Tinge

Summary

In the legend Tinge is a woman before she is a city: the wife of the Libyan giant Antaeus, after whom the city on the strait at the far west of North Africa was named, which the Greeks wrote Τίγγις, Tingis, and the Romans Tingi: Tangier.

Plutarch, in his life of the Roman general Sertorius, reports what the people of Tangier tell: when Antaeus died his wife Τίγγη, Tinge, lay with Heracles and bore him Sophax, who became king of the country and founded a city that he named after his mother. Sophax had a son, Diodorus, to whom many Libyan peoples became subject, because he had a Greek army of Olbians and Mycenaeans whom Heracles had settled there. Plutarch says the tale should be put down to a wish to please Juba, king of Mauretania and the most devoted to history of all kings, whose ancestors were said to descend from Sophax and Diodorus. In the same passage Sertorius opens the tomb the natives say is Antaeus's, finds a body sixty cubits long, fills it in again and honours it.

Pliny says that Tingi was founded by Antaeus and later made a Roman colony by the emperor Claudius. The city's coins of the second and first centuries BCE show a bearded head that numismatists take for Baal-Melqart, and on the other side two ears of wheat joined by a tendril, with the city's name beside them in late Punic letters, TNGʾ.

The idea the tale turns on is that the city takes its descent from the land and from the stranger together. Tinge is the wife of the land's first owner, Antaeus, son of Earth; she then bears a son to Heracles, the stranger who killed him, and from her comes the founding king, while the city carries her own name. So the founder unites in his descent the people of the country and the newcomers, and the Greek army with which his son rules the tribes comes from men his father settled. The historian Gabriel Camps thinks Plutarch took the tale from Juba II and tells it ironically, and that the name Sophax is that of Syphax, king of the Masaesyli of western Numidia, who never ruled the land of Tangier; he thinks it more likely a divine name, as such names were common among the Numidians.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method. The essay on trade routes says the Arabic name Ṭanja comes from Tingi, but does not read its meaning. The city's coins write it TNGʾ: t, n, g, then the glottal stop ʾ. We read the opening t as the mark of the feminine that begins Amazigh feminine nouns, as in Tafukt and Tanit, which suits a woman after whom the city is named. That leaves n-g and the final ʾ; if the ʾ is an ʿ weakened in speech, we read the consonants n-j-ʿ. In Lane, intajaʿa is to seek herbage where it grows, nujʿah the seeking of herbage, muntajaʿ the place where herbage is sought, and najaʿa aṭ-ṭaʿām is said of food that did a man good. On this reading Tinge is "the place sought for provision", which is what her coins show: two ears of wheat beside her name. A second reading takes the Punic consonants t-n-ʾ as they stand: in Lane tanaʾa bi-l-balad is to settle and abide in a town, and tāniʾ the resident, also the wealthy man; Tinge would be the woman who stayed on the land after her husband died, but this reading leaves the g unaccounted for.

Linguistic Root

Greek writes the nasal and g together as γγ, ng, so the three consonants t-n-g are constant in every form, and the s of Τίγγις is the nominative ending. Latin and Greek write g and cannot show whether its speakers said j, q, gh or a voiced g, as is noted on the Gurzil page. In the Juthoor table g answers j, q and gh, and we read it as j in najaʿa. The Arabs kept no meaning for the word: al-Ṣāḥib ibn ʿAbbād says Ṭanja is a place, al-Fattanī says it is a town on the shore of the western sea, while ṭunūj in Lisān al-ʿArab are quires of paper, and in another lexicon kinds or sorts, unrelated to the city's name.

Sophax we read, as a reading proposed on the method, from Σόφαξ: ξ is k plus s, and the s is the nominative ending, leaving s-f-k. Arabic ṣ becomes Greek σ and q becomes κ, so we read ṣafq. In Lane, ṣafaqa yadahu bi-l-bayʿah is to strike one's hand on another's hand to ratify a sale or a covenant of allegiance, and ṣafqah is the contract itself. On this reading Sophax is the man of the hand-clasp, the king to whom allegiance is given by the hand, which is what the story makes him: a king to whose son the tribes of Libya submit.

The limit of both readings is that Amazigh feminine nouns take a t at the end as well as at the start, as in Tafukt, and Tingi has no final t; and the value of the glottal stop at the end of the Punic name is not established: it may be a weakened ʿ, or an original glottal stop, or a suffix.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Carthage has the story of another city founded by a woman, Elissa, whom the Romans call Dido, who came from Tyre; Justin tells how she bought from the natives as much land as an ox-hide would cover, cut it into thongs and encircled a wide tract, a story told on the page of Gefjon, who ploughs a land out of Sweden with her oxen. At Tangier the god on the coins is Baal Melqart, the god of Tyre whom the Greeks called Heracles, so the stranger by whom Tinge bears her king is, in this picture, the god of the Phoenician sailors who built the coastal towns.