Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/866

Rh 834 MOROCCO and Abda. In form and size the mules are much superior, and they usually fetch two or three times the price. The horned cattle are not unlike Alderneys ; and the sheep, for the improve ment of which nothing is done, have spiral horns (not unfrequently four), rounded foreheads, and long fine wool. Domestic fowls are kept in great numbers ; they are of the Spanish type, small and prolific. The mackerel fishery off the coast at Casa Blanca and Tangiers attracts fishers from Spain, Portugal, and other parts of Europe. Occasionally a small shoal may be found as far soutli as Mogador. Soles, turbot, bream, bass, conger eel, and mullet are common along the coast, and a large fish called the aslimsah (rough scaled and resembling a cod). Lobsters and crayfish swarm in the rocky places, but the natives have no proper method of catching them. The tunny, pilchard, and sardine, and a kind of shad known as the &quot;Mogador herring,&quot; all prove at times of practical importance. &quot; The catching of the shebbel or Barbary salmon, a species of shad, is a great industry on all the principal rivers of the coast, and vast numbers of the fish, which are often from 5 to 15 pounds in weight, are dried and salted.&quot; They ascend from the sea in spring. Bar bels and a few other small fish swarm in the streams, but for the angler there is little real sport. x Of the population of Morocco only the vaguest estimate is pos sible. Behm and Wagner give 6,410,000 probably too high a number. Ethnographically it consists of three main elements Berbers or Shelluh, Arabs, and Jews with a large infusion of Negro blood, and a sprinkling of Negro individuals. A distinction is sometimes drawn between the country Arab and the city &quot;Moor,&quot; as he is called par excellence ; but the difference between them is one not so much of race (though the &quot; Moor &quot; has probably absorbed a greater variety of heterogeneous elements) as of method of life, and the superficial physical results of the same. The Berbers are the original occupants of the country (as may be proved by the ancient words preserved by classical writers), and they still form not only the most numerous but the most industrious and civilizable section of the people. While the Arab is still by preference a dweller in tents, the Berber for the most part builds himself houses of stone or clay. On the whole, the Arabs are predominant in the lowlands and the Berbers in the hilly districts and mountains. Greatly corrupted, even in the time of Ibn Khaldun, the Arabic of Morocco has now, with the complete decay of literature, reached a state of extreme degradation. Of the Schilha dialects very little is known, but everything goes to prove their general philological agreement with the better-investigated representative of the Ber ber. The Jews are the great commercial class in the community. They are usually said to number about 150,000 to 200,000, but Rohlfs (Petcrmann s Mitth,, 1883) shows reason to suppose that they do not exceed 62,800. Having come largely from Spain, they still use among themselves a corrupt Spanish. 2 That at one time Morocco was a much more populous country is evident from the description of Leo Africanus, though even in his time the number of ruined or decaying towns was very great. Besides Tangiers, Larash, Bailee, and the other places on the coast already described, there are only a few large cities in the country. Four of these FEZ (q.v.), Meknes or MEQUINEZ (q.v. ), Wazan, and Teza are in the basin of the Sebu. On the Zarhun range, north of Meknes, lies the town of Muley Edris or Zarhun, which no Christian is allowed to enter, though in 1801 Jackson did manage to pay a hurried visit. According to Captain Trotter, who got within three- quarters of a mile, it is a place of apparently 1500 to 2000 inhabitants, compact, and with several large buildings. Wazan (Rohlfs s Wesan) is par excellence a sacred city, being the seat of a sheri f, whose influence is even more widely acknowledged than that of the sultan. It was probably raised from a mere village by Muley Abd Allah al-Sherif (ob. 1675). At present it is one of the cleanest and best-kept places in the empire. Teza (Taza) is a considerable trading centre on the route between Fez and the Algerian frontier. Leo, Ali Bey, and Rohlfs agree in describing it as a place of great beauty, embowered in orchards, and the houses give evidence of wealth. The population, in Leo s time 20,000, is now 5000, of whom 800 are Jews. About 120 miles east of Teza, and only 10 from the frontier, is Wajda (Ouchda of the French), clean and neat, in the midst of an orange grove. The only other inland town of importance is Kasr al-Kebir (see ALCAZAR KEBIR), the Oppidum NovuiTi of the Romans, which, except on market-days, wears a look of great decay. In all the country between the basin of the Sebu and the Tensift, a distance of upwards of 200 miles, there is nothing that a European would consider a town ; and Morocco itself is the only really large city of south Morocco. Tariulant, the capital of Sus, lies between the Atlas and the river ; it is a place of from 30,000 to 40,000 inhabit ants, has recently been garrisoned and refortified by the sultan, and may bo considered the frontier city of his empire. High (Ilir, 1 A scientific list of some thirty or forty fishes from Morocco will be found in Ber. Senck. Ges., 1874 ; an account of angling experiences in Payton, Mosses from a Boiling Stone. 2 The evidence for the existence of a tribe of warlike Jews in the interior leans on the whole to the positive side. Illec, &c.), 100 miles south-south-east on a stream which joins the? Massa, is the chief town of Tazerwalt or the state of Sidi Ilisham, an independent principality founded by Sidi Ahmed u Musa ; and Auguihnin (Gulemin or Gliinin), in like manner, is the chief town of the state of Abd Allah u Salem, or, as it is usually called by Europeans, Wad Nun. Tagawost (Tagaost of Ibn Khaldun * r about 40 miles inland from Ifni, was formerly a large city, and in the 16th century the seat of a Spanish factory trading in archil. Throughout Morocco the nomenclature of ordinary maps gives a very misleading idea of the number of inhabited sites. Most of the seeming villages are either market-places, completely deserted except on market-days, or the tombs of saints, with possibly not a. house in the vicinity, or stations for caravans, with a small com pany of soldiers. The markets are named after the days of the week, as Siik al-Thalatha, Tuesday market ; the kubbas or saints tombs are distinguished as Sidi (my master) so and so ; and the stations are marked Nzela, or some such corruption as Inzella. The prehistoric antiquities of Morocco are of considerable interest. In a cave at Cape Spartel M. Tissot found regularly shaped arrow heads, and in his travels through the north of the country he met with dolmens, barrows, and cromlechs, just as in Algeria or Tunis. The dolmens usually form a trapezium, and the dead body seems to have been buried with the knees drawn up to the chin. At Mzorah (Mazorah), a quaint little village of widely-scattered houses built of rough blocks of yellow soft sandstone, about 8 or 10 miles south east from Azila, stands a group of megalithic monuments of ex traordinary extent. They have been visited and described by Sir Arthur de Capell Brooke (1830), Davidson (1835), Farley (1860), Tissot, Watson, Trotter, &c. Watson s account is the most detailed. Round the base of a mound (15 feet high) of yellow sandstone lies, a circle of sixty-seven large stones, one of which (at the west side) is more than 20 feet high. In the vicinity are several other groups, some of still larger blocks. Roman roads seem to have run from Tan giers southwards to the neighbourhood of Meknes, and from Azila to the south of Rabat ; and Roman sites are in several instances marked by considerable remains of masonry. At Kasr Fara un (Pharaoh s castle), on the western slope of J. Zarhun, are the ruins of Volubilis. The enceinte, constructed of large stones and flanked by round towers, is 12,000 feet in extent. Four gates are still recognizable, and a triumphal arch erected in 216 A.D. in honour of Caracalla and Julia Domna. The stones of this site have been used for Meknes. Bana.sa (Colonia JKVia, originally Valentia) is identified with the ruins of Sidi Ali Bu Jenun, and Thamusida with those of Sidi Ali b. Hamed. At Tchemmish, up the river from Larash, the city of Lixus (Trinx of Strabo) has left splendid specimens of Punic and Roman stone work, and the similar remains on the headland of Mula Bu Selham probably belong to the Mudelacha of Polybius. Of early Moorish architecture good examples are comparatively few, and badly pre served. Besides those in Fez, Meknes, and Morocco, it is sufficient to mention the mausoleum of the Bein-Merm (13th to 16th centuries) at Sheila, which, with the adjoining mosque, is roofless and ruined, but possesses a number of valuable inscriptions (see Atlwnseum, 1875). The present state of Morocco is deplorable. The government is. an Oriental despotism under an independent quasi-hereditary sultan ; there are no administrative functionaries with definite responsibility and regular salary ; the distribution of justice is utterly arbitrary, and the punishments often barbarous in the extreme ; education, in the European sense of the word, there is none ; foreign commerce is hampered by vexatious prohibitions and restrictions, internal trade by the almost complete absence of roads and bridges, and by the generally lawless state of the country (the very peasant has his gun beside him as he ploughs) ; the only substitute for a postal system is a class of running couriers; and even the army (in which the sultan does take an interest) is only just beginning to show signs of disci pline and effectiveness under the supervision of Kaid M Clean and other foreign officers. The last remnants of the once powerful Moorish fleet are rotting beyond recognition in the harbour of Larash. With good government and freedom of trade the country might soon be restored to a high state of prosperity : its climate, soil, products, and the qualities of its predominant population are full of promise ; and the evident decrease of hostility towards the Christian, which may be observed since the beginning of the cen tury, and especially within recent years, gives hope that European influence, apart from European conquest, may before long remove from Morocco the reproach of being &quot; the China of the West,&quot; the most backward and barbarous of civilized nations. History. Morocco corresponds to the Roman Mauretania Tingi- tana (see MAURITANIA). Conquered by the Vandals (429 A.r&amp;gt;.)&amp;gt; Mauretania was recovered to the Eastern Empire by Belisarius. The Arabs first penetrated into the country under Okba (supra, p. 567), but the Berbers opposed an obstinate resistance to Islam, and their conversion and subjection to the caliphate was only com pleted in the reign of Walid by Musa b. Nosair, the conqueror of Spain (supra, p. 573). The dominion of the caliphs was of short duration ; the Abbasids had very little hold of the Berber countries, and in the 9th century, while the Aghlabites were practically inde pendent at Kairawiln, the regions west of the salt marsh of Sebkli:t