Monsieur
Benou, in his "Description Geographique de l'Empire de Maroc" says
Morocco "comprend une superficie d'environ 5,775 myriametres
Carres, un
peu plus grande, par consequant, que celle de la France, qui equivaut a
5,300." This then is the available and immediate territory of Morocco,
not comprising distant dependencies, where the Shereefs exercise a
precarious or nominal sovereignty.
Previously to particularizing the population of Morocco, I shall take
the liberty of introducing some general observations on the whole of the
inhabitants of North Africa, and the manner in which this country was
successively peopled and conquered. Greek and Roman classics contain
only meagre and confused notions of the aborigines of North Africa,
although they have left us a mass of details on the Punic wars, and the
struggles which ensued between the Romans and the ancient Libyans,
before the domination of the Latin Republic could be firmly established.
Herodotus cites the names of a number of people who inhabited North
Africa, mostly confining himself to repeat the fables or the more
interesting facts, of which they were the object.
The nomenclature of Strabo is neither so extensive, nor does it contain
more precise or correct information. He mentions the celebrated oasis of
Ammonium and the nation of the Nasamones. Farther west, behind Carthage
and the Numidians, he also notices the Getulians, and after them the
Garamantes, a people who appear to have colonized both the oasis of
Ghadames and the oases of Fezzan. Ptolemy makes the whole of the
Mauritania, including Algeria and Morocco, to be bounded on the south by
tribes, called Gaetuliae and Melanogaeluti, on the south the latter
evidently having contracted alliance of blood with the negroes.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 43 of 196
Words from 11254 to 11536
of 53114
