Tafukt

Summary

Tafukt is the sun in Amazigh, a feminine noun, as the sun is feminine in Arabic. The oldest account of its worship is in Herodotus, in the fifth century BCE: the nomadic Libyans cut a piece from the victim's ear as first-fruits and throw it over the house, then wring the victim's neck; they sacrifice to no gods but the sun and moon, and this is the custom of all Libyans, except those around Lake Tritonis, who sacrifice chiefly to Athena and then to Triton and Poseidon. Herodotus 4.188. He also tells of a people of inner Libya, the Atarantes, who, when the sun is high, curse it and revile it foully, because its burning heat afflicts their people and their land. Herodotus 4.184. Cicero tells that when Scipio came to Masinissa, king of Numidia, the old man embraced him and wept, then looked up to the sky and said: I thank you, highest Sun, and you other heavenly ones, that before I leave this life I see Cornelius Scipio in my kingdom and under my roof.

In the tales of the Tuareg of Aïr the sun, tefukt, and the moon, tellit, are both women, differing not in gender but in age and temper: the moon is older, calm, steady and generous; the sun is hurried, restless and domineering, walks before dawn at the hour of the raid, and is never late, while the moon is often late, busy with her work. When the moon is invisible at the end of the month the Kel Ahaggar say that the sun has caught the moon, stopped her and made her stay stopped, while the sun goes on alone. In the tale Ayur and Tayurt a solar figure, Janégerfaden, is tied to gold that must shine and to an oil that burns; the land burned because of the bad oil, and the moon stood as a shield between people and the fire.

Among the Moroccan village customs collected by Laoust, Tachelhit calls sunstroke tafukt too, as if the sun itself had entered the head. The sufferer goes to someone who knows how to remove it and says: by God, take the sun out of me, my head will burst. The healer sits him down, takes off his turban, presses his skull with both hands to drive the sun to the forehead, runs his thumbs from the temples to the middle of the forehead until the skin between the brows turns red, pinches it until blood comes, cracks the neck and the ears, spits "tef, tef, tef", and says: get up, you are cured. If there is no sun in him, no redness appears. On 24 June, the summer solstice, they celebrate a feast called the ansert. When a fine rain falls from a sunny sky and a rainbow forms, they say a jackal is getting married somewhere and the sky is celebrating his wedding; the rainbow is also called "the bride of the rain", tislit unzar, the bride of Anzar. Laoust, Mots et choses berbères, pp. 169–170, 187 and 189.

The idea running through these accounts is that the sun is needed and feared. The nomads sacrifice to it, the king thanks it, and the farming calendar follows it; but when it rises high it burns people and land, so the Atarantes curse it, the healer drives it out of the sufferer's head, and the Tuareg tale makes it the hurried burner from whom the moon protects people. The Amazigh rereading essay reads the Amazigh calendar as a solar, Julian one, more exact for farming than a lunar calendar, so that for it the sun keeps the time of ploughing and harvest, while the moon, Ayyur, keeps the months.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Tafukt is a feminine noun enclosed by t at both ends, as in tislit, "bride". What remains is fuk. Laoust says this belongs to an Amazigh root F, which gives words for light, fire and morning, among them tifawt, "light", afa, "fire" in some dialects, and fu, "to shine, to dawn". We read fuk from Arabic fawq, as a reading proposed on the method: f is f, w is the vowel u, and q becomes k. Lane gives "fāqahum: he was above them, higher than them" and fawq as the contrary of taḥt, below, the place that is above. On this reading Tafukt is the one above, which is just what the Atarantes make her when they curse her at her height. The same root F gives afa, "hill, mound", in the Sous, and Laoust derives it either from f, fell, "on, above", or from fire, since the solstice fires were once lit on the heights; so Laoust himself finds height and fire in this root. Fire is how the Amazigh Semitic-reading essay reads tafat, light: from fuʾād, the heart, and tafaʾʾud, which Lane glosses as tawaqqud, blazing. So the Amazigh sun holds both senses: height and blaze.

Linguistic Root

Laoust says that tafukt comes from the root F, not from Latin focus, "hearth", and that the stem fu was lengthened by a k that slipped in between the u and the final t, as often happens in Rif, the k then varying between dialects into sh, y or a vowel. He reports René Basset's view that the sense "sun" is secondary in the F words, and that the original name of the sun is the one kept in Kabyle, iṭij, from which the plain of the Mitidja south of Algiers, "the sunny one", takes its name. Kabyle also says aggur n yiṭṭij, "disc of the sun", as Chaker notes.

Lane gives, under f-w-q: "fāqahum: he was above them, or superior to them, or surpassed them", "fuqtu fulānan: I became better than such a one, and higher, as though above him in station", and fawq, "the contrary of taḥt: the location that is above". The sound match: f is f; the w of fawq becomes a long u, as it does in the Arabic dialects themselves; and q becomes k, which the Juthoor laws give as q, k, c or g. From f and q also comes Lane's ufuq, the side of the sky and earth where light appears and disappears, the road by which the sun rises and sets. What remains against the reading is that Laoust takes the k as an added letter, not a root letter, in which case the q of fawq is left with nothing to answer, and that the essay itself calls tafukt native Amazigh with no clear link.

Lane gives, under f-ʾ-d: "tafaʾʾada: it burned, blazed", "iftaʾadū: they lighted a fire for roasting", "faʾīd: fire", "faʾada al-khubza: he put the bread into the hot ashes and baked it", and "fuʾād: the heart, so called because of its tafaʾʾud, its ardour". This is how the essay reads tafat, light: the sun is the heart of the world that warms it from within. The essay sets T-F-T against F-ʾ-D; the two ts of tafat are the feminine marker, so only the f of the Amazigh word remains, the glottal stop dropping as it often does in transmission.

Symbolic Reading

The Amazigh rereading essay reads Amazigh myths as encoding the desert environment, and makes the Amazigh calendar Julian, following the sun, because it is more exact for farming. In the accounts themselves the sun goes with heat and thirst: the Atarantes curse it because it burns their land, the healer drives it from the sufferer's head, and the Tuareg make it the hurried burner. The moon in the same accounts goes with water, milk and rain. So the accounts set sun and moon at two ends, as desert people set heat and water.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Herodotus writes the sun and moon to whom the Libyans sacrifice with the Greek words for sun and moon, which are the names of Helios and Selene, so the Amazigh sun reached the oldest book about it under a Greek name. Helios is the Greek witness who sees everything; for the Atarantes Tafukt is the heat that is cursed. The sun is feminine in Amazigh, as Ugaritic Shapsh is a woman who knows the road between the living and the dead, and as Amaterasu is in Japan; in the Tuareg tale the sun catches the moon at the end of the month and stops her, as Amaterasu parted from her brother the moon by a day and a night. In Egypt Ra sends his Eye against people and it kills them in the desert until he turns it back; in Libya the Atarantes curse the sun because it burns them. In both a sun harms people; they part in that Ra punishes humankind, while the Atarantes are the ones angry with the sun. The Amazigh Semitic-reading essay reads the name of Baal Hammon at Carthage from ḥamm, the hot, solar one, and on his page that reading stays as a reading of the incense stand before him.

Villagers celebrate the summer solstice on 24 June, and ploughing begins by the solar calendar, part of the agricultural calendar.