Idines
Coordinates: 25 ° 15 ′ 7 ″ N , 10 ° 13 ′ 0 ″ E
Idinen is the name of a 1,100 m high rock massif in the Sahara (southwestern Libya ) at the foothills of the Tassili n'Ajjer .
The Idinen belongs to the smaller mountain massifs of the southern Libyan province of Fezzan next to the Tadrart Akakus . The closest town is the old caravan town of Ghat , about 40 km away . From a distance, the silhouette of Idinen towering from the plateau looks like a ruined castle with towers and battlements. The Tuareg nomads call the mountain with the nickname "Tadrart-n-Kel Eru" (Arabic: Jebel al-J-Jenun), ie "Ghost Mountain", or "Bordj-n-Kel Eru" (Arabic: Qasr al-J-Jenun ), so "ghost castle". According to tradition, the rock massif is the seat of ghosts and revenants whose voices can be heard in the storm. The Austrian ethnologist Kurt Jaritz, who visited the mountain range around 1955, believes that the Arabic name must be "qahaf ğnûn (cave of madness)", which is unlikely, while the name "Geisterburg" was used by other visitors (Barth, Hachette, etc.) ) is confirmed.
The Tuareg have traditionally avoided the massif. According to legend, the Idinen and the opposite Tadrart Akakus are enemies and fight each other at night. Those who go into the mountain lose their life or only reappear after many years because the ghosts or revenants hold on to them for so long. When the German Africa explorer Heinrich Barth came within sight of the rocks in 1850 , he was told that the souls of the people who had populated the country before the Muslim Tuareg lived in the rocks . The archaeologically trained Barth had already found inscriptions in Tifinagh , the ancient script of the Tuareg, several times in the rock massifs of the country and also discovered rock art - the first ever to be described in Africa and interpreted in terms of their importance for researching the history of the continent . Hoping to find further traces of early settlement in the Idinen massif, for example by the Berber people of the Garamanten , Barth went there against the advice of his companions and got lost without finding the hoped-for graves or rock paintings. He would have died of thirst if a brave Targi hadn't dared to venture into the rock massif to save the Christian. Today the Idinen is only a stopover for travelers to the Sahara on the way to the neighboring Tadrart Akakus , one of the most important collections of prehistoric rock art . The local legends about prehistoric gods and spirits in the Idinen massif were recorded in the 1950s by the French officer Hachette, who commanded a division of local cavalry soldiers in the neighboring southern Algerian part of the Adscher Mountains, and processed and scientifically evaluated by the Austrian ethnologist Kurt Jaritz .
literature
- Heinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa. Gotha 1857-58, vol. 1.
(Say about the idinen)
- Kurt Jaritz, "Legends of the Gods from Mount Idinen in the Sahara", Wiener Völkerkundliche Mitteilungen NF 3 (1960), 41–50.
- Es-Saraoui (pseud. For Lt. Hachette), "Les oasis légendaires", Bulletin de Liaison Saharienne 5.16 (1954), 54-59.
