyan invasions". In fact the attacks of king Usertesen (Sesostris) on "the land of the oasis-dwellers" (the Libyans) suggested to Oric Bates (p. 212) that "it is the Egyptians and not, as later, the Libyans who appear to have been on the aggressive".
C. P. Tieli (1882, p.16) points out that after six Egyptian dynasties ruled over Egypt, Lower Egyptian dynasties 8th and 9th, proceeding from Herakleopolis, "managed to acquire the sovereignty at least of the north". Throughout the XVIIIth Dynasty the Libyans were apparently in continuous conflict with the Egyptians (Bates, p. 212). Amenhotep I, Amenhotep III, Thutmose I and Thutmose III had all conducted wars against the Tehenu.
By the XXI Dynasty the Berbers succeeded to regain control over Egypt about ca. 945 BC, when the Libyan Berber king Shishenq (Sheshonq) succeeded in establishing the 22nd Dynasty and thereby
starting what narrow-minded Egyptologists know as
"The Libyan Period". The Berbers ruled Egypt for nearly 300 years; seemingly ousting the pharaohs for good, since the Libyan Dynasties were followed by Nubian Dynasties, before a tsunami of invasions, led by the Persians, then the Greeks, then the Romans, before the Arab invasions finally sent the pharaohs to extinction.
The ancient Temehu tribes were among the allied tribes of
the powerful Berber Meshwash (Meshwesh), the subjects of Shishenq, who ransacked
Jerusalem during his reign as king of Egypt. The fact that the allied tribes
included several Berber groups, like the Ribu, Meshwash and the Tehenu,
illustrates a common cause to liberate rather than invade one's land; and therefore Shishenq did not start anything new, but he merely returned control back to Lower Egypt, as noted by various sources including, for example, Georges Perrot and
Charles Chipiez (A history of art in ancient Egypt, Vol. I, 1883, p. 18): "Under the nineteenth dynasty an inverse movement to that of the first period carried the political centre of the country back towards the north. With the twenty-first Tanite dynasty, Thebes ceased to be the capital, and the cities of the Delta, Tanis, Bubastis, Mendes, Sebennytos, and above all Sais, rose into equal or superior importance". By now control of Lower Egypt was almost entirely in the hands of the Libyans, with the Berber Meshwesh tribes occupying the principal towns of the eastern and central zones.
A few dynasties
later, Berber Tefnakht, the chieftain of
Neith's Sais and the founder of the 24th dynasty, attempted to gain control over the whole of Egypt; but
after acquiring the city of Memphis and proceeding southward to Herakleopolis,
he was met by the Cushite Piankhi and eventually lost to Shabaka,
the founder of the Nubian 25th dynasty.
* * *
All these
facts are not a figment of the imagination but an important part of human's
early history, which has been largely ignored and even suppressed. To refer
to this rich period of Berber history as
"the Libyan invasion"
does not necessarily represent the truth, and it is strongly
advised that students of Libya ought to refrain from depending
on established sources alone. A good example of this is the Palermo Stone saga!
And then, there is another interesting point rarely mentioned
but by a few respected scholars: the pharaohs were
in the habit of chiselling out most of the references
they did not wish to survive, and thus censorship
is not that new, after all. They were also in the
habit of inscribing only their victories and rarely their defeats, and therefore
all the references to the Libyans were closely tied to the word:
"defeat". Expectedly, there was no mention of Libyan victory
(or victories) – this practice
is still common in-to the present day. For instance we have evidence
showing the blunt removal of the name of the Libyan God Amen
from several stone engravings after the Akhnaten revolution, during which Amen
was replaced by Aten.
Of course, there are hardly any serious studies exploring
Libyan history and as such Libyan history remains to be written. If the amount
of volumes produced in relation to Egypt or Greece were also produced in relation
to Libya, a totally new history would emerge from beneath
the Libyan desert to shock the world. Having said this, Egyptian Predynastic history itself, according to Hoffman (1980) remains to be written despite the 150-year existence of the science of Egyptology. In fact it is strange how there are thousands of books regarding the reign of the conquering pharaohs and the well-ordered succession of thirty-two historical dynasties, points out Michael Hoffman, while "Egypt's prehistoric past is generally portrayed as a series of disjointed segments whose story is an unimportant prelude to the age of the pharaohs".
A number of sources say Egypt was ruled by divine or mythical rulers (or kings) before the unification of Egypt by Menes, while some consider the predynastic kings listed by the Palermo Stone in the first register as also mythical kings, when the kings clearly wore the red crown (traditionally linked to Lower Egypt), and while inconsistently consider the kings in the subsequent registers as real kings. Consequently, even though the names of the kings in the first register were deciphered (i.e. readable, but not unanimously accepted by researchers), their exact meaning "remains uncertain", and their identification with historical persons "remains controversial" if not lacking.
Rather than fully study these kings, the predynastic [Libyan] kings of Lower Egypt were somehow ignored; while those kings prior to Dynasty 1 (like Irihor, Ka, Scorpion), corresponding to what is known as the late
Predynastic Period (Naqada IIIa-b), were grouped under the label “Dynasty 0”. Why? Why would the Ancient Egyptians suddenly stop being ruled by mythical kings, or the so-called "divine spirits", and instead appoint real kings in the flesh? Where were the thrones of such mythical kings located: in Orion, Sirius or Draco? What does "identifying a mythical king with a historical personality" mean? Or was the whole thing just a convenient way-out of the "Libyan Question"?
Toby A. H. Wilkinson (2000, p. 85) on one hand recognises that most scholars universally agree that the rectangles in the first register on the Recto side of the Palermo Stone represent a list of predynastic (or pre-Old Kingdom) Lower Egyptian monarchs, which were correctly interpreted by Spiegelberg (1897: 10) and later confirmed by Gauthier (1915:33); while on the other hand he seems to agree with both: Helck (1956:2), who thought the names represent "mythical pre-First Dynasty kings", and O'Mara (1996: 203), who suggested that the names "may be entirely fictitious"; the latter of which, Wilkinson adds, is perhaps the more likely (p. 85) because (he says) there is no evidence "for a separate kingdom of Lower Egypt having existed prior to the First Dynasty, even though this was the clear implication of the later Egyptian unification myth" (p. 85).
Wilkinson's book about the Palermo Stone is widely quoted as the latest authority on the Stone, and yet according to him the predynastic kings may be "fictitious", and the unification of Egypt itself is a "myth". Why bother engraving a stone with one fictitious register and six real registers? Such a mix does not make the slightest sense. There is no evidence because there was hardly anything recorded (on stone) during predynastic time(s), and because, like Breasted had noted, the Delta is so deeply overlaid with deposits of Nile mud, that the material remains of its earliest civilization are buried forever from our reach.
Luckily the Palermo Stone survived, albeit broken and with missing parts, but other valuable information was lost. Also most of the data preceeding writing was preserved as oral lore, passed from one generation to another, until it reached the person who engraved the Palermo Stone who preserved the data for us to read.
It is obvious that there were real kings ruling the two parts of Egypt, long before Menes forcibly unified the country, as universally agreed by most scholars. For example, according to Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez (1983) "Neither Mariette nor Maspero deny that Egypt . . . was often partitioned between princes who reigned in Upper and Lower Egypt respectively".
Another reason for the lack of information about these predynastic kings, according to Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez, is that Mariette and Maspero "incline to believe that Manetho confined himself to enumerating those dynasties which were looked upon as the legitimate ones. The work of elimination which has been attempted by certain modern savants, must have been undertaken, to a certain extent, in Egypt itself; and some of the collateral dynasties must have been effaced and passed over in silence, because the monuments still remaining preserve the names of reigning families which are ignored by history" (A history of art in ancient Egypt, vol. I, 1883, p 19).
In addition to the invasions I noted earlier, where invaders naturally fake history to justify their brutal invasions, we must not forget the all-popular science of "Politics", as the following real story will illustrate. Let me start by saying it is needles to remind most readers of the existence of the Berbers in both today's Egypt (in Siwa) and across the whole of North Africa because most educated people know that for fact, except, apparently, Dr. Zahi Hawass, the Director of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.
In a Symposium held at the Natural History Museum, Los Angeles, 1999, by the American Research Centre in Egypt, Dr. Hawass failed to mention the ethnic Berber population of the Libyan desert when he illustrated his journey to the Bahariya oasis and to the still-Berber Siwa oasis (south of Bahariya). He also failed to mention anything about Alexander's visit to Siwa's Temple of Amun when he spoke of Alexander briefly voyaging from Alexandria "to the region". To cut the story short, one of the attendees was the Moroccan Ethnologist Helene E. Hagan. When she requested from Dr. Hawass some explanation as to the ethnicity of the people of Bahariya, he replied: "Egyptians".
Then when Helene Hagan suggested that the indigenous population of the oasis were Libyco-Berber like the population of Siwa today, Dr. Hawass "was quick to assert that he had said "Egyptians and that is what these people were, that they looked like me", adding that "I know nothing about the people you mentioned". (The Shining ones, 2000, p. 129).
Now everyone knows that the current population of Egypt is Arabs (except Siwa) who speak Arabic language as a result of the Arab invasions of North Africa, and therefore to compare himself with the Berber native populations of the Libyan Desert is "naive"; but to deny the existence of the Berbers and of knowledge of the Berbers where he did not even repeat the name 'Berbers' (when he said: "the people you mentioned") is childishly "political".
What I failed to mention until now, however, is that the Symposium was about the "Field Of Golden Mummies", a recently excavated giant burial ground in the Bahariya Oasis, labeled an "Egyptian archaeological treasure". When Helene Hagan later, in a private conversation with Dr. Jean Yves Empereur (off the record, so to speak), sought his opinion regarding the mummies found in Bahariya, Dr. Empereur corroborated her hypothesis by saying that "it is most likely that the Bahraya people were Berber or Amazigh", and that "it is justifiable, he said, to state that these burials are of Berber people" (p. 130).
Helene Hagan also noted that ancient Bahariya was peopled by two Berber groups the Tehenu and the Temehu, and that according to the Egyptian archaeologist Ahmed Fakhri the existence of a great number of Libyan texts and the Berber cemetery at Bahariya prove that Bahraya was not and has never been a pure Egyptian territory (p. 41).
Now the question to ask is why did not Dr. Empereur say what he told Helene Hagan off the record inside the Symposium for the other 200 Egyptologists to hear? While Helene Hagan was polite to note that the 200 Egyptologists were entertained with fabricated history and misled into thinking that the newly discovered mummies are "human remains of undetermined origin", I personally can only say that if you go against the ruling Arab tide you will lock yourself out of Egypt (and of any other North African country for that matter); and therefore in my view many Egyptologists are not ignorant of the facts, as demonstrated by Dr. Empereur, and thus they were not misled by anyone. However, silencing them by controlling access ('visa') to the so-called stone "monuments" is another matter; probably because of which not a single Egyptologist out of the 200 found the courage to stand up to Dr. Hawass' denial of basic truth.
One final note relating to this story, is that in relation to the concept of "fictitious", as applied by O'Mara and Wilkinson to a possible Berber line of predynastic monarchs, Helene Hagan's book itself, The Shining Ones, first appeared in print in 2000 with a publishers note (on the copyright page) stating that the book "is a work of fiction" and that "names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously".
In other words, the American publisher, Xlibris, is saying the names "Egypt", "Cairo", "Zahi Hawass", "Khufu", "Libya", "Los Angeles", "Amun", "Nile", "Delta" and hundreds of other names of both persons and places are all imaginary and do not exist in the real world. My first reaction was to scratch the back of my head; then having thought about it for a few hours, I emailed Helene Hagan. She replied a few days later, apparently unaware of such statement, stating that she referred the matter to her lawyers.
As one is often lured to talk of 'colour'
and 'race' when the whole of humankind is found
to be of one type, genetically sharing around
99.8% of its DNA material with chimpanzees
and 58% with bananas, one can only say that
(some of) the Temehu people were said to be
'fair skinned' and 'blue eyed'. However, recent genetic results revealed that blond hair did not originate solely in Europe. For example, the dark-skinned residents of the remote Solomon Islands have the highest occurrence of bright blond hair, due to a single mutation that seems to have originated in the Pacific; concluding that human characteristic of blond hair arose independently in equatorial Oceania (Science, May 3, 2012).
Apparently, according to another study, the European gene responsible for blue eyes arose from a single ancestor between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago around the Black Sea, during the expansion of the human population in Europe and the arrival of agriculture from the Middle East. Such date is rather recent when compared to the genetic results suggesting the Temahuq speakers (the Berbers) breaking up from the Afro-Asiatic group between 21,000 and 32,000 years ago (as I noted above).
Generally speaking the Libyans were in the Old Kingdom
shown "red brown", with
a long, lock-like beard, very
similar to the beard of Osiris, which the pharaohs also adopted as a sign of
royalty. However, the Tehenu were portrayed as tall, dark skinned
(or bronze-skinned, as I noted above), with long black hair, short pointed beards, slender faces
and thick lips; most of which needless to say are features characteristic of African populations - the ancestors of humanity.
In ancient times men wore single hair locks on one side of
the head, and in some cases the side-lock was worn on both sides of the head at once. Libyan chiefs however were found wearing the double side-lock (as seen on
two chiefs in a relief at Karnak). Libyan captives often appear as wearing only one side-lock, either on the left or on the right side of the head. Incidentally, writes Oric Bates, the hieroglyph for the "west" iment (the Libyan land) is seemingly a cap with a plume, and two pendants of unequal length which appear to be side-locks; which he compared to modern Berber Imushagh ('Berber Tuareg') women, who sometimes braid their hair in two side-locks on the right and left of the head.
iment (Ament)
They also had pointed beards and a headdress
of two ostrich plumes. According to some sources,
one feather symbolises 'chieftain status',
while two feathers are generally worn by everyone
else. But in other representations of Libyans
we see chieftains with two feathers and their
subjects wearing only one feather. The reasons for the differences in hair-dressing among the Libyans, according to Bates, cannot be definitely stated, but that in some degree they served as tribal marks is clear from Herodotus. Unlike
the Temehu and other Libyan groups, the Tehenu wore no feathers on their hair.
Their dress consisted mainly of two leather strips worn across the chest and
held with a belt along the waist, which terminated in a penistache (as shown by the next image, from Oric Bates' The Eastern Libyans).
The great
chief of the Berber Meshwash, King Namlot, who was referred
to as the "Great Chief of Chiefs",
wore two ostrich-plumes, while his followers wore one
each. Also Libyan
gods of ancient Libya were portrayed by
the ancient Egyptians with one feather, like
the goddess Maat and the god Shu, while the
Libyan goddess Ament, the consort of Libyan Amen or Amon,
was shown with one plume (on top of a cap with two side
locks) in one representation, while in another she appeared
with two plumes.
Neith-tattooed Temehu Libyans. Source: Oric Bates (The Eastern Libyans).
The long robe, fastened at the shoulders with
golden clasps, and bordered with coloured lines,
was a mark of dignity and rank, and therefore
was more common than the kilt (skirt, kirtle).
Over this garment the Temehu occasionally wore
a cloak, under which they wore either a tunic,
girded at the waist and stretched almost to
the knee, or nothing except a belt. The cut
of these robes, which sometimes were fringed,
was derived from the skin-cloaks worn in classical
times. They were regularly open from top to
bottom, and sometimes ornamented with coloured
designs and decorated with pieces sewn in the
corners or at the waist. In late times, the
tunic became more popular among the more civilised
Libyans.
One of the most important temples illustrating the description
of the Tehenu people is the temple of the King Sahu-Ra. Libyan princes wore animal tails as a sign of royalty, which was also employed as a mark of distinction by the Egyptian kings, and which according to Bates could have had its origin in the desire to imitate the aspect of totem animals, or from an archaism which preserved the memory of the time when hunting-men wore the skins of animals taken in the chase. The Temehu kept small live stock, were skilled workers,
and highly religious (or mythical) people. The main
principal deities of the Temehu, Tehenu and other Libyan groups were the Great Goddess Neith, the Libyan god Amon (Amun
or Amen) and goddess Ament, Libyan Seth, Libyan Isis & Osiris, Libyan Bast, as well as other lesser gods and goddesses noted by Budge, Gardiner and Maspero. Neith and Amun were later adopted by other
cultures, like the Egyptian pharaohs, who venerated them as Nit (or Net) and Amun-Ra; the Greeks, who adopted Neith as Athena and Amon as Zeus-Amon; and the Phoenicians, who adopted Neith as Tanit and Amon as Baal-Hamon. Neith's worship in Egypt was attested from predynastic times and therefore dates back to thousands of years before the Phoenicians arrived in Libya and before the Greeks adopted Athena from Lake Tritonis.
The VIth Dynasty cemeteries discovered between the First and Second
Cataracts were identified with the Libyan Temehu.
The cemeteries show a distinctive Libyan culture, comprising tombs with circular
stone walls, burials in contracted positions, and body tattooing, most of which,
according to Egyptian inscriptions, is identified with
the Libyan Triple Goddess Neith par excellence; whose prophesy is simple: "coming of the day when that which is hidden shall be revealed".
This work (Brief History of
The Temehu Tribes of Ancient Libya) is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivs 3.0 Unported License. Author: Nesmenser, Zuwarah, Libya. The full
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