Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/502

 192 Folklore of the Algerian Hills and Desert.

rather than supplant them ; that the hill tribes of Algeria, doubtless as conservative in temperament thirteen cen- turies ago as they are to-day, should merely have clothed their ancient rites with a thin veil of Mohammedan ortho- doxy rather than have abandoned them altogether. It seems that, at any rate in Phoenician times, the cult of a great goddess was very widespread in Libya, a goddess whose attributes included those of ancient deities of Egypt, Asia Minor, and Persia, and whom Herodotus connects with the Greek Athena. This goddess was Tanit, who appears to have been identical with the primitive Egyptian goddess Neith, the deity of nature,^ of water, of fertility, and of vegetation, 2 the Mighty Mother of Sais in the Nile Delta, whose attributes were later assumed by Isis.

In the Geographical Journal (January 1922) I drew atten- tion to a possible survival of the cult of this goddess in the Spring Feast of Menaa and the Abdi valley of the Aures, and to the apparent similarity between the game of " Koora," played on that occasion by the Shawiya women, and the strife of the Ausean maidens by the shores of Lake Tritonis (the Shotts of Southern Tunisia) as described by Herodotus.^ It may be that in the pilgrimage from the tomb of Sidi Yahia to the holy mountain, the Jebel Bus overlooking Menaa, and in the illuminations on that hill by night, we have another vestige of the cult of this goddess comparable, perhaps, to the Feast of Lamps at Sais (Hero- dotus, ii. 59-62) in honour of Isis Net. It is noteworthy that the modern feast takes place at the time when the fruits of the trees are commencing to ripen, a likely moment at which to propitiate a goddess of fertility, and that, in dry seasons, prayers for rain are said to be a feature of the ceremony, prayers which would naturally be addressed to a water deity. In addition to this it is, at least, remarkable

1 Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, Gods of the Egyptians, i. 457.

2 Thid. ii. 216.

' Herodotus, iv. 180.