Berber Peoples in the Sahara and North Africa

Abstract

Over the period since the early Holocene, peoples belonging to either of two cultural and linguistic complexes have come to prevail across most of the vast Sahara region, from the Mediterranean in the north to the Sahel zone in the south. Through the southern Sahara, from the areas just north of the great bend of the Niger River at the west to the Nile River in the east, these populations most often spoke languages of the Nilo-Saharan language family. In North Africa, the northern half of the Sahara, and in the lands east of the Nile, societies speaking diverse languages of the Afroasiatic language family usually predominated. The primary focus here will be on what linguistic evidence can tell about the history of peoples of the Berber branch of Afroasiatic, and thus on historical developments in North Africa and the northern, central and Western Sahara, particularly in the period from around 2000 BC down to Late Antiquity.

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