When a new Amazigh year begins at Yennayer, its year number is 950 years ahead of the Gregorian calendar: 2026 thus becomes 2976. This figure might suggest that Amazigh people have been counting the years in this way for almost three millennia. That is not the case. North Africa’s agricultural calendar is ancient, but the present-day numbering of Amazigh years is a twentieth-century creation.

An agricultural calendar far older than its year numbering

For centuries, rural populations across the Maghreb organised part of their agricultural work according to a solar calendar derived from the Julian calendar. The names of several months still bear traces of this history: Yennayer, for instance, derives from the Latin Ianuarius, January.

This calendar helped mark the time for sowing and harvesting, periods of cold weather, and days regarded as favourable or dangerous for crops. Over time, it became enriched by local traditions, sayings, observations of the stars and practices specific to different regions of North Africa.

But the years were not numbered from some ancient Amazigh ‘year zero’. The practice of writing 2976, 2977 or 2978 today belongs to a much more recent history.

Read more: Yennayer, the Amazigh New Year

Why was 950 BC chosen?

The starting point adopted for the modern system is 950 BC, approximately associated with the accession of Sheshonq I to the throne of Egypt.

Sheshonq came from Libyan populations that had been settled in Egypt for several generations. He became pharaoh and founded the Twenty-second Dynasty. His Libyan origins led the creators of the modern Amazigh calendar to regard him as one of the earliest historically documented figures who could be associated with the Libyco-Berber world.

The date of 950 BC should, however, be understood as a conventional reference point. Current Egyptological chronology generally places the reign of Sheshonq I at around 945 to 924 BC. The intention is therefore not to claim that an ‘Amazigh era’ literally began on a particular day in the year 950 BC.

A system of year numbering created in the twentieth century

The idea of giving the Amazigh calendar its own year numbering emerged within Berber cultural circles in Paris during the second half of the twentieth century.

It is chiefly associated with Ammar Negadi, a Chaoui intellectual and cultural activist. In 1980, he published a calendar bearing the year 2930, calculated by adding 950 years to the Gregorian date.

The principle is simple: 1980 + 950 = 2930. In the same way, 2026 becomes 2976, 2027 becomes 2977, and so on.

This new system gradually spread far beyond the circles in which it had first appeared. Today it is widely used during Yennayer celebrations and in publications devoted to Amazigh culture.

An ancient calendar, a modern era

To say that we are in the year 2976 of the Amazigh calendar does not therefore mean that a continuous count of years has been handed down since the time of Sheshonq.

Two histories meet here.

The first is the much older history of North Africa’s agricultural calendars, its seasons, Yennayer and the rural knowledge associated with the annual cycle.

The second is that of an Amazigh era created in the twentieth century, which chose Sheshonq as its historical and symbolic point of reference.

The distinction matters: the recent origin of the year numbering does nothing to diminish the antiquity of the calendrical practices onto which it was grafted. Rather, it tells us how a culture can take up ancient traditions and, in a new age, give them another framework through which to count time.

Read more: Rites and legends of Yennayer, the Amazigh New Year

Among the Tuareg, the facial veil known as the tagelmust traditionally belongs to men. Women, by contrast, leave their faces uncovered. The Saharan climate explains part of this practice, but certainly not its essence. The tagelmust is also a sign of age, restraint, respect and belonging to an Amazigh society whose codes differ markedly from those of the northern Maghreb.

Who are the Tuareg, these Amazigh people of the Sahara?

The Tuareg belong to the wider Amazigh world, but their historic territory lies beyond Morocco, across the central Sahara and the Sahel. They are not a single tribe, but a collection of groups and confederations established notably in the Hoggar and Tassili n’Ajjer, the Aïr, the Adrar des Ifoghas and the Sahelian regions that now extend across Algeria, Libya, Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso. Their territory, long structured around pastoral routes, confederation territories and caravan trails, was later divided by colonial boundaries and then by the borders of modern states.

In the West, the Tuareg have often been nicknamed the “Blue Men”, a reference to indigo-dyed cloth whose colour could stain the skin. The expression, widely popularised by travel writing and the imagery of the Sahara, is not exclusive to them, however: it has also been applied to other nomadic peoples of the desert.

Their languages — Tamasheq, Tamajaq or Tamahaq depending on the region — belong to the Berber language family. The Tuareg have also preserved the use of Tifinagh in forms particular to their own culture. For centuries, pastoral mobility and participation in trans-Saharan trade shaped a society adapted to movement across immense territories.

Another characteristic has long attracted the attention of ethnologists: among many Tuareg groups, traditional descent is matrilineal. A child belongs to the mother’s lineage, and the tent itself is traditionally a woman’s possession, passed down through the maternal line. This does not mean, however, that Tuareg society is a matriarchy: descent, property, family authority and the exercise of power are not the same thing.

And it is within this Muslim society, with its own distinctive codes, that we encounter an inversion that often surprises outsiders: it is the men who conceal their faces.

Read more: Tifinagh: from stone to digital, the living alphabet of the Amazigh world

The tagelmust, a veil marking entry into the world of men

The tagelmust is both turban and facial veil. Wrapped around the head, it may leave only a narrow opening around the eyes. In ethnographic descriptions of the Hoggar, a young man traditionally begins wearing it as he approaches adulthood: putting on the veil for the first time can itself mark the transition to adult manhood.

Women may cover their heads with cloth, but their faces remain uncovered.

Its importance is such that some Tuareg have referred to themselves as Kel Tagelmust, “those of the veil”. The garment therefore became far more than protection from the desert: it became a sign of Tuareg male identity itself.

The word belongs to an ancient Berber lexical family. Tagelmust — ⵜⴳⵍⵎⵙⵜ — is related to agelmus, a word used in several Atlas dialects for a hood. From Morocco to the Sahara, the same root, GLMS, thus refers to something that covers or wraps the head.

Sand and sun do not explain everything

The most obvious explanation appears to be the desert itself. The cloth does indeed protect against the sun, wind, sand and drying effects of the desert air. Yet ethnologists have long pointed out the weakness of a purely climatic explanation: why would women living beneath the same sun not cover their faces as well?

Anthropologist Jeremy Keenan, who studied the Kel Ahaggar during the 1960s and 1970s, noted that men might keep their veil on in camp, in the presence of others, and even in situations where protection from sand made little sense. The precise origin of the custom remains uncertain despite its antiquity.

The explanation must therefore be sought elsewhere.

Veiling the face as a sign of restraint

Among the Tuareg, the male veil forms part of a social language of modesty, reserve and respect.

Its position may itself change according to the person being addressed. Geographer Edmond Bernus observed that a young man might leave more of his face visible among companions, then immediately raise his veil in front of someone to whom he owed deference. Other studies have noted this particular restraint in the presence of elders, strangers or relatives by marriage, especially a mother-in-law.

A covered face therefore does not simply say: “I am protecting myself.” It may also say: “I know how to keep the proper distance between myself and another person.”

The Smithsonian Institution summarises this dimension by associating the male veil and women’s head coverings with a broader Tuareg value of reserve, linked to a person’s status and to the different stages of life.

So why do women not veil their faces?

This is perhaps where the subject becomes most interesting.

The answer is not that Tuareg women are subject to fewer rules of modesty. Those rules are simply expressed through different signs. In the traditional system, the facial veil became an attribute of the adult man: it marks his restraint, his status and the way he enters into relationships with others.

The important place occupied by women within Tuareg kinship systems, and their often matrilineal character, makes this reversal particularly striking. It would, however, be unwise to turn this directly into the “cause” of the male veil. Ethnologists themselves have never established a single, certain origin for the custom.

Ultimately, the tagelmust reveals something more interesting than a simple exception in dress. The same idea — modesty — can be inscribed very differently upon bodies and clothing from one society to another. Among the Tuareg, it is traditionally the face of the adult man that the cloth invites to remain partly withdrawn.

A familiar object of Amazigh rural life, the Takchoulte is a goatskin water bag traditionally used to store water and keep it cool. Tradition even held that the water it contained was particularly wholesome.

How was a Takchoulte made?

After a goat was slaughtered, its skin was placed in a container with a bitter herb intended to help remove the hair. Several days later, the remaining hair was scraped away and the edges of the skin were sewn closed, except around the neck, which was left open to form the mouth of the bag.

The skin was then placed back in the container for several more days with the same herb, helping to remove the last impurities and odours. Once thoroughly washed, the Takchoulte was hung in a shaded place. It was then ready for use, naturally keeping the water inside cool.

Despite the arrival of modern containers, this goatskin bag long remained a familiar object in the Amazigh countryside of southern Morocco.

A water bag always kept close at hand

In Arabic, such a goatskin bag is called a qirba, or Lgourba in Moroccan usage. The word belongs to the same Arabic root as several terms associated with the idea of proximity. This may perhaps explain the appealing image of a vessel that was always kept close at hand, particularly during the hottest weather.

The Takchoulte was not used only to store water. Goatskin bags were also used to ferment and churn milk, separating the butter and producing lben.

And sometimes, within the private world of women, they could also conceal an object of value.

In Morocco, Tachelhit is commonly spoken in the South-West and the High Atlas, Tarifit in the Rif, and Tamazight in central Morocco and parts of the South-East. But are these three different languages, three dialects, or varieties of a single Amazigh language? The answer is less straightforward than it may seem — especially since the word Tamazight itself does not always refer to the same thing.

What do Tachelhit, Tarifit and Tamazight refer to?

Morocco’s Amazigh linguistic geography is generally described in terms of three major groups: Tarifit, spoken mainly in the North and the Rif; Tamazight, in central Morocco and several parts of the South-East; and Tachelhit, in the South-West and across much of the High Atlas. Each of these groups in turn includes its own local varieties.

This map should not, however, be imagined as three territories separated by perfectly clear linguistic boundaries. Ways of speaking vary within each of these broad areas, sometimes gradually from one valley or community to another.

The three groups share significant grammatical and lexical similarities. They belong to the same Amazigh branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family and share many fundamental structures. Yet centuries of evolution, geographical distance and contact with other languages have also produced differences in pronunciation, vocabulary and, at times, grammatical construction.

Why is the word “Tamazight” confusing?

Because it can refer to two different things.

In its broad sense, Tamazight is the name used for the Amazigh language, or even for the Amazigh languages and varieties as a whole. In this sense, Tachelhit and Tarifit are therefore forms of Tamazight.

But in Morocco, Tamazight also refers to a particular variety: the one spoken mainly in the Middle Atlas, central Morocco and certain parts of the South-East. In this second sense, Tamazight can therefore be distinguished from Tachelhit and Tarifit.

The contradiction is only apparent. The same word is being used both for the whole and for one of its components.

It is rather as if the name of a language family were also the name of one of its members. For readers discovering the Amazigh world, this double usage explains much of the confusion.

Can a speaker from the Rif understand a speaker from the Souss?

Not necessarily, at least not immediately.

A Tarifit speaker and a Tachelhit speaker will recognise related structures, roots and words, but phonetic and lexical differences can make spontaneous conversation difficult. Research into Morocco’s Amazigh varieties also shows that mutual intelligibility tends to decrease with linguistic and geographical distance; Tachelhit and Tarifit are among the cases where the differences can be substantial.

This does not mean, however, that these varieties are unrelated to one another. Regular correspondences can be found between their sounds, grammatical forms and a significant part of their vocabulary. A study of lexical equivalences between Morocco’s three major groups likewise found strong similarities between many forms.

Mutual intelligibility also depends on exposure. A speaker accustomed to hearing other Amazigh varieties through travel, television, music or school will naturally understand them better than someone whose linguistic environment has remained predominantly local.

So, three languages or three dialects?

This is where the answer becomes less clear-cut.

There is no universal boundary determining at what degree of difference two ways of speaking become two separate languages. Grammatical proximity, shared vocabulary and mutual intelligibility all matter, but they are not always sufficient. History, social usage and institutional choices also play a part.

Some major international linguistic classifications therefore list Tachelhit, Central Atlas Tamazight and Tarifit as separate languages, each with its own identification.

In Morocco, the institutional approach is different. IRCAM regards Tarifit, Tamazight and Tachelhit as the major varieties, or “geolects”, of Moroccan Amazigh, and has worked since its creation to bring them together within a common standard language. This standardisation is intended to be progressive and convergent, drawing on the elements shared by the different varieties rather than imposing one of them on the others.

Whether one speaks of “three languages” or “three varieties” therefore depends partly on the perspective adopted. The two descriptions can refer to different aspects of the same linguistic reality without either being necessarily wrong.

What is the standard Amazigh taught in Morocco?

Standard Amazigh is not simply the speech of one particular region that was chosen to become the language of the entire country.

Instead, IRCAM’s work has sought to build a common standard from Tarifit, Tamazight and Tachelhit: a shared orthography, terminology, vocabulary, grammatical rules and tools intended in particular for education and institutional use.

Ahmad Boukous, former rector of IRCAM, has described standard Amazigh as a macrolanguage encompassing Morocco’s three major groups.

Another element now helps bring these three groups together: a common writing system. Since 2003, Tifinagh has been the official script adopted in Morocco for teaching Amazigh. The alphabet standardised by IRCAM contains 33 characters and can be used to write Tachelhit, Tarifit and Tamazight alike, despite their differences in pronunciation and vocabulary.

This standard language does not, however, make regional forms disappear. Someone may speak Tachelhit at home or in their village while learning to read and write a standardised form of Amazigh, as happens in many languages that combine a common written standard with strong regional variation.

Are Morocco’s borders also linguistic borders?

No. And this is where the map becomes even more interesting.

Amazigh languages existed long before the present political borders of the Maghreb. Some linguistic areas therefore extend from one country into another, while significant differences can occur within the borders of a single state.

Tarifit itself belongs to a broader linguistic area whose varieties extend eastwards beyond Morocco’s border. Tachelhit is also recorded beyond Moroccan territory alone.

Across North Africa, other names then appear: Kabyle, Chaoui, Chenoui, Mozabite, Tuareg, Nafusi and many others. All belong to the Amazigh linguistic world, but their relationships can no longer be understood solely through national borders.

Another question then begins: where does one Amazigh language end and another begin?

From ancient Libyco-Berber inscriptions to the Tifinagh taught in Morocco today, this script has a long history that remains partly mysterious. Preserved for centuries, notably in the Tuareg world, it has become one of the most visible symbols of contemporary Amazigh culture.

A script rooted in ancient North Africa

The history of Tifinagh is linked to that of the ancient Libyco-Berber scripts, attested in North Africa since Antiquity. Their geometric signs appear in inscriptions carved into stone, sometimes alongside representations of people or animals, from the Maghreb to the Sahara.

These ancient alphabets existed in several regional variants, traditionally distinguished in particular as eastern and western Libyco-Berber. Their exact history, chronology and the relationships between their different forms nevertheless remain the subject of research.

The Tifinagh later used in Saharan regions, particularly among the Tuareg, belongs to this long graphic tradition. It is therefore one of the rare North African writing systems whose use has continued across the centuries in successive forms.

Where does Tifinagh come from?

The origin of the Libyco-Berber alphabets remains debated.

For a long time, many scholars favoured the hypothesis of Phoenician or Punic influence, linked to ancient contacts between North African populations and the Carthaginian world. Others have argued for an essentially local development, possibly shaped by outside influences.

None of these hypotheses is sufficient on its own to explain what was probably a more complex history. Similarities between certain Punic and Libyco-Berber characters have fuelled the debate, while other signs appear to reflect developments specific to North African societies.

The etymology of the word Tifinagh itself is also uncertain. A popular interpretation connects it with tifi, meaning ‘find’ or ‘discovery’, and nnegh, ‘our’, giving the poetic meaning ‘our discovery’. This attractive explanation, however, is not considered proven. Another hypothesis links the term with the word ‘Punic’, again without any definitive certainty.

From the Tuareg world to modern Tifinagh

While the use of ancient Libyco-Berber scripts disappeared from much of the Maghreb, Tifinagh survived in the Sahara, particularly among Tuareg populations. There it continued to be used for inscriptions, messages and various forms of written expression, preserving an ancient graphic tradition.

In Morocco, a new stage began at the start of the twenty-first century. In 2003, Tifinagh was adopted as the official script for the Amazigh language. The Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture — IRCAM — then developed a standardised alphabet of 33 characters, intended notably for education.

Its inclusion in the Unicode Standard in 2005 subsequently enabled its use in computer systems and digital tools. The Unicode block also includes characters used for other forms of Tifinagh, particularly Tuareg variants.

An alphabet that became a symbol

The recognition of Amazigh as an official language of Morocco in 2011 gave Tifinagh a new visibility. Moroccan legislation subsequently confirmed its adoption for writing and reading the Amazigh language.

It can now be seen in education, on public buildings, in signage, the media and many digital formats.

Yet its significance goes far beyond its practical function as an alphabet. Tifinagh has become one of the most immediately recognisable symbols of contemporary Amazigh identity. This symbolic dimension is all the more powerful because it is rooted in a much older graphic tradition.

Between ancient inscriptions, Tuareg continuity and contemporary revival, Tifinagh thus connects several periods of Amazigh history, even though not every stage of that history is yet fully understood.

Read also: Tifinagh, the Berber singularity engraved through time

Where does the word ‘Berber’ come from? Used for centuries to describe the indigenous populations of North Africa, the name itself came from outside. From the Greek barbaros to medieval Arab writers and later the European notion of ‘Barbary’, its history also tells us something about the ways in which the Maghreb has been viewed and named.

Where does the word ‘Berber’ come from?

The word ‘Berber’ is generally traced back to the ancient Greek barbaros (βάρβαρος), later adopted into Latin as barbarus. Among the Greeks, the term initially referred to people whose language they could not understand, before acquiring the broader meaning of someone foreign to the Greek and later Greco-Roman world.

It was therefore not originally the name of a particular North African people. Greek and Roman sources used many different names for the populations of the region, including Libyans, Numidians, Moors, Gaetulians, Garamantes and Mazices, depending on the period, territory and people concerned.

These names are not interchangeable. On the contrary, they reflect the diversity of peoples and societies encountered by ancient writers in North Africa.

How did the name become established in the Maghreb?

The term subsequently appears in Arabic sources in the form al-Barbar. Muslim historians and geographers increasingly used it to describe the indigenous populations of the Maghreb in all their diversity.

In the fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldun devoted considerable attention to them in his Kitāb al-ʿIbar. Part of this vast historical work later became known in French as Histoire des Berbères — History of the Berbers. By then, the word had long since become a broad historical category encompassing very different peoples, tribes and dynasties.

The populations themselves nevertheless had their own names. Amazigh, plural Imazighen, is today the most widely used endonym. It is often translated as ‘free man’ or ‘noble man’, but this should not be regarded as an established etymology: the precise origin of the word remains debated.

From ‘Barbary’ to the Barbary Coast

From the sixteenth century onwards, Europeans commonly used the name Barbary for a large part of North Africa, from Morocco to Tripolitania. Expressions such as the ‘Barbary States’ and the ‘Barbary Coast’ became familiar on maps and in European travel writing and diplomatic language.

The term became particularly associated with the Barbary corsairs, who operated in the Mediterranean and Atlantic for several centuries. Yet ‘Barbary’ did not mean ‘Berber’ in an ethnic sense. These corsairs came from many different backgrounds, including North Africans, Ottomans, sailors from elsewhere and numerous European converts and renegades.

Until the nineteenth century, ‘Barbary’ remained a common European designation for the Maghreb.

Read also: Yaz, the Amazigh sign of the free man

Read also: Berber or Amazigh: the origin of a word and the history of a name

Aït Ben Haddou, Aït Atta, Aït Zineb, Aït Bouguemez… On maps of Morocco, these three letters appear again and again, at the beginning of the name of a village, a tribe, a valley or a territory. We see them so often that we almost stop reading them. Yet this small Amazigh word tells, by itself, something essential: a way of belonging to a group, of connecting oneself to an origin and of inhabiting a territory.

The children of…

The primary meaning of Aït — or Ayt — is ‘the children of’.

The linguist Salem Chaker defines it as the plural of several ancient Amazigh forms — u, w, ag — meaning ‘son of’. To say Aït X is therefore, first of all, to designate ‘the children of X’, in other words those who recognise themselves as the descendants of a common ancestor.

The word belongs to a very ancient vocabulary of kinship. Its present form probably derives from aw-t, constructed from aw, ‘son of’, to which an old plural marker was added.

Behind three letters that have become almost commonplace on road signs, a first image thus appears: that of a community defined by descent.

In the Arabic-speaking world of the Maghreb, the logic is familiar. In its use, Aït can be compared with Beni, Banu or Ouled/Oulad, which likewise appear in countless names of groups and places.

From family to territory

But this descent should not always be taken literally.

As groups formed, moved, forged alliances or occupied a territory, Aït came to mean more than genealogy alone. The ‘children of’ also became ‘the people of’, ‘those of’, the members of a community.

In Kabylia, for example, aït wexxam refers to the ‘people of the house’, in other words the household; at ufella, ‘those above’. The bond is no longer necessarily one of blood: it may become one of place, group or shared belonging.

It is this shift that helps explain why Aït is now so deeply present in the geography of Morocco. The name of a human group often came to designate the territory inhabited by that group, and sometimes eventually the village itself.

Kinship inscribed itself upon the map.

Aït, Ayt or At

Depending on the region and the system of transcription, the same word can take different forms.

Aït is the spelling that has become familiar in Morocco and in French-language place names. Ayt reflects its Amazigh form more directly and is now frequently used by linguists. In some regions, particularly Kabylia and the Mzab, the semi-vowel disappeared and the word is found in the form At.

Aït, Ayt, At: behind these different spellings lies the same ancient term.

This diversity also explains why two names constructed according to exactly the same logic can look different on a map of the Maghreb.

A word that crosses the Amazigh world

The principle extends far beyond Morocco.

Forms corresponding to ‘son of’ and ‘children of’ belong to an ancient common stock of the Amazigh languages. Among the Tuareg, another construction became established for naming groups: Kel, meaning ‘the people of’. Thus the Kel Ahaggar are the ‘people of the Ahaggar’, and the Kel Ajjer those of the Ajjer.

The words differ, but the logic remains: to name people through that to which they belong — an ancestry, a community, a land.

Three letters on the map

Today, anyone travelling through Morocco encounters Aït everywhere, without necessarily knowing what they are reading.

Yet the word was there long before road signs and administrative maps. It recalls a time when territory was expressed first through the people who inhabited it, their alliances, their lineages and the memory of their ancestors.

Aït Ben Haddou, Aït Atta, Aït Zineb…

Each time, the same three letters open the name.

And behind them, one can still glimpse the same ancient formula: the children of, the people of, those who belong.

It takes only a few stones set into an earthen wall: a vertical line, two arms and two legs spread open. The ⵣ, or yaz, is first and foremost a letter of the Tifinagh alphabet. But it has become much more than that: the silhouette of a man standing upright, a sign of freedom and resistance, and undoubtedly today one of the most immediately recognisable symbols of the Amazigh world.

First, a letter

Before representing anything at all, ⵣ is a letter. Its name is yaz, and it corresponds to the sound ‘z’ in the modern Tifinagh alphabet. It notably appears at the heart of the word Amazigh, written ⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖ. In the IRCAM Tifinagh standard, adopted in Morocco for writing Amazigh, it is one of the alphabet’s thirty-three characters.

Tifinagh itself belongs to a much older history. The so-called Libyco-Berber scripts are attested in North Africa from Antiquity and are generally considered to be the ancestors of present-day forms of Tifinagh, although their exact origins remain debated. While their use gradually disappeared across much of northern Africa, the Tuareg preserved a living tradition of the script in the Sahara.

In the twentieth century, with the Amazigh cultural revival, these characters once again emerged from the realm of ancient inscriptions or Tuareg usage. Neo-Tifinagh became a reclaimed script, then modernised and standardised. In Morocco, Tifinagh was officially adopted in 2003 as the script for the Amazigh language.

Read also: The Tifinagh, the Berber singularity engraved in time

A man rises within the letter

And yet, one only has to look at the ⵣ for another reading to appear.

A vertical axis forms the body. Two lines open upwards like arms. Two others spread towards the ground like legs. A man is standing.

It is this resemblance that gives the yaz its symbolic power. The man depicted does not bow; he occupies the space, his feet on the earth and his arms open. The sign can then become the image of the free human being, of the one who remains standing, master of himself and attached to his land.

But the history of the script must be distinguished from that of the symbol: there is no evidence that those who carved the ancient Libyco-Berber inscriptions already gave the corresponding sign this meaning of ‘free man’. The anthropomorphic interpretation belongs above all to the contemporary cultural reappropriation of Tifinagh.

From a written character to an Amazigh emblem

From the 1960s, and especially the 1970s, movements for Berber cultural revival made Tifinagh one of the signs of a reclaimed identity. Around the Berber Academy, founded in Paris, ancient characters were taken up and adapted into what would come to be known as Neo-Tifinagh. The ⵣ gradually acquired a particular status: from a simple letter, it became an emblem.

The transformation was completed when the yaz appeared at the centre of the Amazigh flag, adopted in 1997 by the World Amazigh Congress. Its three horizontal bands evoke the great landscapes of the Amazigh world: blue for the sea and sky, green for the mountains and fertile lands, yellow for the Sahara. At the centre, the red ⵣ represents the free human being standing upright; red is generally associated with life, resistance and the bond uniting the Imazighen across these different territories.

A letter of the alphabet thus became capable of linking populations scattered from the Canary Islands to the Siwa Oasis, from the mountains of Morocco to the Tuareg territories of the Sahara.

‘Free man’: a symbolic truth more than an etymology

Almost everywhere, one reads that Amazigh literally means ‘free man’. The expression is beautiful, and today it is inseparable from the ⵣ symbol. Historically, however, things are more complex.

The linguist Salem Chaker points out that the etymology of the word Amazigh remains uncertain. The ancient root from which this ethnonym may derive no longer exists as a living word in present-day Amazigh languages. Meanings such as ‘free’ or ‘noble’ did indeed exist in certain Berber societies, particularly where they served to distinguish groups of different social status, but nothing proves that this was the original meaning of the word. The interpretation is an old one — it appears notably in Leo Africanus — but it cannot be regarded as an established etymology.

None of this diminishes the power of the symbol. Perhaps even the opposite.

The ⵣ does not necessarily transmit to us, intact, the meaning that people may have given it two thousand years ago. It also tells us what modern Imazighen have chosen to make of a script inherited from their history. They recognised a human silhouette in this letter, then a standing man in that silhouette, and in that standing man a way of expressing freedom.

On a flag, a piece of jewellery, a façade or simply in a few stones taken from the earth of a wall, the yaz has thus become much more than a ‘z’.

A letter that became a body.

Read also: Berber or Amazigh: the origin of a word and the history of a name

The ethnographer Émile Laoust recorded this scene in Mots et choses berbères (1920), from an Amazigh testimony that he himself transcribed and translated, on pages 107 and 108 of his book. In years of food shortage, he explains, women among the Ida Oukensous would go out into the countryside in summer to dig up a wild root.

One root, several names

It was called wainrî among the Ida Oukensous, ainrî further north, and agërni among the Zemmour. From one tribe to another, the word changed; the plant remained the same — a tuber belonging to the arum family, identified today as Arisarum vulgare. It was also found among the Ida Gounidif and the Ntifa: hunger, apparently, paid little attention to tribal boundaries.

Its preparation required real knowledge. The roots were washed, dried in the sun, pounded, then steamed for a long time before being ground into a coarse flour. From this flour came bread or couscous, which Laoust himself describes as “not very nourishing” — food of last resort, never food for a feast.

The price of getting the quantity wrong

There was nothing accidental about the care taken in its preparation. Laoust records a belief found among several tribes: eaten in excessive quantities, the root was said gradually to blacken the skin and eventually cause death, unless the person changed their diet in time. A food of survival, then, but never an entirely safe one.

Better to hide than to be seen

Hunger, in this testimony, was not caused by climate alone. Laoust notes that some households which still had stores of grain nevertheless continued to dig up the root — out of fear of the Makhzen. Better, it seems, to appear destitute than to appear prosperous.

Donkey ears for children

Yet the same plant did not belong only to years of hardship. When its leaves pushed through the earth, folded like little cones, children played with them. Among the Amanouz, they were seen as an “ogress’s ear”; among the Ida Gounidif, as “donkey ears”; among the Ida Oukensous, as “jackal plates”. Three tribes, three ways of seeing, the same leaf — hardship did not quite put an end to play.

What adults dug from the earth to stave off hunger became, in the eyes of children, donkey ears, jackal plates or the ears of an ogress. Even in times of dearth, play did not disappear entirely.

In a small locked temple in Taliza, two wooden idols sleep throughout the year. Only one festival brings them out: Ashura. In 1920, Émile Laoust gives a striking description of the ritual — a sacrifice, a strangely unclothed man amid the jeers of the crowd, a great bonfire, and two divinities whose identity he himself is still trying to understand.

A sacrifice, a bonfire, a night apart

It all begins on the eve of Ashura with the sacrifice of a cow, slaughtered at the entrance to the mosque. The blood is poured outside the village, on the precise spot where the great annual bonfire will soon be raised. The meat is shared out, one portion per household; the head, feet, tail and hide are auctioned and sometimes fetch a very high price — they are said to be charged with the baraka of the sacrificed animal.

Emile Laoust also notes several indications of the possible agricultural origin of the sacrifice: the cow is bought with the proceeds from grain collected on the threshing floors at the time of threshing, and a comparable ceremony was still observed among neighbours of the Aït Isaffen, at the end of the harvest.

Daoud Ou Brahim, the strange high priest

The following evening, a man named Daoud Ou Brahim appears, whom Laoust compares to “some high priest of a lost cult”. He enjoys a singular privilege: each year, he alone may light the Ashura bonfire with an olivewood brand that he has prepared himself several days beforehand.

His role requires him to appear that night largely naked, stripped to above the navel; it is even said that he is forbidden to remove his body hair, contrary to Muslim custom. Greeted with shouts and jeers, he nevertheless walks impassively between the two lines of men and women, the burning brand in his hand.

He first sets fire to the dry grasses piled up in the square. The flames light up his body; the “first” women of the village — those whose sons bear the name of the Prophet — then leap three times over the fire, each time uttering a wild cry.

Laoust himself admits that the meaning of this first part of the ceremony largely escapes him.

The first idol, the one of fire

Daoud Ou Brahim then returns home to put on his finest clothes. During his absence, an attendant is given the key to the small temple where the two wooden idols are kept, and where they remain hidden from the village except during these festivities.

The first is a simple cylindrical piece of fig wood, around eighty centimetres long, with a small stick fixed obliquely at one end. The inhabitants call it “the finger”. Legend attributes a sacred origin to the wood from which it was made: a pious pilgrim is said to have brought it back from Mecca long ago.

The attendant removes the idol from its niche and vigorously rubs it with green barley — or, depending on the season, with a plant growing in the irrigation channels. For Laoust, this green colour may recall the agricultural character of the divinity, the renewed vigour of vegetation, or the fertile forces of spring.

A small lamp is lit, then a new procession forms. The attendant carries the idol on his shoulder; behind him comes Daoud Ou Brahim, now dressed in white, still holding his olivewood brand. Tambourines and songs accompany the procession to the great bonfire.

Alone, the man whom Laoust now calls the high priest approaches it and sets it alight with his sacred brand. He then repeats three times:

“There is no divinity but Allah.”

The idol is then erected facing the flames, in a pile of stones, with its small burning lamp placed upon it.

Smoke, omens and the evil cast away

Around the fire, everyone watches the first smoke. Its direction foretells the year to come: if it is blown eastwards, the year will be good; if towards the west or north, it will be bad.

As the flames rise into the night, young and old, men and women, run three times around the bonfire, always to the right, while repeating a formula whose opening words had already lost their meaning for the people of Taliza in Laoust’s time:

“Ater Oumater! Everything turns around the world!”

Laoust himself wonders about these words, already obscure, and very cautiously puts forward the hypothesis of a very ancient solar rite.

This is also the moment chosen by wives who have not yet experienced motherhood to slip their ring over the idol’s “finger”. They leave it there for a moment before taking it back, hoping in this way to break the supposed spell keeping them childless.

Then, as the fire dies down, one final gesture remains: each person throws onto the embers a handful of the snails gathered by the children during the day, saying:

“Depart with your evil!”

The crowd then returns to the village in a mood of sadness and contemplation that contrasts with the cries, songs and jeers of the outward procession.

The second idol, the Bride of Water

The festivities begin again at dawn the following morning. The young men go down to the river to bathe and splash one another ritually: the rites of fire give way to those of water.

A woman named Aïcha Laser then enters the small temple and brings out the second idol. It bears the name Taslit, the “Bride”. More clearly anthropomorphic than the first, it consists of an almond-wood stick ending in two small pieces of wood representing legs.

Aïcha Laser washes it with water from the river in which the young men have just bathed, then dresses it in rich fabrics. The idol is carried to the public square, where it presides over the women’s dances and songs until evening.

Its role ends there. At the end of the day, it returns to its niche and will not emerge again until the following Ashura.

Two figures, one mystery

Laoust suggests that these two idols may be understood as two complementary figures. The first would be a male divinity associated with the rites of fire; the second, the Taslit, would preside over the rites of water, another element of fertility. But he never presents this identification as certain.

With caution, he draws a parallel between the two figures of Taliza and the couple formed elsewhere by Tlgonja and Anzar, the Rain: in some rituals, the two effigies form a united couple and are invoked together; in Taliza, by contrast, the two idols appear separately and each receives its own acts of devotion.

For Emile Laoust, rain rites, fertility rites and rites linked to the renewal of vegetation thus seem to belong to the same symbolic world, of which, by the beginning of the twentieth century, he was already finding only scattered fragments.

And that is perhaps what makes the ceremony of Taliza so fascinating: when Laoust describes it in 1920, the gestures are still being performed, the two idols still emerge from their temple, the chants are still being spoken — yet part of their meaning has already been lost.

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