So Vast the Prison

1. THE SLAVE IN TUNIS

GOOD OLD THOMAS D’ARCOS! He is more than sixty years old and up to this point has led a rather pleasant life: Born in the somewhat troubled times of 1565 in La Ciotat, near Marseilles, when he is very young, he goes up to Paris, where he becomes secretary to the cardinal de Joyeuse, brother of the favorite of Henry III.

Suddenly, who knows why, he quits high society, returns to his sunny Provence, travels, learns languages, is seized with literary or scholarly ambitions: research on the history of Africa, a project to chronicle Ottoman customs (written in Spanish), as well as commentaries on Turkish and Moorish music. He is full of unmethodical but unflagging curiosity. He seduces women, of course, when he is young, then he straightens up and marries a local beauty in Sardinia. Does he mean to settle down there or in Marseilles, or in Carpentras?

Good old Thomas d’Arcos! Guess what! More than sixty years old and pirates from Tunis capture him aboard a sailboat. Thus in 1628 he finds himself in that city, a slave of the Turks.

Despite adversity he has unflagging energy. Does he not like oriental languages, antique coins and medals, rare objects, old books? He succeeds — no one knows how, probably by cashing in on his knowledge and gifts as an interpretor — yes, in two or three years he succeeds in putting together enough for his ransom. Free now, will he return to Marseilles or to the home of his wife in Sardinia? No; he settles in Tunis, where he will die.

That is when the story begins for us — after 1630. From Tunis he writes to a magistrate, an important local personage named Peiresc, who serves as counselor to the king at the parliament of Provence in Aix. (The famous Gassendi will later write a biography of this notable who was his friend.) He also corresponds with M. Aycard, a royal equerry and a friend of Peiresc’s as well, but above all a scholar living in Toulon, where, thanks to traffic with Smyrna, Constantinople, all of the Levant, and Barbary, he is the recipient of manuscripts, antique medals, cameos, foodstuffs, and exotic things.

Thomas d’Arcos goes back and forth throughout the Regency, the Muslim states of northwest Africa, and he seems happy. He must be engaging in trade or barter to live well; no doubt he likes this life in the sun, probably easier and less expensive! … Has his wife not forgotten him, as his friends at the court of France, the nobility of Joyeuse, had done before?

He must admit to himself that, as far as his peace and pleasure are concerned, he is better off among the “Turks,” the infidels, finishing this Relation de l’Afrique, his most important project, and after that his volume in Spanish. He is learning a lot here. He roams about and, even though he suffers from bad eyesight, he also writes. He teaches himself other languages. He is a scholar in Tunis, and certainly among the lower classes and perhaps among the notables, the foreign traders, the dragomans and celebrities who pass through, Thomas, good old Thomas d’Arcos, commands some respect here, enjoys some honors.

It is through his correspondence with Peiresc and Aycard that we can see into his days in Tunis: his schemes, his ambitions, his comfort, his pleasures as a well-read man, and sometimes his fears.

Then, gradually, quietly, a real drama unfolds for him. Persuaded that he will remain permanently, he complains about his bad eyesight to Peiresc; he can never find any eyeglasses that suit him and he would pay their “weight in gold” to have some. Then he adds sadly, “For more than five years I have been unable to read by candlelight with my regular ones!” To pay for them, he sends his correspondent some very warm slippers for both the magistrate and his wife, as well as couscous and the skins of vultures!

But one can guess that the ongoing drama that is causing his two correspondences to be interrupted is still brewing. Drama? Call it a passage, a shift — no, not a new passion for women or boys, nor for other realms of knowledge that might have opened up for him. Call it “an experience.”

Thomas, good old Thomas d’Arcos, sixty-two or sixty-three years old, with failing eyesight, but still energetic and full of bounce, leaving Tunis for the nearby villages, then adventuring east, far into the interior — Thomas, the former prisoner who has been free for some time, feeling he has been accepted by everyone and resigned to dying in Tunis — Thomas decides to become a Muslim!

A conversion in due form: first the circumcision, then the words of the chahadda and the assuming of an Islamic name. Thomas becomes Osmann.

This takes place apparently around 1631 or the beginning of 1632. No sooner has he “turned” than he is “renounced.” (He is not the only one to make this turnaround, or, one might say, this accommodation. Several of his friends who are younger and with different perspectives manage the transformation. There is a Provençal man like him who will take the name Chaabane, a young Fleming who will call himself Soliman, a very young Greek boy who will be Mami.) But as soon as he feels he is a “renegade,” he begins to doubt and suffer, and to think about his friends to the north.

In fact Peiresc waits more than a year before showing any signs of life. Thomas complains to Aycard, “The early characteristic of salvation given me by the Church will never be erased from my soul although my habit may be changed!” He goes on to conclude philosophically, “God sometimes allows evil so that he can draw some greater good from it.”

There he is, a middle-class man firmly attached to Tunis: he could almost hope to find some rather mature Tunisian lady with a warm heart and hospitable fortune to cuddle with in his old age! There he is, borrowing Islam — at least that is how he describes it to his friends in Provence, because, in the end, he refers to a double faith: the faith of necessity and the faith that, he assures them, he has never really denied, the faith of the faithful. But in Aix, Peiresc refuses to communicate, sits in judgment, and does not write.

Thomas-Osmann has sent him his finished book about Africa and expects some criticism and observations; in this way he will indeed continue to exist, if only in his writings, on the shores he has left behind for good. If Peiresc considers his book to be serious and of value, it may be that he, Thomas-Osmann will not to be forgotten back there … Though he remains in the sun on the outskirts of Tunis, his heart and his mind are journeying off with the book he sent to Peiresc.

Repudiated, but trying to make Peiresc forgive his new faith, he turns to his other friend, Aycard, telling him about further presents he feels obliged to send each of them.

That is when he sends the gift, a really nice gift, of a gazelle — the alzaron he calls it. It is the end of 1633; in January 1634 he writes that this gazelle was caught in Nubia, that “it has a wonderful way of running,” that he bought it from a great marabout in the city, and that someone else wanted it for the duke of Tuscany.

It will take several months for Peiresc to reply. Thomas, who meant to send him some little chameleons as well but got them too late to do so, inquires about his Relation de l’Afrique. In the end he confesses, “I admit that your long silence has caused me extreme pain and actually I attribute its cause to my sins …”

Gassendi, writing later about Peiresc, mentions the Nubian gazelle sent by Thomas and describes it. We know through him that it ended up in Rome at the estate of Cardinal Barberini.

The correspondence between Thomas-Osmann and his two friends comes to an end in 1636. Peiresc dies the following year and Aycard soon after. No further trace of Thomas d’Arcos, the renegade of Tunis.

However, it is neither the gazelle, which lives from this point on with the famous Cardinal Barberini in Rome, nor the scholarly work sent to Peiresc that makes this shadowfigure — a freed prisoner who became a Muslim — a silhouette that is inseparable from “our” story, from the shores of the Atlantic to the beaches lining the gulfs of Libya and Tunis, and all the way to the desert of Fezzan.

It was that Thomas was present, alone, in this first half of the seventeenth century traveling back and forth around Tunis or farther to the east with his truly ravenous gaze! Just before his conversion (sincere or strategic), he took a trip to the border between the two regencies, Tunis and Algeria. In a letter to Aycard, he mentions that Sanson Napollon, a knight of the king’s order and governor of the Bastion of France, is now before Tabarka, that he wants to capture Cape Nègre and abandon the Bastion for it. (Things would definitely be easier with the Tunisian powers than with the rulers of Algeria.)

In this atmosphere Thomas embarked on an archeological expedition to a nearby spot, the ruins in Dougga — which he calls Thugga. It is now the autumn of 1631.

He must have been amazed at the fields of columns standing or lying about, the disorder of the marble objects in the midst of luxuriant vegetation, and never tired of describing and drawing them. Two or three poor villages are spread out nearby. Then suddenly he finds something wonderful!

In the middle of this plain, an imposing monument, not a simple triumphal arch but a majestic, harmonious, even strange mausoleum. Thomas studies the sculptures, the inscriptions. All day long he does not leave it.

In the slowly setting sun, some children from the village come to bring him flatbread, eggs, and sheep’s-milk cheese — he knows there is only one thing for him to do. The most unusual and unexpected thing about this whole mausoleum is certainly this inscription on two parallel but not similar faces; he will copy it down meticulously. He studies the letters for a long time and corrects himself: “Two inscriptions, two scripts,” because he finally understands that the magnificent stele is composed of a bilingual text.

He is not sure he will be able to return soon; a year earlier in his first letter to Aycard, he reported that he had been in the entourage of his then “patron” four leagues from Tunis, at La Calle, “where ancient Utica lay.” He had been drawn there by his curiosity about the Roman past.

Even though he is unable to read any of the signs, he suspects that one of the scripts on the two faces of the stele is Punic. For a moment he muses over the final moments of the Carthaginian presence: he tells himself with tears in his eyes that what he is copying down dates at least from the second century before Christ! So this space, these stones, these signs that he cannot understand, have remained inviolate in this place for more than eighteen centuries!

If one speech, one solemn declaration is inscribed there in the Phoenician language, before (or after) Carthage was abandoned to the flames, the other side would bear the same declaration, but in what language? The language of the Vandals? No. Or that of some other vanished population?

He asks himself no more questions. He sits down. Although his tired eyes are weeping now from the strain, he works away at copying these mysterious signs!

Three days later, back in Tunis, his mind still smarts from the fire of this new enthusiasm. He had no witness, not a single confidant in his entourage, and he feels frustrated. Who will there be to come back to this after him? Who will be able to decipher the strange characters?

He spends days copying the double inscription several times over. He decides to send a copy to Peiresc, who does not respond. His curiosity, or his instinct, faced with the mystery, begins to lapse when he hears no echo. Neither Peiresc nor Aycard seem to think his discovery of any value …

It is then, during the following months, that Thomas’s desire for apostasy occurs: as if, drawn by an obscure call from something far back in time, something unknown and as far back and ancient as these stones in Dougga, his soul regained a sort of equilibrium thanks to this conversion — which he referred to as “a shift.”

In June 1633 a learned man, a Maronite, came through Tunis; he was a scholar of oriental languages and, writes Thomas, “highly respected in Rome” by the pope. His name is Abraham Echellen, and the reason for his being in Tunis is to negotiate the buying back of Christian slaves.

In great excitement, Thomas (from now on Osmann), with the text from Dougga in hand, introduces himself to Echellen. He will be able to read it! he thinks eagerly, and waits there respectfully with lowered eyes.

The Levantine studies the copied characters with a magnifying glass for a moment: “This is neither Syrian nor Chaldean,” he asserts. “Perhaps certain characters bear a sort of resemblance to some ancient Egyptian! I shall have to study them at length once I am back in Rome. I shall work at identifying them if you let me have this copy!”

He promises to send Osmann in Tunis the results of what he discovers.

Thus, well before the gazelle reached Cardinal Barberini, this paper with the double inscription, copied by the former slave, ends up in Vatican City. Is put away in the paper archives. Lies dormant there.

As for Peiresc, he will not know what to do with these “hieroglyphs.” Later Glassendi will describe the gazelle from Nubia at length but will disregard these drawings sent by “the Provençal renegade.”

Thomas, good old Thomas d’Arcos, we do not know how or where he dies, whether as a Christian or as a Muslim. Thomas, between two shores, between two beliefs, will be the first person to transmit a bilingual inscription whose mystery will lie dormant for two more centuries.

2. THE RENEGADE COUNT

THE YEAR 1815 is the year Napoleon fell from power. The man feared by all the thrones of Europe is locked up for good. The Ancien Régime — its monarchies brought back out of the cupboard, its emigrés back in their châteaus and estates — is reestablished after Waterloo.

1815, or the return of the previous century: in Paris first, but also in Naples where Joachim Murat, king of Italy and brother-in-law of the “Ogre,” has just been shot by firing squad.

In Naples where, as it happens, Countess Adelaide was feeling all alone: Adelaide, wife of Count Borgia, never leaves her dwelling, a veritable museum, the palace of the Borgia family. Her husband, Camille Borgia, the forty-one-year-old son of General Giovanni Paolo Borgia and the nephew of Cardinal Stefano Borgia, has had to choose exile as a precautionary measure, because in his youthful ardor as a sympathizer with the “revolutionaries” of earlier years he had enlisted in Murat’s army as an officer. Then, rather rapidly, he had been promoted to the rank of general.

Having been born in a museum, Camille Borgia wrote, he had, so to speak, suckled a passion for antiquities with his milk. In his current difficulties, he decides to cross the Mediterranean to explore the ruins of Carthage around Tunis — to reflect, among the stones of antiquity, upon the destruction of the empires of this world and finally to fulfill what he believes to be his true vocation, becoming an archeologist.

As 1815 comes to an end and throughout 1816, Countess Adelaide will do her best to make something of her forced solitude. She regularly invites her circle of friends to the ancestral palace to read the chronicle that the count regularly sends her of his “scientific travels.” Had Borgia “fled” to the land of the Moors? No, this was rather more of a stroll, drawing pencil in hand, with a mind inclined to wax philosophical in the midst of ruins, in search of monuments, some of which had been standing intact or nearly so for more than twenty centuries …

And this is how the renegade Neapolitan count will end up following in the footsteps of the Provençal slave of earlier times, Thomas-Osmann d’Arcos!

The count arrives in Tunis on 19 August 1815, carrying a Danish passport: He did in fact have the title of king’s chamberlain in Denmark. Welcomed by the Danish consul in Tunis he is introduced to the bey’s ministers and the diplomatic circle … He sets himself up in the Imperial, the only hotel in the capital with European amenities, and at the same time immediately begins his first archeological tours in the countryside around Tunis. He becomes the friend of a Dutch engineer, J. E. Humbert, who is an officer in the corps of engineers sent there long before and on good terms with several dignitaries serving the Tunisian sovereign.

In December 1815 Count Borgia and Humbert decide to make an excursion to study the origins of the aqueduct of Carthage in the Zaghouan plateau. Together they make discoveries that escaped several travelers and explorers of the previous century (Peysonnel, Shaw, Bruce, and so on). Not long after, when his Dutch friend manages to join the entourage of Mohammed Khodja, one of the bey’s ministers, Count Borgia undertakes a journey to Le Kef with them. On their return he stops and spends four days in Dougga.

Was he, like the Provençal slave before him, struck with passionate amazement so that he spent his days there drawing everything in sight? As soon as he is back in Tunis, he writes a long letter describing everything he saw, specifically the strange three-story mausoleum. While there, he made numerous pencil sketches, some of which he later traces over with ink. He methodically reproduces each of the monument’s façades as well as numerous plans of the inner chambers on all three levels. Finally, he copies down the bilingual inscription — in the notes he wrote in Italian to accompany the reproduction he mentions two types of lettering, mistakenly referring to them as punico e punico-ispanico.

Thus it is not the mystery of the unknown writing that strikes him, although he senses something strange about the cenotaph, which he attributes to its architectural style, a mixture of Hellenistic inspiration and oriental archaism. He reproduces the Ionic columns with their capitals whose volutes are in the shape of lotus blossoms, and on each level the horizontal stone layer with the architrave and an Egyptian neck. He asks himself questions about the funerary functions of the whole: Had there been small funeral urns in the empty niches of the inner chambers?

Borgia spends all of 1816 exploring other sites in coastal and northern Tunisia; his accounts are regularly sent to the countess, where they are read to a circle of scholars and enthusiasts. In Naples, Borgia the military man is forgotten in favor of Borgia the archeologist. He finally returns to his country in January 1817 with the intention of publishing as quickly as possible the chronicle of his wonderful journey that so inspired him. A well-known engraver is already at work on a series of plates based on Borgia’s wash drawings; among them is an engraving of the Libyco-Punic mausoleum of Dougga.

Alas, Borgia dies suddenly at the end of 1817. His widow assembles all his papers, the Borgiana (harvest of her husband’s travels), and sells them to a French enthusiast, who promises to publish them quickly, but he in turn sells them to the national museum in Leyden, which also acquires Humbert’s papers. This entire unpublished body of work will remain dormant, unpublished, until … 1959.

Meanwhile, in a scholarly review in 1867 the traveler’s son will lament the fact that the Dutch government did not keep its promise to make known his father’s work. Meanwhile, luckily, several scholars will go to copy from this voluminous file at least the mysterious writing of the bilingual inscription of Dougga.

Years go by after Borgia: The strange alphabet keeps its mystery and the mausoleum stands intact — how long? — in the space and ruins of ex-Thugga.

3. THE ARCHEOLOGIST LORD

AT THE BEGINNING of the summer of 1832 in Algiers, the painter Delacroix, returning from a visit to Morocco, stops and spends three days painting at the home of a former raïs. On June 22 he departs once more, carrying in his sketches and in his memory the elements of the composition that several years later will become the masterpiece Women of Algiers in Their Apartment—a lighthouse on the outposts of the colonial darkness represented by Algerian history. Thus placed so suddenly and prominently on display for the public to see, the feminine Algeria will henceforth make itself invisible in its heart of darkness and iridescence for generations to come.

Delacroix left at the end of June, and on July 5 a British lord, Sir Granville Temple, who is a fanatic about archeology, lands in Algiers. Accompanied by his wife, his sister, a couple of English friends, and a young French artist, whose job it is to draw views and landscapes, Lord Temple stays with the English consul, St. John, who had witnessed the capture of Algiers by the French.

They launch into a fashionable social life “with the charming daughters of the duchess of Rovigo,” and they attend the very brilliant ball given by the governor on July 29 (at which the former bey of Médéa appears, dazzling the foreigners with his oriental elegance). Ecstatic over the beauty of the countryside, which he explores from Algiers to Bouzareah, Sir Temple also has time to visit the American consul, discover the city, and note the price of merchandise at the market of Algiers, as well the number of schools (twenty-six Koranic, three Christian, and eight Jewish).

He leaves Algiers to return to the city of Bône, which, on March 28 of that same year, had been conquered by Colonel Yousouf. From there he sets off again by sea and has his presence announced to the English consul in Tunis when he arrives there on August 19.

The consul, Sir Thomas Reade, greets Lord Granville Temple and his family and friends at their boat and accompanies them to La Goulette; from there he takes them to his property at La Marsa. But Granville is dying to do just one thing.

The next morning I was going to walk on the site of great Carthage, he writes. It is the ultimate goal of his Excursions en Méditerranée, the collection that he will publish shortly after his return to London.

In it he recounts how, after having visited Monastir, Mahdia, and Jem, he wants to travel farther into the interior but is kept in Tunis by the incessant rains of January 1833. Finally, on the first day of Ramadan, he sets out on his ride eastward, which will take him, in four days, to the site of Dougga.

The next day at dawn Granville Temple begins to look around the area. He remarks that Doctor Shaw, who in the middle of the preceding century left a description of his travels in this region as well as in Algeria, never visited this city, although it must have been “remarkable and thriving with many beautiful buildings.” The first of these that he admires is a temple of Jupiter with a dedication allowing him to date it back to the reign of Hadrian.

Lord Temple is drawn above all by how beautiful and well preserved the mausoleum standing in the center of an olive grove is. He notes its dimensions and describes the two stories and what remains of a third, the stepped foundations of the pyramid where a beautiful statue and other ornaments remain — one of them a quadriga with a warrior and a chariot driver. He also notes a statue of a draped woman, already damaged by bad weather.

On the east face a double inscription catches his eye and he is fascinated by it: One of the scripts is Punic — he quickly recognizes it. The other has unknown letters, probably “some form of old African,” he says to himself. He supposes therefore that this mausoleum dates from the last years of Punic Carthage — shortly before its disappearance, in 146 B.C.E. — or after?

He in turn copies down the double inscription and in all good faith believes himself the first foreigner to do so. In any event, when his account, Excursions en Méditerranée, appears in London in 1835, this version of the bilingual inscription will be reproduced by the scholar Gésénius. Learned researchers will follow him in attempting to decipher the mysterious writing: Honneger, Étienne Quatremère (who had already published work on Punic inscriptions), but also de Saulcy and A. C. Judas (a specialist in the study of the Libyan language).

Lord Temple presses on with his journey into the regency of Tunis, where he takes notes both about the ancient past and its stones and about everyday life in the present. Before leaving the country he makes friends with a Dane, Falbe, who has lived near Tunis for eleven years and who has just published a topographical map of the ruins of Carthage.

These two amateurs will meet up again in Paris in 1837 in an archeological association established by eighteen members of high society (among them a prince, a duke, two counts, but also the painter Chassériau) to undertake “digs at Carthage and other ancient cities in the regencies of Barbary.” Sir Temple and Falbe, because of their shared passion and their knowledge of the region, agree to go to the area themselves as volunteers in charge of directing the first excavations.

Summer 1837: To make up for the stinging failure of the siege of Constantine the previous autumn, the French government is actively preparing its revenge against the Algerians with the son of the king, the duke de Nemours, as one of the leaders of this campaign.

They decide on a military landing in Bône, attempting once again to take Constantine, where the bey Ahmed still rules.

Following behind the French army, Sir Temple and Falbe meet in Bône in September, where General Valée has promised to help the two archeologists by creating a scientific commission. The two take advantage of the occasion by identifying the ruins of Hippone, and they hope soon to locate those of Cirta, once the city has been captured.

Thus our two friends become witnesses, from an unexpected — apparently “scholarly”—perspective, to the siege and capture of Constantine in all its dramatic and murderous detail. Cirta, an eagle’s nest that only on rare occasions over the centuries had been made to submit!

The siege begins 6 October 1837. It will be trying for both armies: Torrential rain falls without break until 12 October and Lord Temple is already dreaming a little less ardently of discovering the tomb of Masinissa! For six nights in succession it is the work of the engineer corps to move the artillery cannons, which sometimes tip over into the ravines despite all the efforts of sappers and zouaves. They flounder in the mud and the sticky earth clings to the feet of both men and horses.

Everything is told from the point of view of those laying siege, sometimes in vividly realistic detail: “happy were the men who had tents!” to rest in, says the narrator with a sigh. In the cemeteries of Koudier Aly, soldiers break open the sides of tombs and “took out the remains of the dead so that they could lie down in their place.”

On the morning of the twelfth, good weather returns. Making a tour of inspection on horseback to study the area with his telescope, Damremont, head of the command post, is struck down by a cannon. He dies on the spot and is followed in turn by General Perrégaux, also fatally shot.

That very day the city is surrounded. The bey Ahmed, who thought it was impregnable (“nature has made it a second Gibraltar,” writes Lord Temple) had only provided for weak fortifications. On the evening of the two French generals’ death, the city is breached. On 13 October, at four in the morning, the attack is on, led by the Lamoricière’s column.

Hand-to-hand combat, house by house, street by street, alley by alley; the battle is made even more relentless by the explosion of a munitions depot belonging to the resistants, many of whom are killed there. The defenders begin to withdraw into the Casbah. Lord Temple gives a rather brief account of one episode: the death of hundreds upon hundreds of the people of the city as they try to flee through the ravine of el-Medjerday. “They descend the precipice using ropes” that give way under the weight; “they are all dragged down onto each other as they fall.” The next day, hundreds of bodies that have not been removed will be counted.

At the end of the morning of the fourteenth (“the night of 13–14 October there is a total eclipse of the moon between nine in the evening and two in the morning,” adds the witness), the Casbah is taken: the tricolor flag floats over the city.

During the night, thanks to this eclipse perhaps, the bey Ahmed and most of his cavalry are able to reach the nearby mountains. As for the survivors, the civilian population either unable to or not wishing to flee, almost sixteen thousand of them remain, holed up in their tile-roofed houses. They begin the experience of French occupation: provisions of wheat and barley are requisitioned from each home to fill the needs of the conquering army. The city dwellers huddle over their memory, their patios, the invisibility of their women.

Gustave Flaubert, who will visit the city almost twenty years later — before heading east, like our archeologists, to Carthage — will have as his guide the grandson of the great Salah Bey (a legendary figure from the beginning of the century, a hero of the resistance, and martyred by the Turkish rulers). And now his descendent is a mere secretary of some French officer! Going down into the Rummel Gorge, the great writer recalls the fall of hundreds of unfortunate people attempting to flee — a scene from the past that was now the subject of a currently popular painting. At the bridge of el-Kantara, the great novelist muses over the wild scene: “this is a place that is both enchanting and satanic.” Flaubert concludes magnificently: “I think of Jugurtha; the place resembles him. Constantine, moreover, is a true city in the ancient sense.”

Let us return to October 1837 and to our two friends, Sir Temple and Falbe, living in the captured city. Doctor Shaw’s English account in hand, they list the ancient monuments still in good repair twenty years earlier. Many have been demolished, but the underground cisterns are there; the fountain of Aïn el-Safsaf (“the poplar spring”) described by Leon the African at the beginning of the sixteenth century is still there, but without the hieroglyphic characters, no trace of which remains.

In the Casbah, an old Byzantine church is almost intact. As for the famous bridge, when one enters through Bab el-Kantara, it is visible with its two rows of vaults and the “remarkable structure,” about which Edrisi had already exclaimed. Our two tourists resume their calculations, locating various sites, then Sir Temple admires a statue of a woman with two elephants that Shaw had drawn. With two hands she lifts up to her belt the cape that she is wrapped in; the dress underneath fits closely. She is nodding her head — the features of her face are erased — to one side: her braided hair is down to her shoulders. At her feet there are little elephants that have lost their trunks.

The beautiful unknown woman in stone materializes: an immutable pagan idol, preserved because it was placed down low, set way down against the ravine. Although rage and death on the move spread out now above her head in these October days, the two foreigners, the Englishman and the Dane, have come only for the past. These men are only concerned with her, the unknown woman whose face has been eroded by the centuries, foreshadowing for them what if not destruction from now on?

4. DESTRUCTION

THE DESTRUCTION OF Cirta’s freedom sounded the deathknell for Algerian independence, for any last bursts it made after 1830.

The bey Ahmed, who took the resistance off into the Aurès Mountains, becomes the head of an underground movement and will hold on for ten years more. To the west the emir Abd el-Kader continues to wage war; he will not be conquered until nine years later.

The year of Constantine’s fall, the son of Hamdane Khodja, an important dignitary from Algiers, is in Paris. His reaction to the news of the disaster is to write an account of a journey he made earlier with his father who had to cross Kabylia — still undefeated — to meet with the bey Ahmed. During the negotiations with the tribal chiefs that were necessary in order to gain anaia, that is, the host’s protection — the young Ali Effendi served as interpreter for his father in the Berber language.

Ali ben Hamdane Khodja had his text translated into French, and printed, by the orientalist de Saulcy. The latter had known Hamdane Khodja, who spoke English and French fluently as well as Arabic and Turkish and had correspondents in several capitals of Europe. Hamdane Khodja tried in vain, after the surrender of the dey of Algiers, to save what could be saved, but rapidly became the leader of a peaceful opposition — a position that was hardly tenable. He was attacked for his wealth; he was pushed to the limit.

He came to Paris, where he had plenty of friends who supported a French presence that would respect individual Algerian freedoms. He wrote a book, Le Miroir, in which he denounced the encroachments by French soldiers in Algiers, thus becoming the first essayist on the subject of this servitude now beginning.

In 1836 he throws in the towel. Leaving his son in Paris and escorted by sixty friends and relations, he takes the road to Constantinople, where the sultan provides him with a pension. There he hopes to use Ottoman power to sway the politics of the Maghreb, not abandoning Ahmed Bey to his own forces alone. He corresponds with the latter in the name of the sultan, writing in code.

After his defeat and the conquest of his city, Ahmed Bey, in a letter to the sultan demanded that cannons and four thousand soldiers be sent. Now here in Constantinople, faced with the unrest breaking out in the Tripolitaine, Ahmed Bey is expected to be named the pasha of Libya. But the Turkish powers go back and forth for a long time, despite the warnings of Hamdane Khodja: “The French,” he said, “are going to occupy Constantine; next they will infiltrate Tunis and Tripoli and carry their ambitions all the way into Egypt, I have no doubts. Tomorrow it will be too late!”

The statue of the Constantine woman prefigured another destruction for Lord Temple and Falbe — in such a rush were they to get to the ruins of Carthage, there was so much to do in this year of 1837!

Of course, ever since Napoleon’s expedition in Egypt, there had been treasure there, inexhaustible treasure, giving rise to trafficking, theft and irreparable loss: Ancient objects (including mummies and papyruses) are easily negotiable and enrich the intermediaries. Rivalries become intense among states and consular agents in Cairo.

The consul general of England in Tunis, Thomas Reade, the same man who welcomed Lord Temple and his friends in 1833, sees by Temple’s second trip that there is increased interest in Carthaginian archeology. Knowing the extent to which his colleagues from every nation are rivals in this lucrative commerce in Egypt, he goes for the bilingual stele at Dougga. He decides to take it and sell it to the British Museum. He counts on getting at least fifteen hundred pounds for it.

In 1842 he goes to Dougga and hires there a team of workers to pull down the monument and bring back the stele! He has probably obtained some authorization from an official of the bey’s government, it being a well-known fact that the bureaucracies of Muslim countries are more often than not indifferent to this remembering of antiquity … Reade has the entire façade bearing the engraved stele demolished, and the stele is sawed in two to make it easier to transport.

The local workers hired on the spot lack the technical means to detach this stele carefully. The other blocks of stone stacked on each other should have been pulled away to get to the block on which the inscription fit. They throw down the top blocks by lifting them with heavy levers. Thus the bilingual stele carried off to Tunis leaves a field full of ruins behind it!

A French visitor, Victor Guérin, who was there more than ten years later, described the scene: “In the jumbled heap I caught sight of the trunk of a statue of a winged woman (but with no head, arms or legs). On one of the remaining blocks a chariot pulled by four horses can be seen; the driver of it is mutilated, as is a second statue of a winged woman …”

Earlier an Englishman, Nathan Davis, had even more fiercely denounced “the shameless demolition” resulting from “the avarice of Europeans driven only by money matters.” He, too, described this mausoleum broken apart “barbarously,” and called his compatriot’s plundering a “crime.”

In a sad irony he reports that the consul indeed sold the stele to the British Museum, but not for the fifteen hundred pounds he had counted on — for a mere five pounds!

Time goes by and Tunisia is now a protectorate of French.

The field of ruins, Punic as well as Roman, becomes an area reserved for French archeologists. One of them, C. L. Poinsot, attempts to reconstruct the cenotaph of Dougga, making use of the sketches made in 1765 by J. Bruce in his travels.

Shortly after 1900 they begin the careful work of reconstructing the monument, making initial use of the stones still there, reconstituting the sculptures of the winged women, the quadriga, and the chariot driver. In 1910, with the exception of the bilingual inscription, which is still in London, the mausoleum is once again standing, almost intact, but stripped of its double writing.

Fifty years later C. L. Poinsot will devote himself to studying the papers of Count Borgia, forgotten in Leyden. Reconstituting a portion of the stele’s secret, he will prove that at Dougga there were, in fact, two steles, and that the second — probably the most important — of these had been partially erased.

Thus, even if the funerary monument has regained its hybrid — half Greek, half oriental — elegance, some mystery still seems to hang over Dougga, over the lapidary writing, the words in stone that were desecrated and carried off but also those words, victims of erosion, that have almost entirely vanished.

5. THE SECRET

THE WRITING AT DOUGGA began to raise interesting questions starting with the scholar Gésénius, who outlines several conjectures after learning about it through the copy published in 1835 by Lord Temple. In Paris, de Saulcy does detailed research, then Honegger visits the site, but it is Célestin Judas, especially, who, during the years from 1846 through the 1860s, clarifies the meaning of the seven lines in Libyan and succeeds in listing the twenty-three characters of the alphabet.

A work begun at the end of the preceding century had just appeared. The author, Venture de Paradis, had compiled a French-Berber dictionary that was published, with a preface by Champollion, in 1838. Célestin Judas will base his work on numerous remarks made by Venture de Paradis, who had persistently questioned the Kabylians of Algeria about the structure of their dialect.

Throughout the nineteenth century all the questions asked about the stele of Dougga focused on some vanished alphabet, some lost language — one as ancient as the elegant figures of African princes who paid visits to the pharaohs and were melancholically rendered on Egyptian frescos.

Paleographers, following the example of Champollian, felt they were penetrating into a cavern of images and scripts that were indeed exciting but from the past.

Now comes a trickle of doubt: What if this “old African,” which in North Africa the indigenous people themselves consider to be merely an oral dialect, what if this “barbarous” speech, before being accepted as “Berber,” used to be written? What if it was a written language, was the same as Libyan, whose shadows loom throughout the seven centuries of Carthaginian power, yes, what if this archaic alphabet had preceded the Phoenician culture and survived long after it?

Then suppose this strange writing came alive, was a voice in the present, was spoken out loud, was sung. Suppose this so-called dialect of men who spoke by turn Punic with Carthage, Latin with the Romans and the romanized until Augustine’s time, and Greek, then Arab for thirteen centuries, continued, generation after generation, kept alive for endogamic use (mainly with their mothers, their wives, and their daughters). Suppose this speech, this language — the one in which Jugurtha expressed his insurmountable energy as he fought and died, the very one Masinissa spoke throughout his sixty-year reign — went back even farther! Suppose, even longer ago, the Barbarians/Berbers, the great pharaohs’ guests and sometimes their friends or rivals, mentioned by Herodotus of Halicarnassus — suppose those ancestors, who apparently sometimes surrendered to peoples from the east or north and sometimes rose up, struggling until they were put down — yes, suppose these first men and these first women had written this alphabet on skins, shards, stone, on their horses’ and camels’ flanks — same signs, same symbols — which then became indecipherable until the mid-nineteenth century, in short until a stele with seven lines on it was carried to the British Museum, leaving in its wake a field of broken statues and felled columns.

And leaving scholars in their studies to seek and study and listen and suppose … always with the thought that they are on a quest for some lost meaning — underground echoes.

And yet the writing was alive. Its sonority, its music, its rhythms still reeled on around them, around the travelers and their followers going back and forth between Dougga and Cirta. It traveled into conquered Constantine and onto the Kabylian mountains, still rebellious fifteen years after the fall of Constantine, and then, beyond the dunes and sands of the Sahara, it went all the way to the heart of the desert itself! For there, from the Fezzan to Mauritania, among the nomads who thought they had forgotten the Numidians, Libyan letters from earlier times have stealthily slipped in ever since. Perhaps they came in the days of the Garamantes — who gave up their horses for the newly introduced camels, who let the herds of ostriches disappear from their lands until only their silhouettes, in a dancing, animated crowd, remained, engraved on the walls of caves a thousand years old.

The Libyan letters, however they did it, escaped all together, curled up as far away as possible in the reddish dunes as if propelled by some immobile god. They went off to hide in the palms of noble women — the queens, the wives, the lovers of the Veiled Men.

The writing of the sun, fertile secret of the past!

This lost writing was resurrected in various stages over the course of several decades and once more with an Anglo-French rivalry as their basis.

In 1822, after traveling from Alexandria to the Tripolitan regency, a man named Scholz brings various unfamiliar characters to the attention of the public. He believes some of these signs found on old, ancient monuments as well as on Arab buildings, to have been carved several centuries earlier while others, in contrast, seem of rather recent origin.

In 1827 another traveler — his name is Pacho, and he is from Cyrenaica — notices other odd signs on buildings and rocks; he also sees the same signs written by nomads on their camels’ flanks. He reaches the rapid conclusion that this is not an alphabet of some lost language but utilitarian signs the shepherds use.

Before Pacho, however, during the years 1822 and 1823, Walter Oudney, a medical doctor returning from an expedition, brought back nineteen characters that he had seen traced on a Roman monument at Germa and then on rocks in the deserts between Tripoli and the Fezzan, places frequented by the Tuaregs. He determines that some of the signs are several centuries old and others were made more recently. Oudney, publishing his account, is quite clear: In Germa the inhabitants are unable to read most of the inscriptions. But, pushing beyond their borders, the traveler meets up with the Tuaregs and learns to understand their writing: “We discovered for the first time that the characters traced on the rocks were Tuareg!”

This English account is available in Paris in 1836, where first de Saulcy and then Célestin Judas learn about it. The mystery begins to split open: They finally say to themselves, what if this writing that is so ancient were still being written?

So, at the same moment, in Paris, Ali Effendi ben Hamdane Khodja is telling de Saulcy about his stay with the Kabylians when he was traveling with his father. De Saulcy translates this account into French. To thank him, Ali Effendi agrees to lend one or two letters that he still has from the correspondence between his father and the bey Ahmed.

The Parisian scholar is confronted by the following puzzle: The main text is in Arab; but, running along the sides, the bey Ahmed has written several lines of a secret writing: just simple code, de Saulcy thinks. Plagued by curiosity, however, he gets the idea overnight to compare these signs with the ones copied by Dr. Oudney in Cyrenaica. Then, to decipher the first line, de Saulcy remembers that any letter written between Muslims begins with the sacred formula: “In the name of God the Merciful, the Forgiving! …”

Suddenly the Frenchman understands: and what if the bey Ahmed, who could obviously speak Chaoui Berber, has learned — thanks to Saharan nomads passing through Constantine — this mysterious writing and used it as a code, thinking that this alphabet, now so rare, is the only thing that can ward off the danger of interception?

In short, de Saulcy concludes in amazement, contrary to what Venture de Paradis believed when he made a point of learning Berber but thought it normal to write it in Arabic characters, in short, what if Berber had always been a written language? Was still written? Since the dawn of time?

First in Constantine, then after having been driven from his city, the bey Ahmed keeps up a political and military correspondence using this script, whereas, the majority of the population at that time — in the middle of the nineteenth century — have almost entirely lost the ancient alphabet. The resisting leader uses it to write dangerous things, actually to ward off danger!

He will surrender in 1847, a year after the emir Abd el-Kader. There is no mention of the language in which he signs his surrender; moreover, did he sign anything at all on this occasion? In 1830, when the dey of Algiers, without really putting up a fight, writes his capitulation, it is in Turkish — the official language of the time — that he hands himself over to the invader.

After the defeat of the bey Ahmed, the Tuaregs will remain free for seventy more years. As if the ancestral writing, maintained outside of any state of submission, went hand in hand with the intractability and mobility of a people who, in a gesture of supreme elegance, let their women preserve the writing while their men wage war in the sun or dance before the fires at night …

Finally then, Célestin Judas, returning to the inscriptions that English travelers brought back from the Fezzan and Cyrenaica, and aware of de Saulcy’s intuitions, sees the solution — clear as day: Whether Libyan or Berber, for thousands of years this has been the same writing with a few variations: ancient and neo-Libyan.

This is the 1850s. It is during this period that Gustave Flaubert visits Constantine and mentions the grandson of Salah Bey, as well as his French superior, Captain Boissonnet, who is in correspondence with de Saulcy. Boissonnet has a highly valued informant, el Hadj Abd el-Kader, the secretary of the sheik of Touggourt, who traveled in the past with nomad caravanners. Boissonnet gets “a small example of tifinagh writing” from el-Kader and sends it to the orientalist in Paris. “I was struck by the similarity between these written characters and the ones on the Libyan inscription from Dougga,” he says in conclusion.

Of course, this informant has not visited his country for six or seven years, so his memory must not be completely reliable. Captain Boissonnet manages to convince him to resume his contacts with the nomads, maybe even to undertake another trip himself — his seventeenth! — to the Touat.

Will el Hadj Abd el-Kader of Touggourt risk such a thing? The fact remains that, the next year, he sends Captain Boissonnet of Constantine a second list, this time more complete, of the signs currently in use among the Veiled Men.

Once again Célestin Judas provides a meticulous account, comparing the signs on the stele from Dougga, the characters brought back by the Englishmen from Cyrenaica, and those sent to Paris by the captain in Constantine. The same signs are on the stone and on the rocks of the Fezzan and written on their camels’ flanks by Tuareg warriors.

It is 1857—just before the English and French travelers to Dougga discover to their despair the “barbarous crime” committed by Consul Reade against the bilingual stele. But in this same moment the meaning itself — and the music and the throbbing orality — of this alphabet comes back to life, no longer stifled!

Thus, during the 1860s, the stirring course of a very ancient civilization is restored. Though its memory had, indeed, preserved the language in all its toughness and bitter-sweetness, the letters now return to their source, seek to be written again, and by everyone!

While the secret is revealed, how many women and men are there still, from the oasis of Siwa in Egypt to the Atlantic and even beyond — to the Canary Islands, how many of them — how many of us still — all singing, weeping, ululating, but also loving or rather being in a position where it is impossible to love — yes, how many of us are there who, although the heirs of the bey Ahmed, the Tuaregs and the last century and the aediles, bilingual Roman magistrates in charge of the monument of Dougga, feel exiled from their first writing?

6. THE STELE AND THE FLAMES

DOUGGA. IT IS THE SPRING of the year 138 B.C.E. The city notables are presenting, therefore, a magnificent cenotaph to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of the great Masinissa. After reigning sixty years as king of all Numidia, he had died at the age of ninety. It was he who made it possible for the Romans to take Carthage for the last time, conquering it completely.

It has been eight years since Hannibal’s age-old capital went up in flames after a siege lasting almost five years. What astonishing, unflagging energy and desperate resistance on the part of the Carthaginians! How amazingly the Romans pulled together following their senate’s implacable decree: “Delenda Carthago!” And in the end — those April days in 146 B.C.E.

Masinissa saw the siege begin and saw the glorious capital gradually suffocate. But before Carthage will die, consumed by tortures and fire, he dies of old age.

Masinissa died before he could see his dogged enemy vanish. His son, Micipsa, who is present at this commemoration at Dougga, witnessed the tragedy; his other son, Gulussa, with his thousands of fearless, mounted soldiers, took part in the event, but on Scipio’s side, the side of the conquerors.

When the carnage begins, Scipio Emilien (who has summoned from Rome his teacher of Greek literature, the writer Polybe, who was thus fated to be the chronicler of the fall of Carthage), this Scipio — adopted grandson of Hannibal’s rival, Scipio the Great, decides to save some part of the splendor of Carthage.

Of course, the ancient treasure taken from the Syracusans was returned to them; of course, fifty thousand survivors were spared and left as slaves; but what could he preserve of Carthage, other than its writing — its books?

Everything is burning, everything vanishes into dust and ashes: sanctuaries, palaces, the magnificent statues of Baal. In a few days the beauty and munificence of a society that has endured for seven centuries disappears.

Scipio — with his old master standing behind him — raises his hand to intervene: “Save them! Save the books!”

Then with a condescending smile he announces that he does not do this with the intention of carrying the books off to Rome! No. Romans do not care about Carthaginian heritage. Quite the contrary: they will seed the land with salt to give notice that it must become sterile.

“Save the books!” Someone who has heard what Scipio said repeats it: “Not for us, not for us to carry off to Rome! Save the books to give to our allies!”

“Our allies?”

“The Berber kings!”

And so, just barely rescued from the flames already eating into the walls of the most important library, the Carthaginian books are safely set aside and carried away in copper-studded metal boxes.

They will be delivered a few hours later to the tent of King Micipsa once the general gives the order. Micipsa is not surprised and thanks no one. He commands them to carry this booty to Cirta, the lofty capital. We’ll see what happens there, he thinks, and it is as if the memory of his father’s arrogant enemies were rising intact, over the flames.

Micipsa is thinking, in fact, about these books as he stands there, his calm, heavy silhouette that of a man in his fifties, the one they respectfully call the Life of the Living. The important men of Dougga form a circle around the steles engraved with their double alphabet.

“Bilingual,” the head of the technical team, a man named Atban, makes clear: “We wanted the inscriptions to be bilingual.”

No one present forgets that Masinissa formerly declared Carthaginian to be the official language in his kingdom, but how comforting to be there among themselves finally, speaking their ancestral language that is carved equal with the other, this time in stone!

The town notables speak: “May the great Masinissa and the Life of the Living both be praised throughout future generations. Do we not owe to their fighting and their vigilance the fact that we were not dragged into the ruin of Carthage or under the Roman yoke that is going to grow stronger and more burdensome!” In Dougga, the peace-loving city, where we still live …

Micipsa goes up to the steles. He checks each inscription and thanks the carpenters, the stone-carvers as well as the decorator and the sculptor; the statues of the winged goddesses are magnificent.

“So,” he says without solemnity but as if talking to himself, “at the height of my powers I was granted the sight of the destruction of the greatest metropolis on earth!”

Two or three representatives of the municipality of Dougga begin to make speeches. The first one speaks in Carthaginian, showing off his fluency; obviously he has studied in Carthage and is still proud of it. The second, a stockier man, makes his speech in Berber, with something like the rediscovered comfort of relaxing in the warmth of being “among one’s own.” And the third man, the youngest but the most gaudily dressed, brings it all to a quick conclusion — in Latin, the language of the future, he must have thought.

Micipsa, who has been listening patiently, raises his arm; he begins by thanking the orators for the eulogies that, one after the other, they have made to his father, Masinissa. “I would like, before you all, to ask a favor of my young nephew! It was not ten years ago that he saw, as did we, our enemy vanish as if in a nightmare. Now he reminds me that he is one of the people who speaks yesterday’s language best! May he then read for us all, and in both scripts, the stele dedicated to my father and the one bearing the names of the skilled artisans! My dear nephew!” he insists before everyone.

And Jugurtha steps forward.

In a very clear voice resounding through the respectful silence, he begins with “the Others’ language,” as he calls it, and his Carthaginian rises in praise of the great Masinissa, his ancestors, and his three sons. Then he calls out the names of the team from Atban in the same manner.

He takes a breath for a moment, a brief moment, and in the intensifying heat the chatter of a cicada is heard; he begins to read again, this time in, he says emphatically, “the language of our ancestors.”

All present reply with rounds of applause. The young Berber prince stands erect and unsmiling there for a moment before the elegant monument. Soon he moves away under the olive trees.

To leave! envisions Jugurtha who is not yet eighteen.

He uses up his days hunting and in battle practice with his fellow students. He studies, at least when he is living in Cirta, law texts and historical chronicles in Carthaginian — the family library enriched, so much enriched, by so many new books, the booty of Carthage …

Jugurtha has read the account of earlier wars between Rome and Carthage, but it is neither the ghost of Hasdrubal the Great nor even the ghost of glorious Hannibal, triumphant in Rome and many other Italian cities, that haunts him. No. He dreams more about the indomitable enemy of these two heroes: great Scipio.

Because the young man remembers: He was barely seven years old, he was standing there, frozen, at the gates of the palace of Cirta, above the cliffs, when a Roman named Scipio, a leader who was scarcely thirty, said to have been the adopted grandson of Scipio Africanus in Rome, dismounted first, at the head of his troops.

The child Jugurtha stared at him with fiery eyes. Listened to what they were saying in Latin. Micipsa introduced himself and greeted the Roman guest in the proper manner: “My father,” he said, “died scarcely two hours ago! Certainly we have awaited your arrival for the burial. The women who come to weep, and his wives as well, are now at the place where he lies!”

Then, as was customary, he wrapped the general in a spotless woolen toga so that he could cross the first threshold.

At the entrance to the vestibule the child appeared, standing bare-chested and holding himself proudly, his hands together and ready to make the offering. He offered the general the cup of goat’s milk and three dates soaked in acacia honey.

Jugurtha raised his hands high. The general lowered his weatherbeaten face, weighed down by his helmet. He smiled with his eyes and his mouth at the same time as the child-prince slowly spoke the words of hospitality in Libyan which his uncle, Micipsa, scrupulously translated. “He is welcoming you in our language: ‘May the mourning,’ he says, ‘be eased because of your arrival, O friend!’ ”

Before drinking, Scipio Emilien studied the child’s face for a long time. He asked his name.

“Yougourtha,” the child replied in his sharp voice.

7. THE DEPORTED WRITER

WHAT JUGURTHA DID will not be recorded in Berber: the letters of this alphabet, scattered on the ground like the bas-relief Roman chariots, the quadrigas, and the winged goddesses from the dismantled monument of Dougga, seem to have fled by themselves, going all the way to the desert of the Garamantes to slip into the sands and settle onto the immemorial rocks.

Jugurtha and his passion for battle will not be inscribed in the Punic alphabet either. Carthage is no longer there, even if Caesar will attempt to make it rise again on the high plain that the Romans made sterile. Carthage is no longer there, but its language is still current on the lips of both the educated and the uneducated in the cities that fell but were not yet romanized. The language, in fact, like a current, runs freely on, never becoming fixed. The Carthaginian language dances and quivers for five or six centuries to come. Freed of the soldiers of Carthage, of the priests of Carthage, of the sacrifice of the children of Carthage, Carthaginian speech, free and unsettled, transmutes and transports with vivid poetry the spirits of the Numidians who yesterday made war on Carthage. Now they will understand that they were almost making violent, bitter love to it — wanting to desecrate it.

Later and elsewhere, in the first century B.C.E., the same sort of ferment and the same inability to record its outbreaks of resistance will be seen in Gaul as it fights for its independence. Here, too, the task of writing about the defeated Vercingetorix will fall to the conqueror, Caesar. Later.

When Jugurtha reads the double inscription at the request of Micipsa on this spring day at Dougga, however, Polybe, “the greatest mind of the time,” who will soon be seventy, writes.

He records the destruction of Carthage. Before him rise the heroes of the tragedy of the blaze that for six days and six nights and for weeks to come seems to burn and redden the four corners of the known Mediterranean. Houses endlessly collapse in the streets of Byrsa, bodies living and dead of women, children, and old people mingle, and the horses of Roman and Numidian soldiers trample them, splitting human brains into this mud mixed with cries. Nine hundred desperate people shut themselves up in the temple of Aesculapius. In their midst on the roof the wife of Hasdrubal, the Carthaginian leader who is now a suppliant kneeling at the feet of the Roman general, holds his children by the hand, improvises a lyric of scorn, and shouts it at him; she refuses to have her life or the lives of her little ones saved and then leaps with them into the crackling fire … Little by little, a line of slaves leaves the city and its ruins; in sudden magnanimity Scipio Emilien has spared these survivors. And this Scipio, deeply shaken by a metaphysical nostalgia, declaims the verses of the Iliad describing the fall of Troy and the end of empires.

Old Polybe was present for the literary musings of his disciple Scipio who, once it is all decided, at the height of his complete and deadly victory, becomes elegantly sorrowful.

Polybe of Megalopolis, the man deported from the Peloponnesus sixteen years ago, his spirit now full of the flames of Carthage, full of the delirium of proud souls struck down and the thousands of trampled bodies, as well as images of despair and flight, prepares to write about the destruction; destruction is his point of departure.

Before he returns home to Greece, he makes a request to see the Atlantic Ocean, to look at the coast from the land of the Moors (present-day Morocco) to the Mauritanian shores: he is passionate about geography, as if now truly tired of history — too heavy, too somber. He wants instead to see the physical world, landscapes, animals (“as for the quantity and power of the elephants, the lions and panthers, the beauty of the ostriches,” he writes, “there is absolutely nothing of the sort in Europe, but Africa is filled with these species”).

Once back in his own country, in the autumn of the same year, Polybe must then bear the sight of the sack of Corinth, “pearl of Attica.” He would try to act as a negotiator and arrange better terms for his people, but a second time he is present, helplessly, at an irreversible fall of Achaean autonomy beneath the boots and brutality of savage Roman soldiers. He watches the light of Greece suddenly flickering out; he accepts it and writes.

But I, today’s humble narrator, a woman, say that whereas Jugurtha at Dougga reads in the ancestral language for the last time, the writing of Polybe is nourished by all this simultaneous destruction. (He witnesses first the razing of Carthage, then the statues of Corinth, knocked down or carried away in shards, and, to finish it all off, he soon will have to contemplate the burning of Numantia and the dead Spaniards convulsed in their grandiose heroism.) I say that his writing, composed in a language that was, of course, maternal, but espoused by the cultivated minds of the West at that time, runs freely over the tablets and is polygamous!

As if, giving an account of death — the death of men, the death of ancient cities, and especially the death of the spirit of light that had shone through the darkness — Polybe, writing in this third alphabet the account of his life — his political deportation, his observation of the seat of power in Rome, his journeys, as well as the sight of these immense ruins at the very moment that they come crashing down — Polybe, almost in spite of himself, turned the coat of mail worn by all resistance inside out, the one implied by a language of poetry.

In fact for him the writing of history is writing first of all. Into the deadly reality that he describes he instills some obscure germ of life. This man who should be faithful to his own people justifies, consoles, and tries to console, himself. We see him, especially, confusing points of view. In the destruction his writing sets itself at the very center of a strange triangle, in a neutral zone that he discovers, though he did not expect it or seek it out.

We see him, far from Carthage, but also far from nearby Corinth, writing neither as a loyalist nor as a collaborator. The mere fact of his history somewhere else nourishes his astonishing “realism.”

Polybe the historian — who did not merely set out to give an account of civil war’s fatal effects like his fiery predecessor, Thucydides — Polybe the deported writer, returning in the twilight of his life to his native land, sees that he no longer has a land or even a country (the latter enslaved and in chains). All that he has is a language whose beauty warms him and that he uses to enlighten the enemies of yesterday who are now his allies.

He writes. And his language, his hand, his memory, and all his powers just before they fade, contribute to this untimely, yet necessary transmission. Is that why his work, like the stele of Dougga, after having fed the appetite for knowledge and the curiosity of his successors for several centuries, all at once, unexpectedly and in great slabs, is erased?

Because Polybe’s accounts of Carthage, of Corinth, and of Numantia, exist henceforth only in scattered scraps, only in bits of relfections in the mirrors held up by imitators, those writers of lesser stature, Appien, Diodorus of Sicily, and a few others.

As if this literary ascendance exuded some danger, some acceleration toward its own erasure that would prove inevitable!

Abalessa

Let me finally turn my musings to the royal Tin Hinan, the ancestor of the noble Tuaregs of Hoggar. Her history had long been told like a dream wreathed in legends, a fleeting silhouette as evanescent as smoke, or a ghost, or a myth, an imaginary figure. She suddenly became solid thanks to archeological discoveries by a French-American team in 1925. Tin Hinan existed. Her so moving mortal remains (the skeleton of a woman closely related to the pharaonic type) were taken from the necropolis of Abalessa and carried away to the museum of Algiers.

Yes, let me dream about Tin Hinan, the fugitive princess, who made her way into the very heart of the desert of deserts!

She was born in the north: in the Tafilalt, in the fourth century C.E., just after the reign of Constantine. What young girl’s reason could have made her decide to flee this northern Berber land in the company of her attendant, Takamat, and a group of servants? What reason, private or political, made her decide to abandon everything — despite her youth and the fact that she was perhaps to be the ruler — and push on beyond the oases of the Sahara? Was it because freedom — her freedom or her family’s or her group’s — was threatened?

The Tuaregs ever since that time like to tell of her expedition: Tin Hinan, riding a white female camel, is accompanied by faithful Takamat and a caravan composed mostly of women, young girls, white and black intermingled. From their country they carry with them dates and millet, rare and precious objects, the royal jewels of course, as well as the vases and urns required by the pagan religion they practice.

The route to Hoggar was long. In the final stages food became scarce. The situation became critical: to die of hunger in the desert!

Takamat on her dromedary or Tin Hinan mounted high on her mount — the story does not decide which of the two friends — sees the little mounds on the ground formed by anthills. Takamat, with the help of the servants, sets about gathering, grain by grain, the harvest of the hardworking ants! Thanks to her patience Tin Hinan and her cortège are able to continue their journey. Finally Hoggar is close, a green and fertile valley opens up before them. Saved!

They settle there west of Tamanrasset: Abalessa was a site of pilgrimage even before the mausoleum of the princess was discovered there.

One day in 1925 the Frenchman Reygasse and the American Prorok enter the chamber of the dead princess, seventeen centuries after she was placed there in the center of a vast necropolis containing eleven other burial places. Around it a road was laid out for the religious processions that fervently circled the dead women!

This funerary grouping, for its dimensions, its complex organization, the thickness of its walls, and its basalt stones, is the most imposing pre-Islamic necropolis in the region.

I find that I am always dreaming about the day that Tin Hinan was laid to rest at Abalessa. They stretched her out on a bed of sculptured wood. Her thin body, pointed east and covered with cloth and large leather ornaments, lay on its back with its arms and legs slightly bent under.

Tin Hinan — as the two archeologists verify by studying her skeleton — wears seven silver and seven gold bracelets on her left wrist and a single silver bracelet on her right; a string of antimony beads circles her right ankle. Precious and exquisite pearls cover her breast.

Near her, dates and fruits had been placed in baskets; nothing remains of them but pits and seeds. Facing the recumbent body there is a stylized statuette of a woman (her portrait?) that has not completely vanished, as well as some pottery, fragments of which remain.

A gold coin stamped with the likeness of the Emperor Constantine is still there; in a nearby room a Roman lamp from the third century is preserved. So, despite the distance of centuries, the chronological date of the tomb can be fixed.

But there is something especially troubling to my stubborn dream in its attempts to reassemble the ashes of time, to hold on to the traces around these miraculously preserved tombs. Especially troubling (even though I am just as disturbed by Tin Hinan’s removal to Algiers) are the tifinagh inscriptions found here. They are very ancient in origin and they can also be found on the walls of the neighboring chambers (the chouchatts), where each of the princess’s friends was buried in turn.

Libyan writings. Earlier even than the writing at Dougga, they are in Libyan script, no longer understood by the Tuaregs, who respectfully followed the archeologists into the tomb, then averted their gaze when faced with the recumbent Tin Hinan.

And so I imagine the princess of the Hoggar who, when she fled in the past, carried with her the archaic alphabet, then confided the characters to her friends just before she died.

Thus, more than four centuries after the resistance and dramatic defeat of Yougourtha in the north, also four centuries before the grandiose defeat of la Kahina — the Berber queen who will resist the Arab conquest — Tin Hinan of the sands, almost obliterated, leaves us an inheritance — and does so despite her bones that, alas, have now been disturbed. Our most secret writing, as ancient as Etruscan or the writing of the runes, but unlike these a writing still noisy with the sounds and breath of today, is indeed the legacy of a woman in the deepest desert.

Tin Hinan buried in the belly of Africa!