The region which extends from the frontiers of Egypt to the Atlantic Ocean,and from the Mediterranean to the Niger, was in ancient times inhabited bya people to whom we give the general name of Berbers, but whom theancients, particularly those of the Eastern portion, knew under the name ofMoors. "They were called Maurisi by the Greeks," said Strabo, "in the firstcentury A.D., and Mauri by the Romans. They are of Lybian origin, and forma powerful and rich nation."1 This name of Moors is applied not only tothe descendants of the ancient Lybians and Numidians, who live in the nomadstate or in settled abodes, but also to the descendants of the Arabs who,in the eighth century A.D., brought with them Islamism, imposed by thesabre of Ogbah and his successors. Even further was it carried, into Spain,when Berbers and Arabs, reunited under the standard of Moussa and Tarik,added this country to the empire of the Khalifa. In the fifteenth centurythe Portuguese, in their turn, took the name to the Orient, and gave thename of Moors to the Mussulmans whom they found on the Oriental coast ofAfrica and in India.
The appellation particularizes, as one may see, three peoples entirelydifferent in origin--the Berbers, the Arabs of the west, and the SpanishMussulmans, widely divided, indeed, by political struggles, but unitedsince the seventh and eighth centuries in their religious law. Thisdistinction must be kept in mind, as it furnishes the necessary divisionsfor a study of the Moorish literature.
The term Moorish Literature may appear ambitious applied to the monumentsof the Berber language which have come down to us, or are gathered dailyeither from the lips of singers on the mountains of the Jurgura, of theAures, or of the Atlas of Morocco; under the tents of the Touaregs of thedesert or the Moors of Senegal; in the oases of the south of Algeria or inTunis. But it is useless to search for literary monuments such as have beentransmitted to us from Egypt and India, Assyria and Persia, ancient Judea,Greece and Rome; from the Middle Ages; from Celt, Slav, and German; fromthe Semitic and Ouralo-altaique tongues; the extreme Orient, and the modernliterature of the Old and New World.
But the manifestations of thought, in popular form, are no less curious andworthy of study among the Berbers. I do not speak of the treatises onreligion which in the Middle Ages and in our day were translated from theArabic into certain dialects: that borrowed literature, which also existsamong the Sonalulis of Eastern Africa and the Haussas and the Peuls of theSoudan, has nothing original. But the popular literature--the stories andsongs--has an altogether different importance. It is, above all, theexpression of the daily life, whether it relates to fêtes or battles oreven simple fights. These songs may be satirical or laudatory, to celebratethe victory of one party or deplore the defeat of the True Believers by theChristians, resounding on the lips of children or women, or shouted inpolitical defiance. They permit us, in spite of a coarse rhythm andlanguage often incorrect, an insight into their manner of life, and to feelas do peoples established for centuries on African soil. Their ancestors,the Machouacha, threatened Egypt in the tim