Re: Berbers/Amazon and henna
Posted by Catherine Cartwright JOnes on December 24, 1999 at 15:04:10:
In Reply to: Berbers/Amazon and henna posted by Kenzi on December 23, 1999 at 01:01:24:
Some of the scholarship in the Kahena.html is wishful thinking, but a
lot of is very good! Thanks for the link!
Here's one thing the author missed ...when the Phoenicians came into
North Africa at 1200 BCE, and found a henna using group of light
skinned people worshipping Tanit, what they found there were their old
cousins.
(Phoenicians is not my favorite word to refer to these people from
Lebanon and Syria ...they never called themselves Phoenicians, they
called themselves "Channani" (the Red People, "channa" is their root
word for red, and also their root word for henna) (or Canaanites) .
They were called Phoenicians by the Greeks much later ... If I were
talking about the traditions and arts of the Maya fom 800 CE ... why
would I call them "Mexicans", a term used hundreds of years after they
thrived, and never by themselves? (Did I say that in a way that made
sense?)
The Canaanite merchants and traders had gone clear across North Africa
by 1800 BCE, when their civilization was flourishing, founding small
colonies and trading outposts. The people in these colonies were
often groups of women, living with their children, who did a lot of
the textile work that was their main trading commodity. The
Canaanites left an outpost of these people wherever they found the
fairly rare raw materials they needed to make their wares
(especially textile dyes) ... like establishing little factories here
and there ... and went back and forth. These outposts are fairly easy
to track because the women (and men) brought their religion with them,
and that was the Anath/Asherah/Astarte cult ..and their artifacts are
very consistant and identifiable. The goddess with her hennaed hands
up (Anath) and the one holding her breasts (Asherah) turn up all over
the Med. There are Egyptian records of these seafaring people going
along their northern coastline around 1700 BCE and being generally
pesky .... the boats were on their way back and forth between what
became Carthage (Libya, Tunisia) and Ugarit (Syria).
However, after 1600 BCE the Canaanites had some very bad luck . Thera
blew up, (1500 BCE or so) and regular earthquakes in the eastern Med
really trashed their seagoing ships. Also, their neighbors to the
north developed Iron technology and Iron weapons and a spoked chariot
wheel. These invaders attacked Ugarit and pushed clear down to Egypt.
The Canaanites were never empire builders, they were merchants who
were very good at convincing all their neighbors that they should buy
lots of their very, very expensive things (textiles, wine,...) (sort
of ancient Ferengi. Why attack people when you can make them max out
their credit cards? )
So, when the sailors went back to North Africa from Lebanon in 1200,
they were a beaten people, trying to get reestablished. There was a
hell of a famine in Syria and Lebanon at that time. By 1200 Ugarit,
their cheif city had been sacked and burned and was never rebuilt.
What they found in North Africa (they hadn't been there in quite a
while, because their ships kept getting trashed by Tsunamis from the
earthquakes) were the descendants of people they had left there about
600 years earlier. The name of the goddess Anat had shifted slightly
to Tanit, but the customs were absolutely the same.
That's one spot where the author of the Kahena site really missed
...the people in Libya with the plae skin and the henna, sacrificing
to the moon, were not indigenous Africans, they were Syrians and
Lebanese who'd been left behind for a few hunderd years. (And probably
cheerfully intermarried with whomever was around, settled down and
gotten comfortable.) (Imagine the French Canadians if they had NO
contact with France for about 400 years.....some cultural things would
get fossilized, somethin
- Re: Berbers/Amazon and henna Hassan Mortazavi 05:26:50 9/05/00
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