Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/238



Muslim rule in North Africa west of the Nile valley was commenced under conditions very different from those prevailing in Egypt and Syria. The Arabs found this land occupied by the Berbers or Libyans, the same race which from the time of the earliest Pharaohs had been a perpetual menace to Egypt, and which, on the Mediterranean seaboard, had offered a serious problem to Phœnician, Greek, Roman and Gothic colonists. For some thousands of years these Berbers had remained very much the same as when they had emerged from the neolithic stage, and were hardy desert men like the Arabs in pre-Islamic times. Their language was not Semitic, but shows very marked Semitic affinities, and, although language transmission is often quite distinct from racial descent, it seems probable that in this case there was a parallel, and this is best explained by supposing that both were derived from the neolithic race which at one time spread along the whole of the south coast of the Mediterranean and across into Arabia, but that some cause, perhaps the early development of civilization in the Nile valley, had cut off the eastern wing from the rest, and this segratedsegregated [sic] portion