TIN HINAN

Founding matriarch

Tin Hinan is the legendary queen and matriarch from whom the noble Tuareg of the Hoggar claim descent. Her name translates as "she of the tents" and, figuratively, as "mother of us all"; the Tuareg also name her Tamenokalt, the queen. Tradition makes her a princess come, according to the accounts, from the Tafilalet, in the south-east of present-day Morocco, who is said to have crossed the Sahara mounted on a white camel, accompanied by her handmaid Takamat and a caravan, to settle at Abalessa, in the Hoggar. She is generally placed around the fourth century. In 1925, an archaeological mission uncovered at Abalessa a monumental tomb sheltering the well-preserved skeleton of a woman, lying on a funerary bed, surrounded by rich jewels of gold and silver and Roman coins bearing the effigy of the emperor Constantine. This discovery fed the debate on the figure's historicity: while a woman of high rank was indeed buried there, several scholars, among them Gabriel Camps, hold that the legend of Tin Hinan as founding ancestress was constructed later. A figure of matriliny and of the central place of women in Tuareg society, she remains the symbol of this people's origins.