Die Völker in Biledulgerid

Title

Die Völker in Biledulgerid

Description

Representation of Berber in north Africa

ca. 1690

Artist

Mallet (1630-1706)

Alain Manesson Mallet (1630- 1706 ) was a French cartographer and engineer. He started his career as a soldier in the army of Louis XIV, became a Sergeant-Major in the artillery and an Inspector of Fortifications. He also served under the King of Portugal, before returning to France, and his appointment to the court of Louis XIV. His military engineering and mathematical background led to his position teaching mathematics at court. His major publications were Description de L'Univers (1683) in 5 volumes, and Les Travaux de Mars ou l'Art de la Guerre (1684) in 3 volumes. His Description de L'Universe contains a wide variety of information, including star maps, maps of the ancient and modern world, and a synopsis of the customs, religion and government of the many nations included in his text. It has been suggested that his background as a teacher led to his being concerned with entertaining his readers. This concern manifested itself in the charming harbor scenes and rural landscapes that he included beneath his description of astronomical concepts and diagrams. Mallet himself drew most of the figures that were engraved for this book.

Historical Description

North Africa in the broader geographical sense is the area of the continent of Africa that includes the Sahara and the coastal strip to the north, west and east of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the Red Sea. Religiously, North Africa is mainly characterized by Islam, ethnically by Berbers, Moors and Arabs, in the southernmost area also Nubians, Amhars and Black Africans. The core states of North Africa include Morocco with the Western Sahara, Algeria, Tunisia (small Maghreb), Libya (Greater Maghreb), Egypt and Sudan. Especially during the ongoing desert phase, contacts between North and sub-Saharan Africa were therefore limited almost exclusively to trade along the east and west coasts of the continent and to certain routes where there were sufficient water points, due to the difficulties of crossing the world's largest sandy desert. At the same time, this meant ethnic separation, and although North African culture has both African and Middle Eastern roots, with the Berbers possibly even European. With antiquity in the narrower sense, the interests of the Mediterranean peoples, which had previously been focused primarily on Egypt and the Near East in terms of power politics, gradually changed. As so often in history, it was trade that paved new paths; and the first people to devote themselves entirely to Mediterranean trade, even to the neglect of their own state structures, were the Phoenicians, but the place in North Africa where territorial state structures did develop, at least to some extent, was Carthage. In the period between the destruction of Carthage and Rome taking control of the Maghreb, there was a brief flourishing of local kingdoms. Two largely sedentary ethnic groups, the Moors and Numidians, were of particular importance. After the victory over Carthage, Roman culture and, above all, Roman administration spread relatively quickly from east to west along the Atlas mountain ranges across the new territories in North Africa. The North African provinces quickly became economically central to the Roman Empire, and between the 1st and 4th centuries AD, Rome's survival actually depended on grain and olive supplies from there, as the climate in North Africa at that time was wetter than it is today. When the Romans took power in the Mediterranean, a development came to an end in the course of which North Africa in particular finally became part of the Mediterranean world.