Lake Tritonis - Chott el-Djerid

The Pugnacious Girls from Lake Tritonis

--- About 2500 years ago ---

The famous Greek historian Herodotus (484 – 425 BC) provides the following account about the people at Lake Tritonis:

They celebrate a yearly festival of Athena, where their maidens are separated into two bands and fight each other with stones and sticks, thus (they say) honoring in the way of their ancestors that native goddess whom we call Athena. Maidens who die of their wounds are called false virgins. Before the girls are set fighting, the whole people choose the fairest maid, and arm her with a Corinthian helmet and Greek panoply, to be then mounted on a chariot and drawn all along the lake shore.

The intercourse of men and women there is promiscuous; they do not cohabit but have intercourse like cattle. When a woman’s child is well grown, the men assemble within three months and the child is adjudged to be that man’s whom it is most like.

Next to the Maxyes of Libya are the Zauekes, whose women drive their chariots to war.

=> The well-marked Paths in Chott el-Djerid

These two letters of the ancient Tuareg script (Libyco-Berber script) are vocalized »AMAZA«.
This word means »Motherly Love« in the language of the Tuareg.