Augustus Henry Keane

“ They are also intelligent, crossing the wilderness by a sort of instinct quite unintelligible to the stranger, and in all ordinary transactions they display surprising tact and shrewdness. The tribal organization embraces dardai or headmen, maina or nobles, and the common folk, while the unwritten law of custom rules supreme over all classes. The women, who are orderly and industrious, are well treated, and the polygamy allowed by the law is little practised. ”

“ There can be no doubt that the Teda, or true Tibbu, probably identical with the Tedamansii, a branch of the Garamantes, placed by Ptolemy south of the Samamycii in Tripolitana, [4] are physically a Hamitic, not a Negro people, closely resembling their western Tuareg neighbours. They are a pure homogeneous race, who have for ages undergone no perceptible change in their rocky homes, and who are still distinguished by the regular features, long black ringletty hair, haughty bearing, and fierce expression common to so many of the Berber and other Hamitic peoples. ”

“ Room having thus been found for other linguistic families, the Tedaga of Tibesti may be readily explained as an independent evolution from a primeval Tibbu-Berber germ, analogous to other linguistic evolutions in other isolated or inaccessible highland regions, such as the Caucasus, the Pyrenees, and the Anahuac tableland. The common germ, essentially evanescent in its nature, has long since perished, or can no longer be detected, and the Tibbu and Berber languages stand side by side as now fundamentally distinct, while the two races still remain physically one. ”