The Muslims who colonized Iberia were referred to as Moors because of their Maghreb origin (cf old Mauritania)...
That's not the whole truth. Invaders came from far away Arabia, but they were few. From the top of my head, a few thousands.
Roman era Hispania was said to reach a million population. Not sure if that number declined during the Goths' kingdom (that were also a minority themselves) so the Arabians had to recruit 100k warriors of Maghribi origin to help them subjugate the peninsula.
When I hear "Moorish" (I'm Spanish, not an English native speaker, so not sure how they've come with that word) I suspect they're translating "un invento del tiempo de los moros" that would be more precisely translated as "an invention from the time of muslim Spain".
If it was invented here, it was a Spanish invention, no matter what the religion or ethnic group of the author was. If it was brought from outside, it would be interesting to know if it came from Arabia or the Maghreb.
I disagree that "moro" is a bad word in Spanish. It's just descriptive of NW Africa. Those countries are Morocco and Mauritania in English and I don't see their inhabitants protesting the names.
There's a weird projection phenomenom around denomyns: some people attribute ill intentions to perfectly natural names that the addressed people find fine. In Spain, I've heard someone upset about calling "Chinese" to... Chinese people and suggested calling them "Asian" or something like that because "Chinese" is derogatory. WTF?
Ceuta and Melilla were under Berber rule a very short time but they never were Moroccan, which is an Arab state. In fact Europeans (Greeks, Romans, Vandals, etc) were in the coast of North Africa much earlier than the Arabs were.
Madeira was initially settled by the Portuguese in the 15th century, 200 years after the end of the Portuguese Reconquista, so it's quite a stretch to claim that the "levadas" were "established by the Moors", even if they initially brought the technology to Iberia.
That's pretty much why it's called "Portuguese", they pushed the moors before other parts of Hispania did it and decided to get their own kingdom started instead of waiting for all the other nobles to finish the work. If it wasn't for that Portugal might not even exist as a country in itself.
Well, it's not surprising given the racial makeup of the Iberian peninsula over history. (Celts, Romans, Vandals, North Africans) and then sending them to America to mix with native Indian populations and imported Africans.
Wow there is a lot misinformation around here. You mention Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, but you forget to mention the the indigenous population of North Africa, the Berbers. We're still here people we've been here since before the Phoenicians and Romans. Northwest africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) is to this day majority berber (amazigh). Romans occupied north Africa, Byzantines, Vandals, Arabs and Turks, and eventually the French, but there was not a population replacement. Recent genetic population studies of the Maghreb have proved this (try google). Romanization and then eventually Arabization was a cultural process. The majority population of North Africa is still Berber and about 40-50% continue to speak Berber.
These results are not a surprise as North African kingdoms were very well integrated into the Roman and Byzantine empires. The Romans used to call us the Numidians in the east (eastern Algeria) and the Mauri in the west (west of Algiers to Morocco). The word Moor is derived from Mauri.. The daughter of queen Cleopatra and Mark Antony was married to one of our kings (Juba). Also the oldest medieval skeleton recovered in the south of france is of berber stock, there was even a Roman emperor of North African origin (Septimius Severus).
Anyway, we didn't go anywhere, we're still here, but the way we identify has changed for some of us. Just as the Italians no longer call themselves Romans.
Social moors would be either an open field for gathering or friendly Muslims from the Mediterranean region about 800 years ago. You might mean ‘mores’.
It's actually not very clear what North Africans would have looked like prior to the early Muslim conquests of the 600s. The entire Mediterranean-North African-Middle Eastern region has been conquered and reconquered so many times that trying to pin down the population to an ethnic category is (even more) difficult.
In the Iberian Peninsula we also had a migration from the South to the North with the Muslim conquest that started in 711, but apparently they didn't leave that big of a genetic legacy.
That reminds of the legend of the horsemen statue on the island of Corvo in the Azores. Purportedly the statue looked to be dressed in a Moorish style.
Besides that, there's plenty of evidence of pre-Portuguese presence in the Azores. There are theories that everyone from the Phoenicians to the Greeks to the Chinese discovered the island before Portugal did.
And according to a mainstream theory of human migration, and your perspective that people who live in Africa but descended from Phoenicians aren't "African", we're all Africans, because we are all African colonists of the entire world.
Reminds me of the Irish Chronicles that say the people came from Galicia in northern Spain, before that from northern Africa (possibly Phoenicians), all the way back to Scythia (the horse archers who smoked weed in tents). Seems like a stretch but I think there have been some DNA studies that confirm parts of it, but my understanding is the medieval monks who compiled the stories were trying to claim a link to the Mediterranean/holy land in order to connect their identities to the Bible. Maybe they were mixing up multiple different migrations to fit the narrative. I'm curious about what real historians/scientists think about it.
Not Arabs (and not 100% sure about berbers) since Arabs didn’t arrive until the Arab invasions in the 7-800s AD. Peoples idea about the northern Middle East and North Africa is relatively skewed by modern day demographics. This is why people poke fun at pictures of Jesus for not being Arab or black despite the fact he was likely to look similar to Syrians etc or other groups native to the region. They are projecting the modern day into the past.
So tell me, why was it that Europe was nearly conquered by the Arabs and a lot of it occupied for several centuries. They got to the Loire in France around 730 CE. So that was half of France.
The last Arabs were finally ejected from Spain in 1492, only 500 years ago. They'd been there for 800 years.
The whole of the North African coast, thousands of miles, and South to the Equator, is still held by Arabs after the conquests of around 700 CE, so roughly 1300 years ago.
That's not the whole truth. Invaders came from far away Arabia, but they were few. From the top of my head, a few thousands.
Roman era Hispania was said to reach a million population. Not sure if that number declined during the Goths' kingdom (that were also a minority themselves) so the Arabians had to recruit 100k warriors of Maghribi origin to help them subjugate the peninsula.
When I hear "Moorish" (I'm Spanish, not an English native speaker, so not sure how they've come with that word) I suspect they're translating "un invento del tiempo de los moros" that would be more precisely translated as "an invention from the time of muslim Spain".
If it was invented here, it was a Spanish invention, no matter what the religion or ethnic group of the author was. If it was brought from outside, it would be interesting to know if it came from Arabia or the Maghreb.
I disagree that "moro" is a bad word in Spanish. It's just descriptive of NW Africa. Those countries are Morocco and Mauritania in English and I don't see their inhabitants protesting the names.
There's a weird projection phenomenom around denomyns: some people attribute ill intentions to perfectly natural names that the addressed people find fine. In Spain, I've heard someone upset about calling "Chinese" to... Chinese people and suggested calling them "Asian" or something like that because "Chinese" is derogatory. WTF?
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