Ayyur

Summary

Ayyur is the moon in Amazigh, and also the month, because a month begins with the new crescent. It is the most widespread name of the moon across the Amazigh languages: ayyur and ayur in most of the Maghreb, aggur in Kabyle, where the doubled y regularly becomes a doubled g, and éôr among the Tuareg. Another word, taziri, names moonlight and the full moon.

The oldest account of moon worship among the people of the land is Herodotus's statement that all Libyans sacrifice to no gods but the sun and moon, except those around Lake Tritonis. Herodotus 4.188. At Guechguech in Numidia a rock inscription names a god IERU, and above it is carved a figure whose head is surrounded by rays, like that of a star god; Chaker notes that the name resembles ayyur without its initial vowel, (y)yur.

Villagers greet the crescent when it appears. Among the Ida Oukensous of Morocco they say: here is the moon, here is the moon! We bear witness that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is his prophet. O moon, may God make this month blessed for us. O moon, may God give us health in your days. O moon, may we find plenty and peace in them. When the crescent appears they say "the moon is born", and from that birth the Tuareg call the month tallit. Laoust, Mots et choses berbères, p. 185. In the Ahaggar the Tuareg fire their guns at the new month and pray to God for victory over their enemies and protection in this world and the next, saying: may God make you a blessed month; then they say: we throw you a dry stalk, send us back a green one, and throw a stalk toward the moon.

The Tuareg of Aïr tell the tale of Ayur and Tayurt. Ayur, the crescent, and his sister Tayurt are wonder-children hatched from two eggs that sprang from the wounded knee of a lonely shepherd and hatched in the folds of the tent; they grew up helping the shepherd keep his house. The shepherd then married a woman whose daughter was jealous of the beautiful Tayurt, and the stepmother schemed until the shepherd agreed to sacrifice Tayurt; her brother warned her and they fled together. Later another rival, Janégerfaden, imprisoned Tayurt at the bottom of a pool, her long hair pinned under a rock. While Tayurt was gone the camels could not be milked, and the camp lost its light and its milk together. Her brother found her, but no one could split the rock, until a weak little lamb freed her, having got its strength from sucking its mother's milk. Then Tayurt became tellit, the great kindly moon who keeps the world's course in order, and her husband became Amaka, "the firebrand", whom no one but she can see.

The idea running through these accounts is that the moon keeps the time and whatever flows in it. Its name is the month, its appearance at the start of the month is greeted with prayers for health and plenty, and its absence in the tale is the absence of light and milk. Claudot-Hawad writes that among the Tuareg of Aïr the moon goes with the regularity of every flow, time, water, milk and menstrual blood, and that they call the full moon tekkaṛ, "she is pregnant". Chaker writes that among the northern Amazigh the moon goes with fertility, the inside of the house, womanhood and moisture: Kabyle compares a beautiful woman to the moon, and tales call to it, Ziri, ziri, ma, yemma, "moon, moon, mother, O mother!" At Inteketto, when people see a halo round the moon they say: the moon is building her house, it is going to rain; the moon brings Anzar. Laoust, p. 188.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The a at the start of ayyur is the vowel with which masculine nouns begin in Amazigh, as in Anzar. What remains is yyur, y and r. The Amazigh Semitic-reading essay sets ayyur beside Hebrew yārēaḥ, "moon", and says: y and r are shared; this is kinship. In Ugaritic the word is yrḫ, which means both moon and month, as ayyur does, and its y is an old w, so it is Arabic warrakha and arrakha, "to write the date on a document", as the Yarikh page reads it. On this reading Ayyur is the moon by which months are dated, which is what the people of the land do when they call the month by its name and begin it by greeting the crescent.

Linguistic Root

Chaker holds that the doubled y in Kabyle and Tachelhit, the stable a in the annexed form wayyur, and the length of one vowel show that the root seen today, y and r, is the remnant of an older three-consonant root, and that the u stable across all the dialects, with the Ghadames forms, points to w as the third, giving an original root YRW. He holds that the first sense of yur was the full disc of a heavenly body, since Kabyle says aggur n tziri for the full moon and aggur n yiṭṭij for the disc of the sun.

Lane gives, under ʾ-r-kh: "arrakha al-kitāb and warrakhahu: he dated the writing, inscribed it with the time when it was written, the w being a substitute for the glottal stop", and records that some called taʾrīkh a borrowing taken by the Muslims from the people of the Book, adding in brackets Hebrew yārēaḥ, "moon", and yeraḥ, "month", while others called it Arabic. The Yarikh page has settled this: Ugaritic ḫ answers Arabic kh letter for letter, as in Akkadian warḫu, so the word belongs to the old family, and it is Hebrew that merged kh and ḥ into one letter. The match in ayyur runs like this: the doubled y answers the y of Ugaritic and Hebrew, which is w in Arabic warrakha, and r is r. What remains against it is that the third letter is kh in Semitic, while Chaker reconstructs it as w in early Amazigh, so the two names meet in their first two letters and part in the third.

The same essay reads Yennayer as yan, "one", and ayyur, "the first month". The Yennayer page follows the Encyclopédie berbère in deriving it from the Latin month Ianuarius, because all the Amazigh month names are Latin, as the essay's own table shows. The month names are Latin, but the word for month itself is ayyur: the months of both calendars, the Hijri one for worship and the Julian one for farming, are called iyirn, plural of ayyur, "months of the earth" and "months of the sky".

Symbolic Reading

The Amazigh rereading essay says that the Amazigh calendar is Julian, following the sun, and more exact for farming than a lunar one; for it the moon keeps the time of months and worship, not of ploughing. In the accounts themselves the moon stands opposite the sun: among the Tuareg the sun is hurried and burning, the moon calm, bringing milk and light and shielding people from the fire, and the halo round the moon is a sign of rain. Claudot-Hawad writes that in Aïr the moon is the image of a mother: she leans over the world as a mother over her baby, looks into everything down to the bottom of the wells, ripens whatever is latent and pushes it on to its next stage; for her this is the image of nomad life, in which nothing stays in place.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The Ugaritic word yrḫ is the name of Yarikh, the moon, and also the month, just as ayyur is moon and month, and the Amazigh Semitic-reading essay reads the two words from one origin. On the Ugaritic tablets Yarikh marries Nikkal and pays her bride-price on the scales; among the Tuareg of Aïr the moon has a husband called Amaka, "the firebrand". Nanna, the moon of Sumer, travels to his father at Nippur with the produce of Ur and comes home with carp in the river and barley in the field for his city; Amazigh villagers ask the crescent that its month be a month of health and plenty, and the Tuareg throw it a dry stalk to be sent back green. In both the moon is asked for provision; they part in that Nanna asks it of his father, while the Amazigh moon is the one asked. In Japan Amaterasu refused to see her brother Tsukuyomi, the moon, after he killed the food kami, so sun and moon parted by a day and a night; among the Tuareg the sun catches the moon at the end of the month, stops her, and goes on alone.

Greeting the crescent at the start of the month, and dividing the year into months of the earth and months of the sky, belong to the agricultural calendar. The Amazigh Semitic-reading essay reads Yennayer from yan and ayyur, and the Tafukt page sets the moon opposite the sun.