Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, September (2007)
Introduction
The narrow and isolated belt of habitable lands—between Libya in the east and Morocco in the west—that lines the southern shores of the Mediterranean has always been an insular world. From their perspective, the Arab geographers logically named these lands the Jazirat al-Maghrib, meaning the ‘Island of the West.’ The different countries that make up north Africa today are thus collectively called ‘the Maghrib.’ The flow of sea currents and the predominant winds, the hard and rugged barrier formed by the uplifted coastal mountains, and a location between the world’s largest desert and its largest inland sea, combine to produce a peculiar mix of connectivity and isolation that has affected ideas as much as economies. While constantly moderating the exposure of its inhabitants to innovations created elsewhere in the Mediterranean, these same forces have also encouraged unusually strong and fast-paced developments of these outside ideas and practices once they have entered north Africa.
One result in the realm of cult and belief of this double heritage of relative isolation and internalized intensity was the emergence of a bewildering variety, range, and local identity of ritual and practice among Africans in the long age before the arrival of Christianity. It was a diversity so varied that it precludes an easy description. In an area larger than that of the Iberian and Italian peninsulas combined, every environmental niche as small as a village or a valley came to have its own spirits, deities, rituals, and festivals that were peculiar and important to it. The practices and beliefs were so integrated into the daily life of each ethnic people, village, cultural or occupational group that they formed an almost out-of-mind part of daily routine.
Brent D. Shaw (Princeton University)
Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, September (2007)
Introduction
The narrow and isolated belt of habitable lands—between Libya in the east and Morocco in the west—that lines the southern shores of the Mediterranean has always been an insular world. From their perspective, the Arab geographers logically named these lands the Jazirat al-Maghrib, meaning the ‘Island of the West.’ The different countries that make up north Africa today are thus collectively called ‘the Maghrib.’ The flow of sea currents and the predominant winds, the hard and rugged barrier formed by the uplifted coastal mountains, and a location between the world’s largest desert and its largest inland sea, combine to produce a peculiar mix of connectivity and isolation that has affected ideas as much as economies. While constantly moderating the exposure of its inhabitants to innovations created elsewhere in the Mediterranean, these same forces have also encouraged unusually strong and fast-paced developments of these outside ideas and practices once they have entered north Africa.
One result in the realm of cult and belief of this double heritage of relative isolation and internalized intensity was the emergence of a bewildering variety, range, and local identity of ritual and practice among Africans in the long age before the arrival of Christianity. It was a diversity so varied that it precludes an easy description. In an area larger than that of the Iberian and Italian peninsulas combined, every environmental niche as small as a village or a valley came to have its own spirits, deities, rituals, and festivals that were peculiar and important to it. The practices and beliefs were so integrated into the daily life of each ethnic people, village, cultural or occupational group that they formed an almost out-of-mind part of daily routine.
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