Made in the Maghreb

Start before history. Near Sétif, at a site called Aïn Boucherit, archaeologists dug up stone tools about 2.4 million years old. That puts them among the oldest ever found outside East Africa. Someone here was cutting meat with sharpened stone long before anyone could write it down.

Then the Sahara was green. On the cliffs of the Tassili n'Ajjer, deep in the south, people painted what they saw: giraffes, rivers, and herds of cattle with their herders walking beside them. It is one of the largest open-air art galleries on earth, and it shows people who had already learned to keep animals.

The Amazigh wrote too. The old Libyco-Berber script was carved into stone by the sixth century before Christ. Its descendant, Tifinagh, is still on road signs and shop fronts today. Few alphabets that old are still in daily use.

The Numidians had the best horses in the ancient world, and they rode them without a bridle, steering with a light rope and their legs. At Zama in 202 BC, the Numidian cavalry of King Massinissa decided the battle that broke Hannibal. The breed behind them, the Barb horse, went on to shape the Andalusian and many of the horses that came after it.

A boy from Carthage was taken to Rome as a slave. He became the playwright Terence, and Romans called him Afer, the African. In 163 BC he wrote a line that people still quote two thousand years later, and it could be the motto of this whole article.

In 25 BC, Rome made an Amazigh prince king of Mauretania. Juba II ruled from Caesarea, today Cherchell, west of Algiers, and he was more scholar than soldier. He wrote books on geography and plants. He named a plant after his doctor, Euphorbus, and every euphorbia in your garden centre still carries that name. His sailors reached a group of Atlantic islands full of big dogs. The Latin word for dog is canis. They are the Canary Islands.

A few generations later, a man from Madauros, today M'Daourouch, called himself half Numidian and half Gaetulian. His name was Apuleius. He wrote The Golden Ass, the story of a man turned into a donkey. It is the only Latin novel that survives complete.

A boy who went to school in that same town grew up in Thagaste, today Souk Ahras. In 397 AD he started writing a book about his own life, his mistakes and his doubts. He was Augustine, and The Confessions is often called the first autobiography in the West. Every memoir on your shelf descends from it.

Tiaret had another name then. Around the year 900 it was Tahert, a busy capital on the edge of the desert, and a Jewish scholar called Judah ibn Quraysh lived there. He wrote a letter to the Jews of Fez that put Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic side by side and showed that they were cousins. He compared them with Berber too, the language he heard in the street. Scholars call it the oldest known comparison of the Semitic languages. Linguistics did not have a name yet.

In the mountains of Lesser Kabylia, near Jijel, lived an Amazigh people called the Kutama. In the 900s they became the army of a new dynasty, the Fatimids. In 969 that army marched east and took Egypt. Its general built a new city next to the old one and named it al-Qahira, the victorious. You know it as Cairo. A few years later its great mosque, al-Azhar, opened its doors, and it still teaches today. One of the biggest cities on earth was founded by soldiers from the Kabyle mountains.

Now the part I love most, because it happened in Kabylie. Near the end of the 1100s, a merchant from Pisa ran his city's trading post in Béjaïa and brought his son along. The boy learned arithmetic from local teachers, with the Hindu-Arabic digits in the form the Maghreb wrote them. Back in Italy he wrote a book in 1202 that taught Europe to count with 0 to 9 instead of Roman numerals. In it is a puzzle about rabbits whose answer runs 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13. The boy was Leonardo of Pisa. You know him as Fibonacci. The digits you write every day went to Europe through Béjaïa. The city was full of teachers then. One of them, Ibn Mu'ti, came from the Zwawa, the old name for the Kabyles. He wrote a poem of a thousand verses that taught Arabic grammar, and the most famous grammar poem in Arabic follows its model.

Béjaïa gave French a word too. The city sold beeswax across the Mediterranean, and the French called it Bougie. By the 1300s, a candle in French was a bougie. Every time someone in Paris lights one, they say the name of a Kabyle port.

In 1370, in Constantine, a judge called Ibn Qunfudh finished a book on arithmetic. When he wrote algebra, he did not spell out every word. He used short letter signs for the unknown and its powers. It is one of the earliest known texts that writes algebra with symbols, decades before al-Qalasadi, the man who usually gets the credit. Every x on a school blackboard comes from steps like this one.

In 1377, a scholar hid in a castle called Qal'at Ibn Salama, near Tiaret, and wrote for months. Ibn Khaldun asked why empires rise and fall, how cities grow, how taxes kill the economy that pays them. His Muqaddimah is often called the first work of sociology. He was thinking about economics four centuries before Adam Smith.

In 1391, mobs in Spain killed thousands of Jews. Many escaped across the sea to the Maghreb. Two rabbis landed in Algiers: Isaac ben Sheshet, called the Ribash, and Simeon ben Zemah Duran, called the Rashbatz. In 1394 they wrote the rules for the Jewish community of Algiers. Their written answers to questions of law, hundreds of them, are still read and cited by rabbis today. For a time, Algiers was one of the capitals of Jewish law.

Ali ibn Hamza was born in Algiers and worked as an accountant for the Ottoman treasury. In 1591, in Mecca, he finished a book of arithmetic. In it he lines up the numbers that double, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, with the numbers that count, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4. Then multiplying two numbers in the first row becomes adding two numbers in the second. That is the idea behind logarithms. John Napier published the first real logarithm tables in Scotland in 1614, 23 years later. Some people say Ibn Hamza invented logarithms. That goes too far. A German book had the two rows in 1544, and Ibn Hamza made no table to calculate with. But an Algerian was working on the idea before Napier.

Back in the Kabyle mountains, every village ran itself. Its assembly, the tajmaât, met in the village square, made the rules and judged the disputes. Villages kept their own laws, the qanun, and many wrote them down. Most punishments were fines, not prison or the stick. Only men sat in the assembly, so it was not a democracy as we mean it today. But when French scholars recorded these laws in the 1800s, they filled whole volumes with the rules of villages that had governed themselves for generations.

Then the small things, the ones that make you smile. In 1840, French soldiers under siege at Mazagran, near Mostaganem, ran short of supplies. The story goes that they drank their coffee with cold water. They brought the habit home, and Paris cafés served it as a mazagran. It was one of the first iced coffees, and in Portugal a mazagran is still coffee on ice.

Remember Mascara? Emir Abdelkader was born near it and led the resistance against France from its hills. Exiled to Damascus, in 1860 he opened his home and his guards to thousands of Christians during a massacre and saved their lives. The Red Cross now counts him among the forerunners of the laws of war. That is Mascara's real gift to the world.

In 1880, a French army doctor in Constantine put a drop of a sick soldier's blood under his microscope and saw tiny crescents moving. Alphonse Laveran had found the parasite that causes malaria. He won the Nobel Prize for it in 1907.

In 1902, in an orphanage garden at Misserghin, near Oran, a monk called Brother Clément crossed a mandarin with an orange. The new fruit was sweet, easy to peel and almost without seeds. It took his name. The clementine is now one of the best-selling citrus fruits in the world, and it was born in Algeria.

Oran kept giving. Yves Saint Laurent was born there, and in 1966 he put women in a tuxedo, Le Smoking, and changed what a woman could wear to a party. Oran also gave the world raï, the music that sounds like a wedding and a protest at the same time.

Mouloud Mammeri was born in Aït Yenni, a Kabyle village famous for its silver jewellery. Muslim and Jewish silversmiths made it there together, with blue and green enamel and red coral. Mammeri collected the poems of Si Mohand, the wandering Kabyle poet, and wrote a grammar of Tamazight in Tamazight itself. In March 1980, the authorities banned his lecture on old Kabyle poetry in Tizi Ouzou. Students marched, then whole towns. It became the Berber Spring. The fight that started that spring went on for decades, and in 2016 Tamazight became an official language of Algeria.

Constantine again. Claude Cohen-Tannoudji was born there in 1933, into a Jewish family that had lived in North Africa since it fled Spain centuries before. He became a physicist in Paris and learned to slow atoms down with laser light, until they were colder than anything in nature. In 1997 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for it. The most precise atomic clocks in the world are built on that work.

And the oldest dish on the list got its paperwork last. Couscous is Amazigh. In 2020, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Mauritania, countries that agree on very little, put it forward together, and UNESCO listed it as heritage of humanity. One steamed grain, shared by everyone.