Chapter 7 - Page 2

of older and richer societies.

M. Saladin, in his "Manuel d'Architecture Musulmane," after attempting
to unravel the influences which went to the making of the mosque of
Kairouan, the walls of Marrakech, the Medersas of Fez--influences that
lead him back to Chaldaean branch-huts, to the walls of Babylon and the
embroideries of Coptic Egypt--somewhat despairingly sums up the result:
"The principal elements contributed to Moslem art by the styles
preceding it may be thus enumerated: from India, floral ornament; from
Persia, the structural principles of the Acheminedes, and the Sassanian
vault. Mesopotamia contributes a system of vaulting, incised ornament,
and proportion; the Copts, ornamental detail in general; Egypt, mass
and unbroken wall-spaces; Spain, construction and Romano-Iberian
ornament; Africa, decorative detail and Romano-Berber traditions (with
Byzantine influences in Persia); Asia Minor, a mixture of Byzantine and
Persian characteristics."

As with the art of North Africa, so with its supposedly indigenous
population. The Berber dialects extend from the Lybian desert to
Senegal. Their language was probably related to Coptic, itself related
to the ancient Egyptian and the non-Semitic dialects of Abyssinia and
Nubia. Yet philologists have discovered what appears to be a far-off
link between the Berber and Semitic languages, and the Chleuhs of the
Draa and the Souss, with their tall slim Egyptian-looking bodies and
hooked noses, may have a strain of Semitic blood. M. Augustin Bernard,
in speaking of the natives of North Africa, ends, much on the same note
as M. Saladin in speaking of Moslem art: "In their blood are the
sediments of many races, Phenician, Punic, Egyptian and Arab."

They were not, like the Arabs, wholly nomadic; but the tent, the flock,
the tribe always entered into their conception of life. M. Augustin
Bernard has pointed out that, in North Africa, the sedentary and nomadic
habit do not imply a permanent difference, but rather a temporary one of
situation and opportunity. The sedentary Berbers are nomadic in certain
conditions, and from the earliest times the invading nomad Berbers
tended to become sedentary when they reached the rich plains north of
the Atlas. But when they built cities it was as their ancestors and
their neighbours pitched tents; and they destroyed or abandoned them as
lightly as their desert forbears packed their camel-bags and moved to
new pastures. Everywhere behind the bristling walls and rock-clamped
towers of old Morocco lurks the shadowy spirit of instability. Every new
Sultan builds himself a new house and lets his predecessors' palaces
fall into decay, and as with the Sultan so with his vassals and
officials.