ome, early in the 3rd century. The Empire takes a new master, whom the historian Cassius Dio introduces in a few words: “Macrinus was a Moor by birth, from Caesarea, and the son of most obscure parents”. A Moor on the throne of the Caesars. The name Macrinus bore has crossed two thousand years: it named a tribe of northern Morocco, then the peoples of all of western North Africa, then the Muslims of al-Andalus, and even the Moroccans of the last century. More recently, it has also taken on other meanings. So let us go back to the sources, from the ancient name to its modern uses.
A name from Antiquity
The Moors first appear in Greek authors, as the Maurousioi. Diodorus of Sicily mentions them in connection with events of the late 5th century BCE, probably drawing on Timaeus, and Polybius places them near the Ocean. The geographer Strabo notes that the form the Romans used, Mauri, was the one the inhabitants used themselves. The Latin form appears only with Sallust, in his Jugurthine War. In the narrow sense, the Mauri were first a tribe of the future Tingitana, west of the Moulouya.
The name would spread with the kingdom. Bocchus I, king of Mauretania around 110 BCE and father-in-law of Jugurtha, would waver between his son-in-law and Rome before handing Jugurtha over to Sulla in 105. He then concluded a treaty with the Romans, who would add part of Numidia to his kingdom. The eastward spread of the name would follow that of the Moorish kingdom or kingdoms, until all the peoples settled in the south of the future Maghreb came to be called Moors. Until at least the 8th century CE, Mauri would name the inhabitants of Barbary.
Moors in Rome
The Moors did not stay on the margins of the Empire. Under Caligula, the emperor summoned Ptolemy, son of King Juba II, and had him put to death, and Mauretania would pass under Roman administration. Under Trajan, Lusius Quietus, “a Moor” who “ranked as a leader of the Moors,” had commanded a troop of cavalry before being dismissed from the service. When Trajan needed the Moors for the Dacian wars, Quietus came to him of his own accord, and he would become consul and then governor of Palestine. A century later came Macrinus, born in Caesarea of Mauretania. Roman Africa would also give the Empire Septimius Severus, born at Leptis in Tripolitania and father of Caracalla: an African, but not a Moor.
Here are a few ancient sculptures unearthed in Morocco, at Lixus, Volubilis and Tangier.
The name of the Muslims of the West
From 711, much of the Iberian Peninsula would pass under Muslim rule, and that rule would last almost eight centuries. The name Moor would cross into the peninsula with the Berber troops. There it would become moro, and would name not only the Berbers but also, wrongly, the Arab conquerors.
After the Reconquista, the Muslims who stayed in Spain would be called Moriscos. Those who settled in North Africa after the expulsion of 1610 would become the Andalusians there. Until the end of the 19th century, groups of Muslims in port cities such as Tangier or Oran were still called Moors.
A name still in use in the 20th century
In Europe, the word long stayed attached to the Moroccans themselves. Newspapers spoke of the sultan’s “Moorish ambassador,” postcards of “Moorish weavers” or a “Moorish embassy,” as the documents reproduced here show.
What genetics and archaeology say
The life sciences confirm a long local continuity, built from many contributions. In 2001, a Y-chromosome study led by Elena Bosch showed that the paternal lineage defined by the M81 marker, now called E-M81, was the most common in northwestern Africa, at 64% of the samples. It was found in 65% of the Berbers of southern Morocco and in 52% of the Arabic-speaking Moroccans in the sample. Its age is still debated: Bosch dates it to the Upper Paleolithic, while a 2004 study leans toward the Neolithic.
Ancient DNA goes further. At Taforalt, in the Grotte des Pigeons in eastern Morocco, seven individuals about 15,000 years old have been sequenced. All the men well enough preserved carry the E-M78 lineage, common today in North and East Africa. Their genomes combine an ancestry close to the Natufians of the Levant, at 63.5%, with a sub-Saharan ancestry, at 36.5%. Around 5,000 BCE, the first farmers of Ifri n’Amr ou Moussa still resemble those hunter-gatherers and carry a component specific to the Maghreb that is found in Maghrebis today. Around 3,000 BCE, an Iberian contribution would be added.
The history of Morocco’s inhabitants is thus that of a population rooted in place since prehistory, which over the millennia received contributions from the Levant, sub-Saharan Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. Neither a people from elsewhere, nor a pure isolate.
What the name is not
In the 20th century, the word took on a new meaning in the United States. The Moorish Science Temple of America, founded by its own account in Newark in 1913 by Timothy Drew, known as Noble Drew Ali, and settled in Chicago in the mid-1920s, teaches that all Black Americans are of Moorish origin and promotes the word “Moor” over “Black”. Other currents, often called Afrocentrist, present the ancient Moors as a Black people whose history was erased. The sources gathered here say otherwise. The name Moor is a local name, attested since Antiquity in northern Morocco, and the Moors of history are among the ancestors of the peoples of the Maghreb.
A petition of 1790 is often invoked in these debates. That year, four free men, subjects of the Sultan of Morocco Mohammed III living in South Carolina, asked with their wives not to be tried under the law on slaves, the Negro Act. The state’s House of Representatives agreed with them. It is an episode in the history of Morocco and the United States, and it concerned these four men and their wives.
So let us say it clearly. The Moorish Times is a magazine devoted to the history and heritage of Morocco. It has no connection with the Moorish Science Temple of America, nor with the movements that claim a “Moorish” identity today, nor with Afrocentrist theories. It is the Moors of that history, from ancient Morocco to al-Andalus, that this article tells of.
- Jehan Desanges, “Maures (Antiquité): Mauri, Maurēnsii, Maurousii,” Encyclopédie berbère, 31, 2010, pp. 4710-4712. https://journals.openedition.org/encyclopedieberbere/516
- Yann Le Bohec, “Maures ou Mores,” Encyclopædia Universalis. https://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/maures-mores/
- Marieke van de Loosdrecht et al., “Pleistocene North African genomes link Near Eastern and sub-Saharan African human populations,” Science, 360, 2018, pp. 548-552. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aar8380
- Rosa Fregel et al., “Ancient genomes from North Africa evidence prehistoric migrations to the Maghreb from both the Levant and Europe,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115, 2018, pp. 6774-6779. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1800851115
- Cassius Dio, Roman History, book 79, 11, trans. Earnest Cary, Loeb Classical Library, 1927, on LacusCurtius. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cassius_Dio/79*.html
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., 1911, vol. 4, “Bocchus” (after Sallust, Jugurtha, 80-120). https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Bocchus
- Cassius Dio, Roman History, book 59, 25, on LacusCurtius. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cassius_Dio/59*.html
- Cassius Dio, Roman History, book 68, 32, on LacusCurtius. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cassius_Dio/68*.html
- Historia Augusta, Life of Septimius Severus, 1, on LacusCurtius. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Historia_Augusta/Septimius_Severus*.html
- Elena Bosch et al., “High-resolution analysis of human Y-chromosome variation shows a sharp discontinuity and limited gene flow between northwestern Africa and the Iberian Peninsula,” American Journal of Human Genetics, 68, 2001, pp. 1019-1029. https://doi.org/10.1086/319521
- Dominique de Font-Réaulx, “J’ai des moments de paresse délicieuse...,” Musée Eugène-Delacroix. https://www.musee-delacroix.fr/IMG/pdf/BAT_GG29_066_069_MAROC_Delacroix.pdf
- Barbara Arredi et al., “A predominantly Neolithic origin for Y-chromosomal DNA variation in North Africa,” American Journal of Human Genetics, 75, 2004, pp. 338-345. https://doi.org/10.1086/423147
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Moorish Science Temple of America.” https://www.britannica.com/topic/Moorish-Science-Temple-of-America
- Latifa Babas, “History: When the subjects of Sultan Mohammed III signed the Free Moors petition in the USA,” Yabiladi, November 29, 2018. https://en.yabiladi.com/articles/details/71570
