Every year around January 12-14, a date pit hides inside the tagoula bowls of Amazigh families — good luck for whoever finds it. That’s Yennayer, the Berber New Year: an agricultural feast older than the calendar that replaced it, and one that never quite disappeared.

A name from far away

The word “Yennayer” comes from the Latin Januarius, the same root as our January. That link points to old contact with the Julian calendar, brought by Rome and kept alive in Amazigh villages long after the Gregorian calendar took over elsewhere. Some trace the date back to the legendary coronation of the Amazigh king Chachnak, who became pharaoh of Egypt around 950 BCE — an origin still debated, but one that gives the feast a legitimacy of its own.

Since January 14, 2024, Yennayer has been a paid national holiday in Morocco, an official recognition the Amazigh movement had sought for years. The Berber calendar now counts year 2976; the next threshold, in January 2027, opens year 2977.

A feast of the land and renewal

As an agricultural feast, Yennayer celebrates fertility, renewal, and the prosperity to come above all else. Much like our January 1st, it’s a time for family gatherings, good wishes, and looking back on the year gone by. People treat it as a lucky day, good for weddings, engagements, and any fresh start.

The New Year table

Food takes center stage in the celebrations. Orkimen, a thick soup of dried fava beans, wheat, and wild herbs, often opens the meal. Couscous, made for the occasion with seven vegetables, stands for abundance and balance. Tagoula, a rustic porridge of corn kernels enriched with butter, ghee, argan oil, and honey, closes the meal on flavors straight from the land.

A lucky bite

A date pit or almond piece often hides inside the Tagoula or the couscous. Whoever finds it in their bowl is said to carry luck for the whole year. In the old days, that person would even be trusted with the keys to the family granary — the agadir — a mark of confidence and shared blessing from the whole household.

What the table doesn’t tell you is everything that happens the night before and the morning after: a legend of borrowed days never returned, a couscous dumpling hung on the door and read by the wind, hearth stones renewed with spoken wishes. Émile Laoust recorded it all in 1920, valley by valley — worth the longer read.

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One summer evening, on the village Assarag, drums wake before the stars. Men close ranks in a circle; the Anksalim’s voice rises, low and insistent. Then women step in, and the Amazigh circle closes on itself, ready to turn until dawn.

The circle at the heart of Ahwach

Ahwach belongs to the Amazigh communities of the western High Atlas, the Anti-Atlas, and the Souss basin. It unfolds on the village’s central square — the Assarag, or Assais in Tamazight.

Men dressed in white take the center, drums and tambourines in hand. One of them, the Anksalim, opens the chant in a deep, haunting voice: Ahwach begins. Women then form a circle around them, ululations and tambourine beats marking the start.

The rhythm builds in waves. Bodies sway, and improvised poetry drifts from the sacred to the profane — invocation, a search for origins, confessions of the heart. Three instruments carry this rise: the taguenza (a wooden-frame tambourine), the dendoum (a double-headed cylindrical drum), and the naqouss (a metal gong struck with sticks).

Costumes, poetic duels, and colonial-era travelers’ accounts feature in our in-depth piece: Ahwach, the Amazigh Tradition of Morocco.

Ahwach and Ahidous: one pulse, two territories

People often mix up Ahwach with its Middle Atlas cousin, Ahidous. Both share the same grammar: circle, chant-and-drum alternation, poetic duel. But each carries the pulse of a different territory.

Ahidous belongs to the Tamazight-speaking tribes of Khénifra, Azrou, and Imilchil. Men and women dance elbow to elbow, in tight rows or blocks, to sung verses called izlan, kept by a single bendir and handclaps.

Ahwach belongs to the Tashelhit-speaking world of the Chleuh. Men hold the center of the circle, the percussion runs fuller, and the women’s ring can split into two facing rows that answer each other — a choreographed dialogue Ahidous doesn’t share in quite this form.

Two territories, then, for one shared impulse: turning the collective circle into the place where Amazigh speech is spoken and passed on.

A living heritage, still seeking recognition

Each year, a National Festival of Ahwach Arts brings troupes from across the kingdom to Ouarzazate, under the Ministry of Culture’s patronage — a rare showcase for an art still carried mostly by oral transmission.

Unlike the Taskiwin, a martial dance of the western High Atlas inscribed on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2017, Ahwach has yet to earn that recognition, despite advocacy from researchers and practitioners over the years.

The gradual loss of the art’s great masters raises the stakes. University initiatives, notably around Ibn Zohr University, now work to archive voices and gestures before they fade.

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At the end of the 19th century, southern Morocco remained a little-known land for Europeans. Under the Alaouite dynasty, the country only partly controlled these regions, which were often administered by local tribes. In 1883, Charles de Foucauld undertook an exploratory journey into Morocco’s interior, then largely closed to Christians, especially beyond the Atlas Mountains.

Charles de Foucauld therefore travelled under a Jewish identity, accompanied by the Moroccan rabbi Mardochée Aby Serour, a guide and interpreter whose knowledge of the terrain and local communities made the expedition possible.

His travel journal, published in 1888 under the title Reconnaissance au Maroc, marked an important stage in European knowledge of Morocco’s interior. It is a narrative that combines geographical observations, notes on tribes, field sketches and fragments of oral traditions.

During a stay in Tikirt, a douar in the commune of Aït Zineb, in the province of Ouarzazate, he discovered the ruins of a mysterious citadel around which local people told strange legends.

Here is his account:

A fortress between myth and history

The remains of Tasgedlt, although now partly destroyed, still suggest the scale of this ancient fortification. Its thick walls, made from a combination of masonry and rammed earth, bear witness to an architectural know-how adapted to the region’s arid climate. Its position, overlooking the landscape, suggests a defensive function. It made it possible to watch over the surrounding area, the passages, the cultivated land and the banks of the Oued Imini. The caverns beneath the citadel may have served as shelters or as places to store food, although their exact function remains difficult to establish.

The people of the region speak of a legend surrounding these ruins:

According to this oral tradition, Muslims waged long wars against these princesses before driving them away.

Charles de Foucauld, however, remained cautious. He himself noted that it was more likely that the three kasbahs were the work of a single sultan, perhaps the one who built the bridge over the Oued Rdat. This remark is important. It does not destroy the legend, but it distinguishes between two levels: on the one hand, oral memory, which gives the place a face; on the other, the historical hypothesis, which links the ruins to political power and to the organisation of the territory.

Collective memory and the remains of a forgotten past

The legends surrounding the citadel have been passed down from generation to generation. In a culture where history is first and foremost transmitted orally, such stories play a fundamental role in the transmission of heritage. The elders of the village still say that strange sounds can be heard at night near the ruins, as if the spirits of the three princesses continued to haunt the place. Some see in these legends a way of preserving the memory of a distant past, where myth and reality are intertwined.

The fortress of Tasgedlt is not an isolated case. Throughout southern Morocco, there are ruins of citadels that once served to defend trade routes. Sites such as Tamnougalt or Tazenakht bear witness to the organisation of these territories, where each fortification played the role of a bastion against invasions or tribal rivalries.

Today, the douar of Tadoula, where the remains of this ancient citadel are found, may preserve in its name an echo of Doula Bent Ouâd, the princess associated with Tasgedlt. Nothing allows this to be stated with certainty, but this proximity between the name of the place and the story handed down gives the ruin a particular depth. Between architecture, oral memory and ancient sketches, Tasgedlt remains one of the most mysterious sites in the region of Ouarzazate.

Read also: The lost destiny of the Jews of South-Eastern Morocco…

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Perched in the heart of the Atlas Mountains, Tikirt stood out for its elegant and distinctive architecture. Its fortified earthen houses, tall tighremts and geometric decorations bore witness to the skill of local craftsmen.

The city’s lush gardens, irrigated by an elaborate network of seguias — traditional irrigation canals — provided abundant harvests and reflected the agricultural prosperity of the region.

The women of Tikirt lived within this landscape of earth, gardens and mountains. They wore the traditional adornments of southern Morocco: amber and coral necklaces, bracelets, brooches and earrings. These Berber jewels expressed social status, family belonging and the rich cultural heritage of the region.

A city admired by European explorers

The splendour of Tikirt struck several European explorers.

René de Segonzac, in his work Au cœur de l’Atlas, mission au Maroc, 1904-1905, evokes a place surrounded by impressive mountain ranges:

This impression did not come only from the presence of one fortified building. Tikirt was rather a kind of fortified city. An old testimony describes it as a settlement made up of several adjoining tighremts, with a maze of streets, small squares and passageways. Each notable family, each important tribal section, had, in a sense, its own fortress.

Tikirt was therefore not an isolated kasbah. It was a collective ensemble, an earthen architecture where dwelling, protection, family prestige and village life were closely intertwined.

A few years earlier, Charles de Foucauld, in Reconnaissance au Maroc, based on his journey of 1883-1884, had already noted the strength of the site. He reports these words from the inhabitants:

An integrated Jewish community

Tikirt was also home to a notable Jewish community.

Photographs taken around 1935 by Jean Besancenot show a Jewish man and child from Tikirt wearing the akhnif, a large traditional black cloak. This document is precious, because it reminds us that the rural Jewish communities of southern Morocco shared part of the clothing and cultural practices of their Amazigh environment.

The Jewish presence in Morocco is ancient, with communities established for millennia, particularly in the South-East, including localities such as Tikirt.

Charles de Foucauld also mentions a significant anecdote in Reconnaissance au Maroc. He tells of meeting in Tikirt a young Jewish woman from Ouarzazate, married to a man from the village. He specifies that her husband had paid a large sum to take her with him.

Beyond the detail itself, this testimony reveals something essential: Tikirt was not a village closed in on itself. Links existed with Ouarzazate and with other localities of the South. Jewish families moved, formed alliances, traded and belonged to social and economic networks that extended well beyond the limits of a single ksar.

This Jewish memory of Tikirt must therefore be read as part of the history of the place. It recalls the ancient complexity of southern Morocco, made of neighbourhoods, exchanges, crafts, passages and multiple belongings.

Read also: The lost destiny of the Jews of South-Eastern Morocco

A commercial and cultural crossroads

Located at a strategic point, Tikirt served as a crossroads between the routes linking the High Atlas, the Siroua, Tazenakht and southern Morocco.

Merchants, craftsmen and travellers exchanged agricultural products, fabrics, precious objects, news and know-how. The city lived from this position in-between: neither entirely Atlas nor entirely Saharan, but placed on the routes that connected these worlds.

The pisé houses, the tighremts, the gates and the tightly gathered volumes protected the inhabitants and their wealth. They also gave Tikirt the powerful appearance that impressed explorers in the early twentieth century.

Read also: Sijilmassa, the mythical city that shone the true heart of the Maghreb

The decline and legacy of Tikirt

Despite its past greatness, Tikirt underwent a gradual decline. Trade routes changed. Centres of power shifted. Rural exodus emptied part of the old villages. The earthen walls, no longer maintained, gradually yielded to wind, rain and time.

Today, the remains of Tikirt recall the splendour of an almost vanished world.

But these ruins are not only the remains of a fortress. They bear witness to Amazigh architectural genius, to the social organisation of old rural communities, and to the Jewish presence in the villages of southern Morocco.

Tikirt therefore deserves to be seen not as a simple forgotten place, but as one of those fragments of memory where Amazigh architecture, ancient routes, agricultural life, adornments, exchanges and the coexistence of communities meet.

It is also striking to compare the fate of Tikirt with that of nearby Aït Ben Haddou. While Aït Ben Haddou has become one of the great heritage emblems of southern Morocco, Tikirt remains almost invisible, although it was once a radiant city, admired by explorers and marked by a strong Jewish presence. Two neighbouring places, two very different memories: one now seen by the whole world, the other still barely emerging from oblivion.

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In former times, across several Amazigh regions of North Africa, communities celebrated this ritual during prolonged periods without rain, when harvests, pastures and the very balance of village life were under threat.

Anzar, the rain god

This rite is rooted in the myth of Anzar. In pre-Islamic Amazigh belief, Anzar was the god of the sky, water, rivers, seas, streams and springs — often called Aglid n Ugfur, meaning “king of the rain.” For the prehistorian Gabriel Camps and linguist Salem Chaker, who devote an entry to him in the Encyclopédie berbère, Anzar is above all a principle of fertility: a life-giving force that strengthens vegetation and ensures the growth of herds.

But behind the god lies a love story. According to the legend, Anzar fell in love with a young woman of extraordinary beauty who was accustomed to bathing in a silver-reflecting river. Each time he drew near, she fled — and Anzar, wounded, withdrew, withholding his rain and letting the land wither. He issued a threat: “Like lightning I have split the vast sky, O Star brighter than all others — give me the treasure that is yours, or I will deprive you of this water.” Out of love for her people, the young woman finally yielded. And since that day, when rain falls, legend says she appears in the sky as a rainbow — Tislit n Unzar, the wife of Anzar.

The doll and her name

It is this myth that the rite re-enacts each time drought threatens. The bride of Anzar — Tislit n Anzar in Tamazight — took the form of a doll dressed as a bride. A figure was fashioned from rags wound around a wooden ladle or pestle, with two smaller spoons as arms, placed to receive and hold the longed-for rainwater. In some places, such as Tabelbala in the Algerian Saoura, a proper garment was cut and sewn around this wooden frame, completed with necklaces and bracelets — leaving no doubt that what was being enacted was a wedding ceremony.

In Marrakech, the ethnologist Émile Laoust documented in Mots et choses berbères (1920) the almost liturgical care devoted to this preparation: a group of widowed or divorced women of devout reputation would gather at the home of the most pious among them. They painted the facial features — eyes, nose, mouth — in black dye on the rounded surface of the ladle, rouged the cheeks, and wrapped the head in silk scarves before handing the adorned doll to the woman who would lead the procession.

She was called Taghonja, a name that comes from tlaghnja, meaning “the ladle” or “the soup spoon” — doubly symbolic, both as a vessel for the expected water and as an object tied to food and domestic life. She was adorned with henna and jewellery. In some Rif variants, a winnowing fork served in place of the ladle — another sacred vessel by virtue of its role at harvest time.

Read also : The berber fibula: between tradition and symbol

The procession

When the time came, the most respected woman in the village — sometimes called the qibla, the keeper of ancient knowledge — prepared the bride’s toilette. She was not permitted to weep during this preparation, lest it suggest she was giving the bride to Anzar with a reluctant heart. She then lifted the doll onto her back to open the procession.

Accompanied by the children, the women walked through the village lanes chanting prayers and invocations to call the rain:

The doll was sprinkled with water along the way. At each threshold the procession passed, households poured water over the participants’ heads, aiming especially for the bride. They offered semolina, flour, meat and fat. With these gifts, the women prepared a communal meal, shared near a shrine, a riverbed, a threshing floor or the crest of a hill. The ceremony ended with a prayer imploring the return of Anzar — who on this day bore another name: Argaz n Taghonja, the husband of Taghonja.

The fate of the doll at the close of the ceremony varied from region to region. In the Tafilalt, the assembled women would engage in a ritual brawl that ended in the destruction of the effigy — and a fragment of the dismembered doll was carefully kept in the family chest, on account of the baraka that still inhabited it.

Read also : The art of women’s hairstyles among the Aït Atta of southern Morocco

A pan-Maghrebi rite

This tradition has been recorded across the Rif, Kabylia, the Atlas mountains and the Aurès range. Other traces of it have been found in the pre-Saharan region around Merzouga, among the Aït Khebbach. Whether the figure is called Taghonja, Tarenza, Boughenja or Tislit n waman — “the bride of water” — the gesture remains the same: a community that symbolically offers a bride to the sky, so that the sky may return the rain.

This rite speaks volumes about the ancient relationship of Amazigh societies with water. Rain here is not merely a natural phenomenon. It is blessing, fertility, the return of life to dry earth. And marriage — that central figure of alliance and transmission — becomes the universal language through which people address the heavens.

With time, the rite was gradually blended with prayers addressed to God. Though rooted in an ancient cult dedicated to Anzar, today the ritual is largely Islamicised: the communal meal is offered as sadaqa — an act of Islamic charity — and the procession often winds past the shrines of saints in search of their baraka. Yet behind this Islamicised form, the trace of an older imagination endures: a world in which nature, women, children, song and the whole community participated together in the call for water.

Taghonja is therefore not simply a doll carried in procession. She is the little bride of rain, the fragile face of a collective hope. And when at last a rainbow appears above the ridgelines, it is she who is recognised in the sky — the bride who consented, and whom the earth thanks.

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In traditional southern Morocco, women’s hairstyles were never a simple aesthetic choice. They were a visual language in their own right. The way a fringe was cut, the hair braided, wool added or silver ornaments fixed revealed far more than personal taste: it spoke of tribal origin, age, sometimes marital status, and played a full part in affirming identity.

Among Amazigh women of the pre-Saharan regions — the Dadès, Todgha, Saghro, Drâa and Tafilalt — hair was worked with remarkable sophistication. Volume, symmetry, the density of braids, the lines of the forehead, facial tattoos and jewellery together formed a coherent whole in which the body became a medium of cultural expression.

Old photographs are today precious testimonies of a capillary art largely transformed by time.

Who are the Aït Atta?

The Aït Atta are among the largest Amazigh tribal confederations in Morocco. Their historical territory stretched across an immense area, from the Jbel Saghro to the fringes of the desert, taking in the valleys of the Dadès, Todgha, Drâa and parts of the Tafilalt.

Traditionally organised into multiple fractions and tribal groups, the Aït Atta are often distinguished by broad geographical groupings — western, central and eastern. This vast territorial spread explains the existence of cultural variations that are sometimes quite marked, including in women’s adornment.

While language, social structures and certain symbolic codes unite the Aït Atta as a whole, each local group developed its own vestimentary and aesthetic signatures. Women’s hairstyles offer a particularly telling illustration of this.

A woman of the Aït Bou Iknifen (Lower Dadès / Lower Todgha)

This young woman from the Aït Bou Iknifen, established in the region of Ouaklim, displays a particularly refined hairstyle, characteristic of the Aït Atta groups of the Lower Dadès and Lower Todgha.

Her fringe, cut very short, draws a sharp line across the forehead. This contour is underlined by a row of black dotted tattoos, interrupted at the centre by a small motif evoking a suspended pendant. Beneath the eyes and along the bridge of the nose appear further tattooed marks, known as tiqifit, which contribute to the ornamentation of the face.

The hairstyle itself is enriched by two imposing silver ornaments. Most striking are the long spindle-shaped pendants ending in tassels, known locally as tiqulalin — literally “little jugs”. These jewels are not merely decorative: they also assert rank, belonging and prestige.

Here, hair, tattoo and precious metal compose an ensemble of remarkable aesthetic coherence.

Read also : The berber fibula: between tradition and symbol

A woman of the Aït Yazza (Eastern Aït Atta)

This woman belongs to the Aït Yazza, a group of the Eastern Aït Atta.

What strikes one immediately is the volume of her hairstyle. To thicken the natural braids, a large quantity of wool has been worked into the hair along its entire length. This technique produces a structure that is fuller, denser and more stable.

The result gives the whole an almost sculptural silhouette. The hair does not simply fall: it is constructed, shaped, architected.

The addition of wool was far from incidental. In many Amazigh societies, it expressed a pursuit of visual presence, formal power and elegance. The hairstyle thus became an extension of clothing and body alike.

Read also : Discovering the Amazigh culture of Morocco

Two Aït Atta women from the Drâa valley

This third portrait shows two women from the Aït Atta tribes of the Drâa valley, in the region of the Ternata. Their hairstyles are close in general structure, but reveal, on closer inspection, distinctly different personal or social choices.

Both wear a headscarf, one sober, the other richly ornamented — a likely sign of different status, or of a particular occasion. Beneath the fabric, bands of hair frame the temples and a rounded fringe traces the contour of the forehead, integrated into the overall composition of the face with the same precision seen in the hairstyles of the western groups.

What distinguishes this portrait from the two preceding ones is the way in which the hairstyle partly yields to the ensemble of adornment. Silver jewellery — pendants and necklaces — and rows of amber hold a central place, while the dark lines redrawing the eyebrows and accentuating certain features contribute to an overall ornamentation in which hair and jewellery no longer exist in a hierarchy, but in dialogue.

The Aït Atta group of the Drâa, established among the palm groves and ksour of the Ternata, had indeed developed a feminine aesthetic more oriented towards jewellery than towards capillary architecture alone. The proximity to the great caravan routes — and thus to the circuits of silver and amber trade — partly explains this abundance of precious materials. The hairstyle nonetheless remains structured, legible, charged with meaning: it converses with the jewels rather than submitting to them.

Here too, the ensemble forms a complete aesthetic, in which hair, jewellery, textile and bodily signs express at once elegance, belonging and a certain social ease.

Read also : Glossary of traditional amazigh culture: words of the Berber world

A visual heritage to rediscover

These three portraits represent only a tiny glimpse of the richness of southern Morocco’s aesthetic traditions.

Old ethnographic works are filled with photographs that remain fascinating today: Amazigh women of the Dadès or the Saghro, bridal adornments, tribal jewellery, facial tattoos — but also portraits of women from the ancient Jewish communities of the South, whose vestimentary codes sometimes entered into dialogue with those of their Amazigh neighbours.

So many fragments of memory that deserve to be documented — not out of nostalgia for a vanished world, but to better understand the cultural depth of these territories.

Editorial note

These portraits stop us in our tracks — not out of nostalgia, but because they reveal a sophistication that conventional representations of the Berber rural world have not always acknowledged. A precisely calculated fringe, architectured braids, jewels placed with care: all of this presupposes knowledge, transmission, and above all joy — the pleasure taken collectively by women in the act of adornment, in the shared time of doing each other’s hair, of beautifying, of being looked at and looking.

What has disappeared is not merely a style. It is a right. The right to be seen in one’s signs of belonging — to make visible, through hairstyle, jewel or tattoo, one’s origin, rank and tribe. That right was not swept away by time: it was confiscated by an ideological rigourism from elsewhere, which imposed on Berber women the duty to efface themselves, to conform to a uniform mould in which local identities had no place.

Old photographs have preserved some fragments of this world. It is to Mireille Morin-Barde, author of the reference work Coiffures féminines du Maroc (Edisud), that we owe the preservation of an essential part of it — patient, rigorous work, accomplished in close proximity to the women and the territories. She did not capture this world in its entirety. No one will. What these images show is also what we have lost the right to see.

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Music and Song

• Ahwach (ⴰⵃⵡⴰⵊ) — Collective Amazigh dance and song, performed across the High Atlas and south-eastern Morocco during major celebrations. Ahwach is far more than entertainment: it is the rhythmic expression of a community’s cohesion, with men and women alternating chants and percussion in a circle. Certain villages in the Draa and Dadès valleys maintain their own variants, passed down from generation to generation.
• Amarg (ⴰⵎⴰⵔⴳ) — Amazigh lyric poetry sung aloud, a vehicle for intense emotion — grief, love, exile, longing for home. Amarg is also a literary genre in its own right: its words condense a wisdom and a memory that the written word did not always preserve.
• Izlan (ⵉⵣⵍⴰⵏ) — Sung poems, plural of azul in the poetic sense. Izlan form the living repertoire of Ahwach troupes and Rwayes: short, finely crafted, often improvised, they are the place where the Tamazight language reveals its full metaphorical power.
• Tamdawt (ⵜⴰⵎⴷⴰⵡⵜ) — A form of sung poetry in Tamazight, with epic or mythological overtones. Tamdawt tells of heroic figures, battles, and origins — it is the memory of a people put into voice, for centuries without written archives.
• Taktoka (ⵜⴰⴽⵜⵓⴽⴰ) — A percussive rhythm characteristic of certain dances in south-eastern Morocco, recognisable by its syncopated tempo and driving pulse. The word itself is onomatopoeic: it imitates the beat of the drum.
• Asays (ⴰⵙⴰⵢⵙ) — Asays is both a place and an event. It is the space — often a village square or rocky plateau — where the community gathers to sing, dance, deliberate, and celebrate. At once a stage, an agora, and an open-air temple.

Traditional Instruments

• Tabel (ⵜⴰⴱⴻⵍ) — A large drum with a skin stretched over a wooden frame, whose deep beats drive the Ahwach ensemble. The tabel marks collective time: when it sounds, the village knows something shared is beginning.
• Rbab (ⵔⴱⴰⴱ) — A single-stringed instrument played with a bow, the plaintive voice of itinerant poets. The rbab is the instrument of the Rwayes and Imdyazen — those who travelled from one souq to the next, carrying the sung memory of the tribes.
• Bendir (ⴱⵏⴷⵉⵔ) — A single-membrane frame drum, present in rituals and festivities alike. The bendir accompanies spiritual invocations as readily as wedding celebrations in the rural south-east.
• Nfar (ⵏⴼⴰⵔ) — A long copper or wooden trumpet whose deep, far-carrying sound announces important ceremonies. The nfar belongs to the world of thresholds: it marks entrances, processions, the moments when the sacred steps into the everyday.

Artists and Keepers of Memory

• Imdyazen (ⵉⵎⴷⵢⴰⵣⵏ) — Itinerant poet-musicians, genuine living archivists of Amazigh memory. The Imdyazen travelled roads and souqs, carrying news, satire, elegies, and epic tales from one village to the next. Their role was at once artistic, social, and political.
• Rwayes (ⵔⵡⴰⵢⴻⵙ) — Amazigh troubadours specialising in instrumental music and song, often accompanied by the rbab. The Rwayes of the Souss and the Draa have built a repertoire of exceptional richness, today recognised as intangible cultural heritage.
• Ahouachay (ⴰⵃⵡⴰⵛⴰⵢ) — The leader of an Ahwach troupe, a figure of artistic co-ordination and authority. The ahouachay arranges, corrects, and sets the impulse — it is he who holds together the rhythmic and vocal circle of the collective performance.
• Iggawen (ⵉⴳⴳⴰⵡⴻⵏ) — Amazigh griots, guardians and transmitters of genealogy, oral history, and collective knowledge. Comparable in function to the griots of the Sahel, the Iggawen embody the idea that a community’s memory is not kept in a chest — it lives in voices.

Architecture and Inhabited Space

• Tighremt (ⵜⵉⵖⵔⴻⵎⵜ) — An Amazigh fortress-house built in rammed earth, rising several storeys, serving as both family residence and symbol of clan power. The tighremt is the ancestor of the kasbah: it governs the relationship to domestic space and to the surrounding territory in equal measure.
• Aghrem (ⴰⵖⵔⴻⵎ) — A village or collective ksar, the grouped-settlement unit characteristic of the Draa, Dadès, and Todgha valleys. The aghrem is not merely a cluster of dwellings: it is a social, defensive, and symbolic unit, organised around the jemaa.
• Igherm (ⵉⵖⴻⵔⵎ) — A fortified collective granary, also known as agadir in certain regions. The igherm was the common good par excellence: grain, oil, jewellery, and precious documents were deposited there under the guardianship of an amin appointed by the community. Several remarkable igherman survive in south-eastern Morocco.

Social Life and Institutions

• Taqbilt (ⵜⴰⵇⴱⵉⵍⵜ) — A tribe or tribal fraction, the primary unit of Amazigh belonging and solidarity. The taqbilt defines alliances, land rights, and mutual obligations among its members — it is the basic cell of Amazigh customary law.
• Jemaa (ⵊⵎⴰⵄⴰ) — The assembly of free men of the village or tribe, a deliberative and judicial body. The jemaa settles disputes, organises collective work, manages water and pastureland — it is the open-air parliament of the Amazigh world.
• Leff (ⵍⴻⴼⴼ) — A political and military alliance between tribes or fractions, often formalised through oral agreements and oaths. The leff system organised the geopolitics of Amazigh territories long before the centralised state.
• Amin (ⴰⵎⵉⵏ) — A man of trust designated by the community to manage a collective asset or represent a group. The amin of the igherm, the amin of the souq, the amin of the irrigation channel: the function is always the same — delegated trust, shared responsibility.

Water, Land and Calendar

• Seguia (ⵙⴻⴳⴳⵉⴰ) — An open-air irrigation channel, the vital artery of the oases and palm groves of the south-east. The seguia is a collective asset governed by precise customary rules: each right-holder is allocated a measurable unit of water time, transmissible and sometimes negotiable.
• Agdal (ⴰⴳⴷⴰⵍ) — A pastoral territory placed under seasonal reserve, with access regulated by the community. The agdal is one of the most sophisticated forms of sustainable resource management in the Berber world — a collective fallow period for pastureland, designed to ensure its long-term survival.
• Yennayer (ⵢⴻⵏⵏⴰⵢⴻⵔ) — The first day of the Amazigh agricultural calendar, celebrated on 13 or 14 January depending on the region. Yennayer is not merely a new year: it is a feast of the earth and the seed, a thanksgiving to the ancestors, and a call for the fertility of the year to come.
• Tafaska (ⵜⴰⴼⴰⵙⴽⴰ) — A harvest and abundance festival, marked by the ritual slaughter of an animal, singing, and symbolic offerings. Tafaska punctuates the Amazigh farming calendar much as religious festivals punctuate the Islamic one.

Textiles and Adornment

• Handira (ⵀⴰⵏⴷⵉⵔⴰ) — A hand-woven blanket-cloak made by Berber women of the Atlas, recognisable by its wool threads and metallic sequins. The handira is at once protection against mountain nights and a mark of social prestige, often given as a dowry or wedding gift.
• Burnous (ⴱⵓⵔⵏⵓⵙ) — A large hooded woollen cloak, the emblematic garment of the Berber and Maghrebi world. In white wool for formal occasions, in brown for everyday pastoral life, the burnous is the garment of travel and dignity.
• Tizerzay (ⵜⵉⵣⴻⵔⵣⴰⵢ) — A pair of Amazigh fibulae, silver clasps that hold the female garment at the shoulders. Far more than an accessory, the tizerzay are works of silversmithing charged with symbolic and identity meaning.

Language and Memory

• Amazigh (ⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖ) — Free man — the most widely accepted etymology of the word. Amazigh designates at once an individual of this people, their language, and their cultural identity. The plural is Imazighen. The term has progressively replaced “Berber” in official usage, without entirely displacing it in everyday speech.
• Tamazight (ⵜⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵜ) — The Amazigh language in its generic sense, covering a dialectal continuum stretching from the Canary Islands to Egypt, and from the Sahel to the Mediterranean. In Morocco, the principal variants are Tachelhit (Souss, Anti-Atlas), Central Tamazight (Atlas), and Tarifit (Rif).
• Tifinagh (ⵜⵉⴼⵉⵏⴰⵖ) — The ancient alphabet of the Amazigh people, whose earliest traces go back more than two and a half thousand years, in rock carvings across the Sahara. Today official in Morocco in its modernised form (IRCAM), Tifinagh has become the visible symbol of the Amazigh cultural renaissance. → Read our feature: [Tifinagh: symbol of Amazigh culture through the ages]
• Awal (ⴰⵡⴰⵍ) — The word, the verb, the spoken discourse. In Amazigh tradition, awal is never neutral: it commits, it creates, it binds. A promise made before witnesses — an awal — carries the weight of a contract. Amazigh culture is, in its depths, a civilisation of the word given.

This glossary is a threshold, not an inventory. Behind each Amazigh word unfolds a world of practices, knowledge, and human relationships that a few lines cannot exhaust. It will grow alongside the features published in The Berber World section — and we warmly welcome corrections, additions, and insights from those who live these words every day.

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A single object, many names

The word “fibula” comes from the Latin, meaning simply a clasp. But in the Amazigh world, this jewel carries its own identity, expressed differently across languages and territories. It is called Tiseghnest (plural: tiseghnas) across much of Morocco, Tazerzit (plural: tizerzay) in other regions, and Afzim in Kabylia. These names share a common semantic root: to clasp, to pin, to fasten. The primary function written into the language itself.

Archaeological excavations place the use of fibulae as far back as prehistory. In the Maghreb, their presence is documented from the Bronze Age onwards. Similar pieces have been found in ancient Egypt and the Near East — and later among the Etruscans, Greeks and Romans, who used them to fasten their togas. Vikings wore disc-shaped versions to secure their cloaks. The fibula is therefore a near-universal object. What sets it apart in the Berber world is the density of meaning it came to concentrate.

Far more than a clasp

Its primary purpose is practical: the fibula holds fabric in place against the body. Berber women wear it in several ways — in the hair to secure a headscarf, on the chest as a decorative piece, or in pairs at the shoulders to hold the tasselmamt, that broad panel of cloth draped across the back. Simple, effective, indispensable — a safety pin elevated to the rank of jewellery.

But the fibula quickly transcends its utilitarian function. In certain communities of the western High Atlas, a recorded ritual linked this object to animal fertility: when a new heifer entered a home for the first time, the wife would place a silver fibula on the threshold. The animal had to step over it as it passed through. This gesture, charged with symbolic power, entrusted the fibula with the task of blessing the beast and ensuring the prosperity of the household. A simple jewel — and yet a mediator between the human world and invisible forces.

Tribal marker, piece of dowry

It is perhaps in its social dimension that the fibula most fully reveals its depth. As architect and researcher Salima Naji writes in Les Cahiers du Musée Berbère, the fibula visually embodies the feminine in its most fundamental attributes. It is first and foremost a marker of tribal belonging, a visible sign of the wealth and standing of the tribe to which its wearer belongs.

This social weight reaches its height in the wedding ritual. The pair of fibulae forms the centrepiece of the dowry — the lqimt — provided by the father to accompany his daughter. It is not chosen at random: its materials, its size, its ornaments speak of who one is, where one comes from, what alliance is being sealed. To wear one’s mother’s fibula is to wear the identity of one’s lineage.

In certain Berber families, ancient fibulae pass from generation to generation as a sacred inheritance. They carry within them the memory of the women who wore them before, and retain a protective power bound to the blessing of ancestors.

What the materials say

The Berber fibula comes in a wide variety of forms — diamond, circle, triangle, crescent — depending on the region and the era. But it is the materials that reveal its full symbolic complexity.

Silver dominates. It is the noble material of Berber jewellery, associated with purity and protection. The craftsmen who specialised in this work, the isemgan, mastered techniques of casting, repoussé and granulation passed down from father to son. Their social standing was particular: both indispensable and set apart, often belonging to distinct communities within Amazigh society.

Red coral holds a place of its own. Imported from the Mediterranean along caravan routes, it served far more than decoration: its colour and distant origins made it a powerful talisman against the evil eye. Combined with semi-precious stones and geometric motifs — spirals, lozenges, dots — it transformed the fibula into a genuine shield worn against the body.

These motifs are not decorative in the Western sense. They are apotropaic: they ward off evil, attract good fortune, protect the woman and her children. Each symbol answered to a code that the women of the tribe knew how to read.

A craft under threat

Today, the Berber fibula faces a paradox. It attracts growing interest in the worlds of fashion and design — Western designers draw inspiration from it, tourists seek it out in the souks, online platforms offer copies from India or China that reproduce the forms without grasping their meaning.

Meanwhile, the true isemgan — those who have mastered the ancestral techniques of silver jewellery — are disappearing. Ancient fibulae leave Berber families for the antique dealers of Marrakech or private European collections. Transmission is breaking down, silently.

This is precisely why the fibula deserves better than a place in a display case or an ethnic fashion photograph. It deserves to be understood for what it is: a world-object, where body, family, tribe, memory and the invisible all come together.

Also in The Berber World: : The art of feminine hairstyles among the Aït Atta — another perspective on adornment and identity in the Amazigh world.

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The Tuareg, also known as the Kel Tamasheq (“those of the Tamasheq language”) or Kel Tagelmust (“those of the veil”), form one of the great branches of the Berber world. A nomadic people of the central Sahara, they are distinguished by their language, Tamasheq, written in the ancient Tifinagh script — one of the oldest writing systems still in use today. Their society rests on a singular structure in which lineage passes through women: a child knows their mother and their mother’s mother, while the paternal line counts for little in the social order. It is the woman who owns the tent, who passes down rank, and on whom tribal belonging depends. This central role of women has earned the Tuareg their reputation as a matriarchal society — a rare status in the Muslim world, and one that sheds light on the place held by Tin Hinan in this people’s collective memory.

Found today across Niger, Mali, Algeria, Libya and Burkina Faso, the Tuareg represent a living extension of the Berber world, adapted to the vast desert expanses of the Sahara — where it is the men, not the women, who wear the veil: the tagelmust, dyed with indigo, which earned them the nickname “Blue Men“.

A princess from the Tafilalet

According to oral tradition, Tin Hinan originated from the Tafilalet, in southeastern Morocco. For reasons that remain mysterious — political flight, dynastic conflict, the search for new territory — she left her homeland atop a white camel, accompanied by her servant Takamat and a caravan. The story tells that the two women nearly perished crossing the Sahara, saved at the last moment by the discovery of grain in desert anthills — an episode that remains celebrated in Tuareg oral tradition.

After this long crossing, she reached the Hoggar, in the heart of present-day Algeria, where she settled at Abalessa and founded her lineage. According to legend, Tin Hinan gave rise to the noble Kel Rela tribe, while her servant Takamat became the ancestor of vassal tribes. Other accounts, gathered from different Tuareg confederations, attribute this founding lineage to other female figures — a sign that each group constructs its own mythical genealogy around a founding mother.

The 1925 archaeological discovery

A major turning point in this story came in 1924: a Franco-American team uncovered a monumental tomb on a hill overlooking the Oued Tifirt, near Abalessa, not far from Tamanrasset. In 1925, excavations revealed the skeleton of a woman, accompanied by exceptional funerary goods for the region: pearls, gold and silver jewellery crafted using techniques of North African influence, and — a detail that would long fuel the mystery — Roman coins bearing the effigy of Emperor Constantine.

Analysis of the skeleton also revealed a slight limp, leading some researchers to draw a connection with “Tiski the lame,” mentioned by the historian Ibn Khaldun as early as the 14th century. The ethnologist Marceau Gast even suggested that the woman buried there may never have had children — a troubling detail given her status as founding mother in oral tradition.

Legend or history? A debate that remains open

It must be said honestly: the identification of the Abalessa skeleton as Tin Hinan remains debated among scholars. Some specialists, following Marceau Gast, have suggested that the legend of Tin Hinan may be a later construction, shaped by the Kel Rela confederation to legitimise their political supremacy within the Hoggar — a founding figure crafted after the fact rather than a direct historical memory.

Whether or not the woman buried at Abalessa truly was the Tin Hinan of oral legend ultimately matters little to understanding what this figure represents. She remains, in the Tuareg imagination as in that of the wider Berber world, the symbol of a lineage traced through women, of a founding migration that began in the Moroccan Tafilalet, and of an ancient bond between two shores of the Sahara — the oases of southeastern Morocco and the Hoggar of Algeria.

Read also : Ahwach, the Amazigh tradition of Morocco

A living place of memory

The mausoleum at Abalessa, now known as the Tomb of Tin Hinan, remains for the Tuareg a place of memory and lineage. Its silhouette, reminiscent of the funerary architecture of the Tafilalet and Mauritania, testifies to a Berber style shared across the Sahara. The site continues to be the subject of archaeological campaigns seeking to better understand its true origins, while the remains attributed to the queen are today preserved at the Bardo Museum in Algiers.

For the Tuareg, Tin Hinan remains far more than a historical figure: she is a living source of inspiration, invoked in oral poetry, present in stories passed down through generations, and still called upon as the symbolic mother of a people who, from the Moroccan Tafilalet to the far reaches of the Hoggar, have never stopped tracing their own path across the immensity of the desert.

Also in The Berber World: : The berber fibula: between tradition and symbol — another perspective on adornment and identity in the Amazigh world.

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The spirit of carnival — with its masks, its transgressions, its upending of social order — runs through human cultures since antiquity. A singular trace of it survives in several regions of Morocco, most notably within the Amazigh communities of the western High Atlas, the Souss valley and the Rif mountains.

Each year, in the days following Eid Al Adha, a strange figure prowls the alleyways of villages: his body covered in sheep or goat skins, his face concealed or blackened, his head crowned with horns, his step heavy and threatening. He carries a long staff with which he feigns to strike passers-by. Children follow in his wake, drumming, shouting, collecting coins and offerings in exchange for their mercy. He is Bilmawen — the man of skins.

The etymology of the name Bilmawen

The name Bilmawen comes from Tamazight. It derives from the word ilmawen (plural of almu), meaning mask, or covering skin used to conceal the face or body. It refers both to the appearance the figure adopts and to his symbolic function: that of a being who is simultaneously man, beast and spirit.

In other regions, he is known as Boujloud, a dialectal Arabic word formed from bou (“he who has”) and jloud (“skins”). Other local variants exist — Herma, Ayyur, Bou Issafen — depending on the territory and the dialect spoken.

An ancient rite of transformation

Bilmawen does not merely frighten or entertain. He embodies a tradition deeply rooted in North African rural societies: a probable survival of pre-Islamic agrarian rites, associated with the cycles of nature, the deities of vegetation, the symbolic death of winter and the rebirth of spring.

Some anthropologists have drawn comparisons with the Roman Lupercalia, in which men clad in goatskins would strike the crowd to encourage fertility. The parallel remains speculative, but it speaks to the universal dimension of the rite of regenerative transgression.

Among the Amazigh peoples, this tradition also marks a form of passage: the masked figure is a liminal being, hovering between the visible and invisible worlds, between the human and the animal, between social order and sacred disorder.

In several villages of the Souss or the Middle Atlas, Bilmawen’s appearances are accompanied by dances, songs, burlesque dialogues and even social satire. He becomes a vehicle for gentle critique — a form of popular theatre in which one may, temporarily, mock the powerful, caricature local notables or ridicule social conventions.

This moment of ritualised freedom is followed by a return to order: Bilmawen disappears, the skins are put away, and everyday life resumes its course.

A memory written in place names

The city of Fès preserves the memory of this figure in the name of one of its most celebrated gates: Bab Boujloud. While the precise etymology remains debated, it is likely that the name refers to this popular character — or at least to the symbolism he carries. Other places across Morocco bear similar names, marking the memorial trace of rites now threatened by forgetting.

Jews and Muslims — a shared memory?

Certain accounts report that Jewish communities of southern Morocco celebrated, during Shavuot, a figure similar to Boujloud — a possible sign of localised festive syncretism between Amazigh traditions and religious rites. While these accounts remain sparsely documented in academic sources, they speak to an ancient cohabitation of imaginaries.

With urbanisation, religious standardisation and the fading of village celebrations, Bilmawen is gradually disappearing. Yet in certain villages of the High Atlas, the Souss and the Rif, cultural associations and community collectives are choosing to revive this tradition — filming it, documenting it, transmitting it to younger generations.

For beneath his skins and his mask, Bilmawen carries more than a simple disguise: he is the breath of a pagan memory, a carnival spirit particular to the Berber World, a masked voice of earth and time.

Read also : Ahwach, the Amazigh tradition of Morocco

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