Ayyur

Also Known As: the ordinary Berber word for the moon and the lunar month; ayur in the Sous and among the Zemmour, iur in the Rif, éôr or ayor in the Tuareg of the Ahaggar; possibly the Ieru of a Roman-era dedication near Constantine
Region/Culture: North Africa
Mythos: Berber/Amazigh Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Ayyur is the moon itself, the light whose birth each month opens the Berber lunar calendar and whose house, in one Moroccan saying, foretells rain.
Role in Mythos: Ayyur stands for the lunar half of the sun-and-moon cult that Herodotus credited to all the Libyans, a worship known in outline but never given a story.
Relation to Humans: Ancient nomads sacrificed animals to the moon, and Berbers at the time of the Arab conquest were still remembered as worshippers of the sun and the moon. In the early twentieth century Moroccan villagers still greeted the new crescent aloud and asked it, under a Muslim formula, for a blessed month, good health and plenty.

Somebody sees it first: a paring of pale light low over the hills at dusk, so thin it could be a scratch on the sky. “Han ayur! Han ayur!” There is the moon, there is the moon. Among the Ida Oukensous of Morocco, as Émile Laoust recorded them in the years before 1920, the next words were the Muslim profession of faith, and only after that did the speaker turn back to the sliver of silver and talk to it directly. O moon, may God make this month blessed for us. O moon, may God give us health through your days. O moon, may we find plenty and peace in you.

That greeting is the most vivid thing anyone has written down about Ayyur, and it holds the whole puzzle in a single breath. Ayyur is simply the Berber word for the moon. Laoust collected it as ayur in the Sous, among the Zemmour and the Ait Ndir, and as iur in the Rif and among the Beni Iznassen. Charles de Foucauld, compiling his Tuareg dictionary in the Ahaggar, wrote the same word as éôr, a masculine noun meaning moon and nothing grander. The word names the month as well, because the Berber month was lunar. When the first crescent showed, people said that the moon was being born, and the Tuareg called a month tallit, a birth. The god and the object in the sky share one name. Whether there was ever a distinct god behind that name, in the way a Selene stood behind the Greek word for the moon, is a question the record only half answers.

The oldest evidence is a short passage of Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE about the nomads who lived between Egypt and Lake Tritonis. Their sacrifice was quick. They cut a piece from the animal’s ear as a first offering and threw it over the dwelling, then twisted the beast’s neck. Herodotus says they sacrificed only to the sun and the moon, and that all the Libyans did the same, though the people around Lake Tritonis gave their offerings chiefly to the goddess the Greeks called Athena. He names neither god. Nearly two thousand years later the historian Ibn Khaldun, writing in the fourteenth century, remembered that some Berbers at the time of the Arab conquest had been worshippers of the sun and the moon. He does not name the moon either.

The name Ayyur as a god’s name is therefore a modern inference from the language, and it is worth saying who made it. In 1910 René Basset, director of the École supérieure des lettres in Algiers, gathered what was known of Berber religion and argued that because the moon is masculine in Berber, it could hardly have been pictured as a goddess. He thought the best candidate for the god’s name in stone was a suggestion by G. Mercier in a study of the Libyan divinities: that the enigmatic Ieru, honoured with the title Augustus in a Latin inscription from the Guechgach, sixteen kilometres from Constantine, was Ayyur written by a Latin hand. That single word is the only proposed record of the name in antiquity, and it is a hypothesis. Stéphane Gsell, the great historian of ancient North Africa, was cooler still in 1927. Beyond Herodotus, he wrote, there was hardly any certain testimony to a truly native cult of the two heavenly bodies, and the moon held very little place in the folk rites that still survived.

Even the god’s sex is disputed. Basset leaned on grammar to make the moon male. Gsell, reading the same Herodotus, wrote of the moon as a goddess for all the Libyans. The language itself refuses to settle it: in one Moroccan usage Laoust noted that the masculine ayur meant the first quarter, while the feminine form tayurt meant the full moon. Crescents appear carved above a great many Roman-era inscriptions in North Africa, one of them in Libyan and Phoenician letters, but Basset judged that a sign which had once marked a moon cult had most likely become decoration. Gsell offered a more interesting suggestion: that Tanit, the great goddess of Carthage, may have become a lunar deity in Africa by borrowing from the beliefs of the people already living there.

No myth of Ayyur survives. There is no birth story, no consort, no quarrel with the sun, no image in any temple. What survives instead is the moon as people lived under it. In Laoust’s notes the moon is read as weather: a saying from the Inteketto runs that the moon is building its house, so rain is coming. In the Ahaggar, Foucauld recorded that the members of the small Ikadeien tribe were nicknamed the sons of the moon. Laoust also printed, without a translation, a few short Tachelhit texts about the moon: one is headed as a tale of the moon’s spots, and in another, so far as the Tachelhit can be followed, a woman calls the moon down until it drops, groaning like a camel, into a bowl of water.

Those scraps give Ayyur the only powers the record allows. The moon keeps time, because its birth opens every month. It announces rain, which in a dry country is no small office. It can be asked for blessing, health and abundance at the start of each new cycle, and its light marks the cool of the evening when the heat of the day has finally gone out of the stone. Its weaknesses are written into the same sources. A woman who knows the words can pull it out of the sky and into a bowl. The great faith that came from Arabia did not abolish the greeting to the new moon but folded it inside the profession of faith, so that the moon is thanked and God is credited. And the carved crescent, once perhaps a prayer, ended its life as an ornament on Roman-era stones.

What remains is a word that people have never stopped saying. Each month the thin light comes back over the ridge, and somebody, somewhere between the Rif and the Ahaggar, still calls it by the name the nomads of Herodotus may have used when they threw the ear over the house.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ayyur in Berber mythology?

Ayyur is the moon in Berber (Amazigh) tradition, and the word ayyur is also the ordinary Berber word for the moon and for a lunar month. Herodotus recorded that the ancient Libyans sacrificed to the sun and the moon, so a lunar cult is attested, but no ancient writer gives the moon god a name. Calling that god Ayyur is a modern inference from the language.

Is Ayyur a god or a goddess?

Ayyur’s sex is disputed. René Basset argued in 1910 that because the Berber word for the moon is masculine, the moon could hardly have been a goddess. Stéphane Gsell, reading the same passage of Herodotus in 1927, described the moon as a goddess for all the Libyans.

Is Ayyur mentioned in any ancient inscription?

Possibly, in one word. G. Mercier suggested, and René Basset agreed it was the most plausible idea, that the god Ieru, given the title Augustus in a Latin inscription from the Guechgach near Constantine, was Ayyur written in Latin. This remains a hypothesis and is the only proposed record of the name in antiquity.

How did Berbers worship the moon?

Herodotus says the nomads between Egypt and Lake Tritonis cut a piece from the victim’s ear, threw it over the dwelling and twisted the animal’s neck, sacrificing only to the sun and the moon. In the early twentieth century, the Ida Oukensous of Morocco greeted the new crescent aloud with the Muslim profession of faith and asked the moon for a blessed month, health and plenty.

Are there any myths about Ayyur?

No full myth of Ayyur survives, with no birth story, consort or temple image on record. What survives is folk practice and short texts: a saying that when the moon builds its house rain is coming, a Tuareg nickname, sons of the moon, for the Ikadeien tribe, and untranslated Tachelhit texts collected by Émile Laoust about the moon’s spots and about a woman calling the moon down into a bowl of water.