Traditional Berber religion
Originally, the Berbers seem to have believed in worship of the sun and moon, animism and in the afterlife, but interactions with the Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans influenced religious practice and merged traditional faiths with new ones.
Masinissa, the first king of Numidia, commonly paid tribute to the god of the sun Apollo in 179 B.C to his temple in Delos, the assumed birthplace of Apollo and his twin sister Artemis (the goddess of the moon), for which he received a golden crown from the inhabitants of the Greek island Delos.
An example is the inscription found in Souk Ahras (the birthplace of Augustine; Thagaste in Algeria) written "Solo Deo Invicto".
According to Herodotus and Pausanias, the cult had Berber origin and later spread to Egypt and then Greece, probably via the Greek colony of Cyrene.
[6][dead link] In the Siwa Oasis, located Western Egypt, there remained a solitary oracle of Amon near the Libyan Desert.
In the discussion of Athanase of Alexandria against the Gentiles, it is said that for the Libyan populations (Berbers), the god Amon is often named Amen and was venerated as a divinity.
Iarbas, a mythological king of Numidia who sold Dido the land on which she founded Carthage,[9] was also considered a son of Amon.
Diodorus Siculus mentions Ammon as the king of Libya who married Rhea (daughter of Uranus and sister of the Titans).
The ancient cult of Neith (Ha-nit) (or Nit, or Tinnit) influenced the ancient Egyptians with their goddess Neith, and the Hellenes with their goddess Athena through the Berber cult of war,[11] and was an imported deity from Libya who was in wide worship in 600 BC [12] in Sais (Archaic name: Ha-Nit) by the Libyan population inhabiting Sais, a very famous temple of Neith was established in this city by the earliest local dynasty.
[14] According to mythology, Athena was believed to have been born in Lake Tritonis in North Africa (modern-day Algeria and Tunisia), which is why she was given the epithet Tritogeneia.
[14] In his dialogue Timaeus, the Greek philosopher Plato has Critias claim that Neith is the Egyptian name of Athena.
[17] Some identified the Punic Tanit as the Middle Eastern goddesses like Anat[18] or Astarte but Steve A. Wiggins argued that "local associations should not be considered definitive" and that "we must not assert more than the evidence will allow".
[19] Gurzil, a new god appearing in later texts and worshipped by tribes such as the Austoriani outside the Roman frontiers of Libya, was considered the son of Amun and a cow.
It is very likely that the sanctuary of Gurzil was located in Ghirza, in Libya, where remarkable reliefs show a noble Libyan receiving tribute while seated on a curule chair.
[citation needed] It is a culture that dominated in North Africa, between 13,000 BC and the foundation of Numidia, several sub-cultures emerged and evolved and all of which were called Megalithic cultures, the word Megalithic describes an era where ancient monuments built before the invention of early writing in 3,200 BC.
The region with the highest concentration of Dolmens is Roknia where over 3,000 megalithic monuments in the necropolis stretch over several kilometers (in comparison, there are more than 4,000 on the whole of France).
One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Berber religion in antiquity was the veneration of the dead, who seem to have been believed to exercise control over soil fertility and possibly over the future.
[44] Pomponius Mela also reported that the Augilae (Modern Awjila in Libya) considered the spirits of their ancestors to be deities.
He wrote: "They swear by the people among themselves who are reported to have been the most lawful and brave, by these, I say, laying hands upon their tombs; and they divine by visiting the sepulchral mounds of their ancestors and lying down to sleep upon them after having prayed; and whatsoever thing the person sees in their dream, this they accept.
[47] The veneration (not worship) of saints which exists among the modern Berbers in the form of Maraboutism—which is widespread in northwest Africa—may or may not contain traces of prior beliefs or customs concerning the dead.
[citation needed] The Ancient Egyptians were the neighbors of the Berbers, as such traces of the worship of ancient Egyptian deities by the Berbers was found, and it has been theorized that both cultures shared at least some of these gods: The cult Isis and Set by the Berbers was reported by Herodotus when saying: Thus from Egypt to the Tritonian lake, the Libyans are nomads that eat meat and drink milk; for the same reason as the Egyptians too profess,f they will not touch the flesh of cows; and they rear no swine.
[51] They were honored by the Ancient Greeks in Cyrenaica, and was united with the Phoenician god Baal and goddess Anat due to Libyan influence.
[43] Early depictions of rams and ewes (related possibly to an early form of the cult of these deities) across North Africa have been dated to between 9600 BCE and 7500 BCE.The most famous temple of Amun and Amunet in Ancient Libya was the augural temple at Siwa Oasis in Egypt, an oasis still inhabited by Berbers.
Osiris was also among the Egyptian deities who were venerated in Libya and Dr. E. A. Wallis Budge (in addition to a few other scholars) believed that Osiris was originally a Libyan god saying of him that "Everything which the texts of all periods recorded concerning him goes to show that he was an indigenous god of Northern Africa (modern day Libya), and that his home and origin were possibly Libyan.
"[52] The Phoenicians were originally a Semitic people who inhabited the coast of modern Lebanon, and later came as refugees to Tunisia.
Carthage began to ally with the Berber tribes after the Battle of Himera (480 BCE), in which the Carthaginians were defeated by the Greeks.
The Cyrenaican Greeks built temples for the Libyan deities Amun and Amunet who they identified with Zeus and Hera[failed verification], respectively.
Battus II began secretly to invite other Greek groups to Libya, Tunisia and East Algeria.
[59] During the Roman period, Saturn and Ops were the focus of an important cult, subsuming that of Baal Hammon and Tanit, two deities of Punic origin.
[60] By the seventh century, most of North Africa's population in the urban centres and coastal plains had been Christian for a long time and paganism had vanished from prominence, except among the Berber tribes.
