THE KABYLES OF NORTH AFRICA. 



[With 12 plates.] 



By A. Lissauer. 1 



While traveling in Algeria a year ago for recreation the only object 

 I had in view, like all tourists, was to receive the passing impressions 

 of landscape and art as they offered themselves along the road. 

 Soon, however, there was pressed upon my attention many interest- 

 ing questions about the historic and prehistoric periods of the coun- 

 try. I could not resist their fascination, and thus I became more and 

 more engaged in studying the archeological and anthropological 

 problems which the natives of Algeria and the surrounding coun- 

 tries, the home of the Kabyles, offer to the investigator. I pass over 

 the numerous beautiful monuments of historic time, for they are 

 described in every guidebook. 



But besides these memorials of the ten invasions of various peo- 

 ples of historic time, from the Phenicians to the French, there exist 

 in north Africa thousands of megalithic tomb structures about which 

 history has nothing to say. Some of them fully resemble those of 

 Europe ; others are peculiar to that region. 



These megalithic monuments may be divided into two classes : 



I. DOLMEN, MENHIR, AND CROMLECH, AS THEY ALSO OCCUR IN EUROPE. 



i 



1. In Morocco there were still, in 1876, about 70 dolmens pre- 

 served in five groups between the Straits of Gibraltar and the River 

 Loukhos (the Lixus of the ancients), and at Beni Snassen, on the 

 frontier of Algeria. A group of about 40 menhirs, which as late as 

 1830 numbered 90, was also in Mzora, south of Tangier ; finally, there 

 were then still in existence, west of Fez, a number of cromlechs. The 

 tombs are hidden in a hill so that only the stone covers are exposed 

 on the surface. They contain crouching skeletons and coarse, poorly 



1 Translated, by permission, from the German : Archiiologische und anthropologische 

 Studien ueber die Kabylen. Von A. Lissauer, Zeitschrift fur Ethnologic, vol. 40, part 4, 

 1908. Berlin, 1908, pp. 501-529. 



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