Summary
Gurzil was a god of the ancient Libyan tribes of Tripolitania, made in wood and in metal and known in the form of a bull. Most of what we know of him comes from a Latin poem by the African poet Corippus, recited at Carthage around 550 CE: the Iohannis, in praise of the Byzantine general John Troglita, who fought the Moorish tribes of Africa from 546 to 548. In the poem the Laguatan are led by Ierna, who is also Gurzil's priest, and his people say that Gurzil's father is horned Ammon and his mother a cow.
In the poem his story is the story of an image carried into war. John sends word to the rebel leader that the carved Gurzil, under whose protection the tribesmen sing that victory will come to their camp, will be split, its wood scattered and thrown into the fire before everyone. Then the armies meet, and from the midst of the Moors a bull is let loose, prepared by Ierna as the first omen for his people through the power of "Ammonian Gurzil". It rages with its high horns between the lines, unsure where to break through, then cuts its way back towards its own camp; a Roman horseman rides after it and brings it down on the sand with a javelin under the shoulder. The war cries rise: the Moors call on Sinifere and Mastiman, then cry "Gurzil! Gurzil!", and the hollow rocks echo the name.
The Moorish tribes break, and Ierna flees carrying the images of Gurzil, hoping they will protect him; their weight slows his horse. The poet mocks him: who is this you worship, and what protection does he give his people, while you fall dead and he is broken by the enemy and the fire melts his shining metal? The Romans recover the old standards of their general Solomon and bring back Ierna's images as captives, and Ierna falls among thousands of the dead.
The idea the story turns on is that a tribe's strength lies in the image of its god. The priest makes the bull and lets it loose as the first omen, the fighters shout its name in the war cry, and the leader carries its image in defeat hoping to escape; when the bull is killed and the image melts, the leader falls with it. By descent Gurzil is the son of Ammon, the horned ram god of the Siwa oasis, and of a cow, so he belongs to the herds by which desert people live, and his strength is the strength of the bull in the herd. His name outlived the poem: a neo-Punic inscription from Tripolitania names Gurzil before Saturn, and in the eleventh century the geographer al-Bakrī describes a stone idol on a hill on the road from Tripoli to Waddan, which de Slane's translation spells Guerza, to which the surrounding Berber tribes still offered sacrifices, praying for healing and for increase of wealth.
We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Corippus writes Gurzil with four consonants, a voiced g like Cairene j, then r, z and l; modern Amazigh adds the initial a- that begins masculine nouns, Agurzil. These four consonants, in order, are those of Arabic qurzul, and q appears as g in the Juthoor correspondences, as it is pronounced in many Bedouin dialects. In Lisān al-ʿArab, qurzul is the hardy beast, the fetter, and the name of a famous pre-Islamic horse, said to be called after the fetter because it caught the wild game; Abū ʿUbayda says qurzul is the compact, powerfully built horse. On this reading Gurzil is the qurzul, the hardy, compact beast that nothing can stand against, which is what the text makes him: a bull loosed between the lines, raging with its horns until a horseman spears it. This is the second reading of the Amazigh Semitic-reading essay; its first is gharaza, to pierce, the god of goring and war, and horns do gore, but it reads only three of the four consonants.
Linguistic Root
| Form | Where it occurs |
|---|---|
| Gurzil | Corippus, Iohannis, sixth century |
| Gurzil | neo-Punic inscription from Tripolitania, before the name of Saturn |
| Guerza | al-Bakrī, eleventh century, as de Slane spelled it in French |
| Ghirza | ruin site in Libya that Camps thinks may preserve the name |
| Agurzil | modern Amazigh form used in the essay |
Lisān al-ʿArab gives: "qarzala a thing, he gathered it; qurzul, something a woman makes on top of her head like a tuft; qurzul, the hardy beast; qurzul, the fetter; and Qurzul, the name of a horse in the Jāhiliyya." Al-Zabīdī's Tāj al-ʿArūs says the horse was named after the fetter, as though it were a fetter on the wild game it overtook, and quotes Abū ʿUbayda: the fine, compact, powerfully built horse. The root turns on gathering and binding: a thing gathered up, a fetter that binds, a beast compact and tightly knit. The essay's "strong horseman" is not what the dictionaries say: they make qurzul the horse, not the rider.
The comparison keeps all four consonants in order. R, z and l stay as they are, and in the Juthoor correspondence table Arabic q answers g, as does gh. Latin writes the first letter G and cannot show whether its speakers said q, gh or a voiced g, so the first letter alone does not decide between qurzul and gharaza. What decides is that gharaza leaves the l unaccounted for, while qurzul reads the whole name. In Lane, gharaza is to stick a needle into a thing, to fix a stick in the ground, and gharz is a leather stirrup; the sense is inserting and piercing.
The Amazigh Semitic-reading essay grades the proposal "probable" and calls the root gh-r-z or q-r-z genuinely Semitic.
Key Mythic Narratives
Carcasan and the oracle of Ammon
After the Moors' defeat their chiefs gather around Carcasan as leader, and he goes to the land of the Marmaridae where horned Ammon dwells and asks for an answer from his oracle. A bull is struck on the forehead with a double axe, the prophetess seizes the drums and whirls around the altars until the god takes hold of her, and then she speaks: the Laguatan will overcome the Latins, and Carcasan will enter the citadel of Carthage through its open gates, carried high through the middle of the city with the people around him. The poet says Ammon deceived the tribes: Carcasan did enter Carthage, but it was his head that entered, raised on a pole.
Sacrifices by night
Before the last battle the Moors set up altars in their camp by night, drive their beasts around them, slaughter victims for Gurzil and for horned Ammon, and call on other gods, until the blood runs over the meadows.
Ghirza
In a note to his translation de Slane reports that the English traveller Smyth saw at Ghirza in 1817 tombs carved with warriors, hunters, camels and horses, and that the name of the idol al-Bakrī mentions recalls Corippus's lines on Gurzil.
Symbolic Reading
The Amazigh Semitic-reading essay reads Gurzil as the war god of the ancient Amazigh and sets him beside Roman Mars and Canaanite Resheph. The Latin text adds herds and omens to war: a bull loosed at the start of battle, victims from the flock by night, and descent from a ram and a cow.
Cross-Cultural Parallels
Gurzil's father is Ammon, whose oracle at Siwa the Greeks knew well and whom they showed with ram's horns. In Le Glay's view Baal Hammon at Carthage took the ram's horns from Ammon, so in Africa the three belong to one family of horned herd images, and the neo-Punic inscription names Gurzil before Saturn, Baal Hammon's Roman heir. Gurzil shares with Mars and Resheph the fighters' appeal for help in war, and differs from them in carrying no weapon in the text: he enters the battle as a bull loosed between the lines.