The legacy of the Amazigh geometric sign
The particularity of the Amazigh geometric sign is threefold.
It is above all the cultural mark of a civilization belonging to the ancestral peoples of North Africa. It is therefore a material cultural heritage worthy of preservation. This is all the more true since it is an indigenous civilization that has never truly left the African continent. However, as this culture is rooted in the Neolithic period of a Sahara that was still green at the time, the impact is all the more important since it allows us to make some connections with the origins of Homo sapiens.
Most of the signs characterizing this decorative art are not exceptional since they stigmatize established mathematical signs, such as the point [.], the four-pointed star [+] or six-pointed star [*], the square, the rectangle, the triangle [∆] or the diamond [<>], the circle [O]; volumes such as the cube or the vault (architecture). The question arises whether some of these figures are not at the origin of the mathematical signs exported in the period of Judeo-Berber Spain of Al-Andalus, the homeland of Al-Qalasadi (1412-1486) the Berber inventor of mathematical signs.
In any case, these signs retain a universal value. There exist four basic symbolic signs: the point, the cross, the circle, and the square are shared by all the peoples of the Earth.
Despite everything, this range has not remained static. The history of migrations and exchanges has favored the contribution of other signs that have been integrated into the existing register: the hand, the eye, the fish, the effigy of Tinit.
These new contributions reflect the evolution of a cultural population that has geographically dispersed from Egypt to the Atlantic coasts of an “extreme West” (first Greek, then became Muslim Al-Maghrib المغرب).
This apparent multiplicity nevertheless retains a specific ancestral foundation. Its roots are anchored in the soil; therefore in the climate and topography of a North African terroir. This aspect remains essential to understanding the fundamental concerns of an indigenous people. The American mythologist Joseph Campbell makes the following description: “The tribes living on plants became an integral part of the plants; the rites of sowing and harvesting were identified with those of procreation, birth, and maturity”. This reflection corresponds entirely to Berber civilization and is similar to the work of the ethnologist Jean Servier (1918-2000). This characteristic appears in a setting exclusively focused on elements belonging to Mother Earth. The bivalence between nourishing earth and female fertility is one of the great pillars of this endogenous culture. This fundamental aspect remains a sociological key to today's Maghreb world.
However, this attachment to the nourishing soil is necessarily dependent on cosmic phenomena: the sun, the moon, the rain, and the seasons. This existential gaze also focuses on unpredictable phenomena that escape man and question him on questions leading to a mythical system, allowing to explain the inexplicable. In other words, any identification with the soil does not exclude a connection linked to cosmic space. However, this indefinable space belongs to the domain of spirituality. So, the plowed field, planted with seeds is associated with the fertility of water and the sun. Jean Servier described the boundary separating the concrete from the abstract in this way: "Plowing carries within it, through many rites, the symbolism of funerals". This symbolic bivalence is also seen in the circle's squaring, which characterizes certain ceramics forms. Joseph Campbell defines the squaring of the circle as containing "the secret of the transformation of celestial forms into terrestrial forms". He then adds that "the sun is the food bowl of God, an inexhaustible Grail, overflowing with the sacrificial substance, whose flesh is food in truth and whose blood is drink in truth". This seed of spirituality already seems to appear in the first paleo-Berber ceramics of Gastel and Tiddis (Eastern Algeria).
“There is such an air of kinship between some of these Capsian or Neolithic decorations and those which the Berbers still use in their tattoos, weavings, and paintings on pottery or on the walls, that it is difficult to reject any continuity in this taste innate for geometric decoration, especially since there is no lack of milestones from protohistoric times to the modern era”.
This spark of latent spirituality between a sometimes harmful bottom (belief in djinns) and a rather protective top (the Sun) has given way, throughout invasions and time, to imported religious beliefs: Phoenician (Tinit, the eye), Judeo-Arabic (Hamsa hand), Christian (solar wheel); even more esoteric “Noun” in Aramaic means “a snake” or “a fish”. The letter of the Phoenician alphabet [] gave the Nu of the Greek alphabet [Nv], then the Latin [N], and it is also a letter of the Hebrew alphabet [ נ ] and the Arabic alphabet [ ن ]. In the Arabic alphabet, the symbolism of the sign (a cup surmounted by a point) is similar to the myth of Jonah and the whale; all the mosques of the Maghreb bear this emblem at the very top; traditionally, the latter is of an elongated cubic shape, as opposed to the “marabout”, a cubic funerary monument of a holy man, topped with a dome (a qubba, قُبَّة ).
The geometric sign can therefore be read on three levels: a first, linked to the earth; a second, linked to cosmic forces; a third, more diffuse, is similar to a religious spirituality encompassing the whole.
One may wonder whether the geometric sign is threatened with losing its symbolic character by retaining only a decorative aspect. Obviously, such an eventuality exists. This is why it is urgent to recall the existing identity function. In its form of repelling the “evil eye”, its presence persists on the doors of Tunisia in Morocco. We also observe that the potters of Sejnane, in Kroumirie, strive to perpetuate the tradition by modernizing its existence.
It is up to the contemporary Amazigh movement to advocate its cultural importance in order to include it in the heritage of the Berber world, of which it remains an indelible mark. For researchers and scientific actors in anthropology, the geometric sign remains a valuable keystone.
Christian Sorand,
November 2024
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