By Richard L. Smith
Source : Journal of World History, 14.4 (2003)
Piecing together the ethnic history of the ancient world in a systematic way is an impossible mission. One particularly perplexing problem is the fate of groups that lived beyond the bounds of city and empire: hundreds of them come and go in the historical record. We think we know what happened to a few, such as the Franks and the Angles and Saxons. Many others, however, simply disappear from the historical record, presumably the victims of larger or more martial groups, although the disappearance of an entity was more likely to have meant absorption or fragmentation than complete annihilation.1 Even prominent or notorious peoples came to mysterious ends: the Scythians fade away while the Huns lose their storied warlord and make a precipitous exit. What about the people the Greeks called "Libyans," and, in particular, those who lived in the Sahara?2 Were the Libyans, described by Herodotus in the fifth century B.C.E., the same people Ibn Khaldun wrote about under the name "Sanhaja" almost two thousand years later? Ethnic history rarely provides straight yes and no answers.
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By David M. Hart
Source : The Journal of North African Studies
Volume 5,Issue 1, Spring 2000 , pp. 121 - 146.
Abstract
The issue is to determine just how much of, and to what degree, Ibn Khaldun's Berber genealogies, as well as those culled by his Arab historian predecessors, as they emerge in the de Slane translation of the Histoire des Berberes, have stood the test of time: for in most cases those groups whose names are still extant represent at present much smaller units which are often far removed spatially from their original and medieval namesakes. There is, in addition, the possibility that the latter simply appropriated, for whatever the reason, the name of the former, given the lack of any demonstrable genealogical or filiative connection between the medieval group and its modern namesake or namesakes as well as the often considerable spatial distance between them.
By Abdelmajid Hannoum
History and Theory 42 (1), 61–81, 2003.
Abstract
Despite the increasing interest in translation in the last two decades, there has been no investigation of the translation of historiography and its transformation from one language to another. This article takes as a case study the translation into French of Ibn Khaldûn, the fourteenth–century North African historian. It considers specifically the translation done by William de Slane in the context of the colonization of Algeria. The Histoire des Berbères, the French narrative of Ibn Khaldûn that relates to the history of Arabs and Berbers in the Maghreb, has become since then the source of French knowledge of North Africa. It is upon that French narrative that colonial and post–colonial historians have constructed their knowledge of North Africa, of Arabs, and of Berbers. The article shows how a portion of the writing of Ibn Khaldûn was translated and transformed in the process in such a way as to become a French narrative with colonial categories specific to the nineteenth century. Using a semiotic approach and analyzing both the French text and its original, the article shows how colonialism introduced what Castoriadis calls an "imaginary" by transforming local knowledge and converting it into colonial knowledge. In showing this the essay reveals that not only is translation not the transmission of a message from one language to another, it is indeed the production of a new text. For translation is itself the product of an imaginary, a creation–in Ricoeur's words, a "restructuring of semantic fields."
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