Berber traditional religion

Tafukt & Ayyur

According to Herodotus, all ancient Berbers worshipped the moon and sun (Tafukt in Tamazight) and sacrificed solely to them. In Berber, the Moon (Ayyur in Tamazight) and the god of the moon carry the same name. Masinissa, the first king of Numidia, commonly paid tribute to the sun god Apollo in 179 B.C to his temple in Delos, the assumed birthplace of Apollo and his twin sister Artemis (the goddess of the moon), for which he received a golden crown from the inhabitants of the Greek island Delos. Tullius Cicero (105–43 BCE) also reported the same cult in On the Republic (Scipio's Dream):

When I (Scipio) was introduced to him, the old man (Massinissa, king of Massyle) embraced me, shed tears, and then, looking up to heaven, exclaimed I thank thee, O supreme Sun, and you also, you other celestial beings, that before I departed from this life I behold in my kingdom, and in my palace, Publius Cornelius Scipio.

Further authors such as Apuleius or Augustine of Hippo mention that sun worship continued into the first millennium and the seventh century. Coptic saint Samuel the Confessor appears to have been harassed by the sun-worshiping Berbers who tried unsuccessfully to force him to worship the sun.

Some Latin inscriptions were found in Northwest Africa dedicated to the sun-god. An example is the inscription found in Souk Ahras (the birthplace of Augustine; Thagaste in Algeria) written "Solo Deo Invicto". The megalithic culture may have been part of a cult of the dead or of star-worship.

Africa

Africa (Tamazight: Ifri/Ifru) was a goddess of fertility and abundance worshipped by the Berbers and the tribe of Ifri. Her iconography typically included an elephant-mask headdress, a cornucopia, a military standard, and a lion. the Latin designation (Africa) originally meant the land of the Afri was also known from the Berber word ifri (plural ifran) meaning "cave". To the Berbers, Africa was a deity associated with caves which were her main places of worship, coins and other materials depicting this deity were discovered mainly in Algeria in Albulae (Aïn Temouchent) and in Guechguech, 16 km east of Constantine. She was later included in the roman pantheon and became the personification of the region of Africa Proconsularis and later the name used for the entire continent of Africa.

Funerary practices

The tombs of the early people and their ancestors indicate that the Berbers and their ancestors (the Capsians and Ibero-Mauresians) believed in an afterlife. The prehistoric people of northwest Africa buried bodies in little holes. When they realized that bodies buried in unsecured holes were dug up by wild animals, they began to bury them in deeper ones. Later, they buried the dead in caves, tumuli, tombs in rocks, mounds, and other types of tombs.

Megalithic culture

Archaeological research on prehistoric tombs in the Maghreb shows that the bodies of the dead were painted with ochre. While this practice was known to the Iberomaurusians, this culture seems to have been primarily a Capsian industry. The dead were also sometimes buried with shells of ostrich eggs, jewellery, and weapons. Bodies were usually buried in a fetal position. In North Africa in 13,000 BC lived the Ibero-mauresian man, archaeologists have traced their origins to the Caspian culture, a North African civilization that dates back more than 10,000 years.^{[citation needed]}

It is a culture that dominated in North Africa, between 13,000 BC and the foundation of Numidia, several sub-cultures emerged and evolved and all of which were called Megalithic cultures, the word Megalithic describes an era where ancient monuments built before the invention of early writing in 3,200 BC.^{[citation needed]} Megalithic Tombs (also called Dolmens), were monuments built as burial sites for ancient Berbers, megaliths are huge tombs underground to bury the dead and they come in several shapes.^{[citation needed]}

There exists more than 32,000 Dolmens across Algeria, including for instance the slopes of Djebel Mazela in Bounouara, the site of the necropolis of Sigus (which includes dolmens, menhirs and cromlechs), as well as the important necropolis of Djelfa. The region with the highest concentration of Dolmens is Roknia where over 3,000 megalithic monuments in the necropolis stretch over several kilometers (in comparison, there are more than 4,000 on the whole of France). They are present in large numbers in eastern Algeria and Tunisia and are characterized by their quadrangular plan.

The monument of Msoura is one of the best-known megalithic monuments in north-west Africa. It is composed of a circle of megaliths surrounding a tumulus, the highest of which is over 5 meters (16 ft). According to legend, it is the tomb of the Libyan king Anti (known by the Greeks as the giant Antaeus, an opponent of Heracles). The tomb was venerated by Berbers who went for pilgrimage to the ancient prehistoric monument.^{[citation needed]}Another megalithic monument was discovered in 1926 to the south of Casablanca. The monument was engraved with funerary inscriptions in the Berber script known as Tifinagh.

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  Dolmen in Bechar from 6,000 BC, Algeria with a burial chamber built inside the hill.
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  Dolmen in Aïn Séfra, Algeria dating back to 7,100 BC.
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  Dolmen found in Boghar region of Medea in central Algeria from 5,600 BC.
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  Dolmen Discovered in Roknia from 10,000 BC.
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  Dolmen in Tassili sépulture dating back to 12,000 BC.

Ancient Berber tombs

After the development of architecture in North Africa in early history improvement from the dolmens began to be heavily considered by ancient Berbers, more regular and improved designs of tombs were invented known as Bazinas. The term bazina comes from the Berber word meaning mound. The bazinas are built of dry stone. Their upper part is often domed or a truncated cone.

Access to the burial chamber is invisible. The deceased is buried on the ground and covered by a projecting funerary structure. Bazinas are found in the vicinity of Chellala and Tamda, in Algeria and in the north-west of Tunisia, for example in Balta Bou Aouène, near Bou Salem, as well as in the Meknes region of Morocco with the Gour bazina.

These tombs evolved from primitive structures to much more elaborate ones, such as the pyramidal tombs spread throughout Northern Africa. The honor of being buried in such a tomb appears to have been reserved for those who were most important to their communities.

These pyramid tombs have attracted the attention of some scholars, such as Mohamed Chafik who wrote a book discussing the history of several of the tombs that have survived into modern times. He tried to relate the pyramidal Berber tombs with the great Egyptian pyramids on the basis of the etymological and historical data. The best known Berber pyramids are the 19-meter (62 ft) pre-Roman Numidian pyramid of the Medracen and the 30-meter (98 ft) ancient Mauretanian pyramid. The Mauretanian in Tipaza is also known as Kbour-er-Roumia or Tomb of Juba and Sypax, mistranslated by the French colonists as Tomb of the Christian Woman. The Tomb holds the graves of King Juba II and Queen Cleopatra Selene II, the rulers of Mauretania.

Crescent religious symbolism

The crescent was a widespread religious and funerary symbol in ancient North Africa. Archaeological evidence demonstrates that crescent motifs appeared on Libyco-Berber and Punic stelae and other religious monuments across Numidia and Mauretania, where they formed part of indigenous astral iconography.

According to one of the foremost specialists on Berber archaeology Gabriel Camps, the crescent was gradually adopted by the Libyans (Berbers) and later by the independent Numidian kingdoms. He notes that the distribution of crescent-bearing stelae extends throughout Numidia, including sites such as Cirta steles, Milev, Tiddis, Rusicade, Cuicul (Djemila), Lambaesis and Thamugadi (Timgad).

The symbol remained prominent during the Roman period, appearing on votive and funerary monuments dedicated to Saturn, the Roman interpretation of the deity Baal Hammon. Nacéra Benseddik describes the African Saturn as a synthesis of the Libyco-Punic Baal Hammon and the Roman Saturn, reflecting continuity between indigenous and Roman religious traditions. Gabriel Camps likewise states that Saturn unquestionably succeeded the Punic Baal Hammon in Roman North Africa.

UNESCO has recognized the exceptional importance of the funerary monuments of the Numidian kingdoms, describing them as characteristic remains of the ancient Numidian civilization and among the principal archaeological testimonies of the ancient Berbers.

Archaeologists regard the crescent itself as a much older element of Libyco-Berber and Punic religious iconography.

Phoenician-Berber beliefs

The Phoenicians were originally a Semitic people who inhabited the coast of modern Lebanon, and later came as refugees to Tunisia. The Phoenicians of Lebanon were seafarers and they founded Carthage in 814 BCE. They later gave birth to the so-called Punic culture, which had its roots in the Berber and Phoenician cultures. Some^[who?] scholars distinguish the relationships between the Phoenicians and the Berbers in two phases:

When Phoenicians settled in Northwest Africa, they stayed in the coastal regions to avoid wars with the Berbers. They maintained their deities which they brought from their homeland. Therefore, early Carthaginians had two important Phoenician deities, Baal and Anat.

Carthage began to ally with the Berber tribes after the Battle of Himera (480 BCE), in which the Carthaginians were defeated by the Greeks.

Roman-Berber beliefs

The Romans allied firstly with the Massyli against Carthage during the Second Punic War. The campaigns of their king Masinissa against Carthage led to the eventual destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE and the annexation of the remaining Punic realm as the Province of Africa by the Romans. But later, they also annexed Numidia to the Roman Empire in 25 BC and the neighboring kingdom of Mauretania in 44 AD.

Apuleius, a prominent Roman citizen philosopher and writer from the 2nd century of Numidian origins is famous for being the authority of several works documenting ancient Greek and Roman mythology, in fact, researchers argue that the tale of Cupid and Psyche, as written by the Apuleius, has its roots in berber oral tradition.

The Berber pantheon also contained multiple deities, known by the Romans as the Dii Mauri (lit. the Moorish gods), represented on reliefs and also the subject of dedications. During the Roman period, Saturn and Ops were the focus of an important cult, subsuming that of Baal Hammon and Tanit, two deities of Punic origin.^{[citation needed]}

According to Pliny the Elder,^{[full citation needed]} the Libyans honored the war goddess Ifri, who was considered to be the protector of her worshipers (and seemed to have been an influential goddess in North Africa) and depicted her on the Berber coins. This goddess was represented in diverse ways on Numidian coins from the first century BCE. When the Romans conquered Northern Africa, she appeared in sculpture and on the coins of the Roman states in North Africa.

The Roman pantheon seems to have been adopted generally, although the cult of Saturn and Ops, as mentioned above, was perhaps the most important.

The Romans displayed great tolerance to the Berber religious cults, which explains the Berbers's receptiveness of the Roman civilisation. As such, after Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire, North Africa was one of the most heavily Christianised areas. By the seventh century, most of North Africa's population in the urban centres and coastal plains had been Christian for a long time and paganism had vanished from prominence, except among the Berber tribes.