The Chaoui people or Shawiya (, ) are a Berber ethnic group native to the Aurès region in northeastern Algeria which spans Constantine, Setif, Batna, Khenchla, Oum El Bouaghi and Tébessa provinces located in and surrounded by the Aurès Mountains. They were known as the Massylii in antiquity.
They call themselves Išawiyen/Icawiyen (pronounced ) and speak the Shawiya language. They are the second largest Tell Atlas Berber-speaking ethnicity, alongside the Kabyles and Chenouas.
Etymology The name Chaoui is taken from the Berber word ‘Ich’, meaning ‘horn’ and is a reference to the Numidian god Amon, who is portrayed at having a human head with the horns of a ram. According to de Slane, translator of the books of Ibn Khaldun, the term Chaoui/Shawi means "shepherd" and designates the Zenata Berbers.
History Historically, the Aurès Mountains served as a refuge for Berber peoples, the Auresiens (Chaouis) formed a base of resistance against the Roman Empire, the Vandals, the Byzantine Empire and Arabs. The Chaouis are part of the Zenata Berber confederation (Ifren, Maghraouas, Jarāwa, Abdalwadides from the Houaras and Awarbas and Beni Ouacine of the Aurès (Marinids) who are Zenata).
Massylii
The Aurès, where the inhabitants of the Aures known as the Auresiens, are identified as the Chaouia, have been the cradle of the Massylii dynasty its capital was Cirta. Under king Massinissa, the kingdom of the Massylii was able to unite Numidia to become the first unified Berber state in North Africa. The patriarch of Chaouis believed to have been Madghacen, the common ancestor of the Zenata and of the Botri as well. Ibn Khaldun identified the Zenata as Berbers. Modern historians rank this Berber region within the group of Numidians and Gaetuli or the much more ancient Meshwesh, Maesulians and Mazaxes, from whom the Zenata formed, the main inhabitants of the Aurès in the Middle Ages. Chaoui clans known by Ibn Khaldoun were the Ifren, Maghrawa, Djerawa, Abdalwadides, Howara and Awarba.
Punic Wars It is against Carthage that the Chaouia kingdom of the Massylii enter history. As a federation of tribes, the Massylii soon became a coherent organization endowed with strong authority. as soon as conflict between Rome and Carthage began, the kingdom of the Massylii under king Massinissa were victorious.
Thus it was that Massinissa, son of the king of the Massylii, took the side of Rome with Scipio and triumphed with him in the two victories of the Great Plains and Zama. It was also Massinissa who unified the Massylii and the Masaessylii under Numidia. Not long after, he provoked the third Punic war, from which Numidia emerged stronger. After him, it was Jugurtha who, against the will of the Roman Senate, waged a fierce war against Rome in the Jugurthine war.
Scipio Africanus honored Masinissa with a gold crown, a gold patera, a curule chair, an ivory sceptre, a toga picta, and a tunica palmata—the traditional symbols of a Roman triumphator. Scipio declared that nothing was more magnificent among the Romans than these honors, implying that Masinissa was the only foreigner worthy of such distinction. These rewards recognized Masinissa's crucial role in securing Rome's victory in the war.
Roman Period
Rome initially refrained from annexing Numidia which was seen as a very close ally and a close partner. However, Juba I, king of Numidia, took the side of Pompey against Caesar , Juba I was defeated alongside Pompey at Thapsus and committed suicide, the kingdom of Numidia came under Roman tutelage, Ceasar adopted Juba I's son, and the proconsular Province of Africa was expanded on Numidian territory. Immediately afterwards, we begin to witness a Romanization of Berbers in Numidia. The Aurès and its surroundings continued to form a buffer zone to roman administrative control, where the authority of Rome did not manage to be recognized. For a long time, the Limes did not go beyond the northern limit of the Aurès: it was only with Antoninus and thanks to reinforcements borrowed from the armies of Syria, the Danube and Spain, that a strategic route crossed the Aures, and it was in the time of Commodus, Septimius Severus and Caracalla that the Limes bypassed it to the south. Theveste, Mascula, Timgad, Lambèse, Tobna were all roma cities that this strategic route passed through. Legio III Cyrenaica, moving through Roman Africa, was garrisoned there.
Several revolts occurred against roman rule in the Aurès region, including that of Tacfarinas in the first half of the first century AD, against the Roman Empire under the reign of Emperor Tiberius.
Roman citizenship was offered to the Chaouis so that it would facilitate their integration into the Roman world, The area east of the Fossa Regia was fully Romanized with one third of the population made of Italian colonists and their descendants, the other two thirds were Romanized Berbers, who were all Christians and nearly all Latin speaking.. Numidia was a vibrant center of learning, it produced some of antiquity's most influential minds, leaving a lasting mark on philosophy, theology, science, and literature some of them include CharacterOriginRoleApuleiusMadauros (M'Daourouch)Orator, writer, novelist and philosopherSaint AugustineThagaste (Souk Ahras)Christian theologian and philosopherMaximus of MadaurusMadauros (M'Daourouch)Orator and grammarianMastanbalCirta (Constantine)Olympics ChampionMarcus Cornelius FrontoCirta (Constantine)OratorDonatus of Casae NigraeTheveste (Tebessa)Christian theologian and philosopherJuba IIHippo Regius (Annaba)Polymath, Writer and GeographerLactantiusCirta (Constantine)Christian writer and orator
The Chaoui material civilization and, at the same time, its way of life, have been transformed. The practical sense of the Berber culture, has began to change drastically in fields of irrigation, as new crops were being introduced from across the roman empire into the region and also foreign processes for example- metal working. Olive agriculture, for example, have developed much more rapidly. The Chaouia country, in its mountains, began to practice this associated economy, which today makes it original. Thus, Chaouia life changed.
In the year 256, Christianity spread massively the Aurès region, the land of the Chaouis became an important center of Christendom. Several bishops became prominent. Saint Augustine of Hippo, a native of Thagaste as well as Donatus Magnus, are considered the most important figures in the establishment and development of Western Christianity.
The Christian Bible was first amassed with the Synod of Hippo referring to the synod of 393 which was hosted in Hippo Regius in modern day Algeria, northern Africa during the early Christian Church attended by Augustine of Hippo. Rules regarding clerical succession were also clarified at the synod .
The synod of 393 is best known for two distinct acts. First, for the first time a council of bishops listed and approved a Christian Biblical canon that corresponds to the modern Catholic canon while falling short of the Eastern Orthodox canon. The canon list approved at Hippo included books later classed by Catholics as deuterocanonical books and by Protestants as Apocrypha. The canon list was later approved at the Council of Carthage (397) pending ratification by the "Church across the sea", that is, the See of Rome.
Vandals
In 430, the entire Roman Empire withdrew from the region under pressure from the Vandals who invaded the country. But the Vandals were never able to bring them back to obedience. From the moment that the Moors of the Aurès had shaken off the Vandal domination, they had nothing more to fear, they were the masters. At the northern foot of the mountain, in the plain, the Moors evacuated all the inhabitants of Timgad, who were numerous, and destroyed the city " at ground level ." This is how the Kingdom of Aurès was born, founded by King Masties in 484, and made Arris its capital.Procopius Wars 3.5.18–19 in Andrew Merrills and Richard Miles, The Vandals, 3.
Byzantine Period
In 533, it was the Byzantines who conquered Africa, at that time, it was Iaudas the king of the Aurès. He held the Byzantines in check in the Aurès for a long time, and played an important role in the Berber revolts that followed the Byzantine reconquest.
Arab conquest
In the Middle Ages, the Chaouis appellation was born with the historians of the time such as Ibn KhaldounIbn Khaldoun, History of the Berbers. The Chaouis formed the kingdom of Aures which included several Chaoui confederations. The most important are the Houaras, the Aurebas, the Zenetes.
Kingdom of Aures
The first revolt of the Berbers was led by Koceila of the Aurebas tribe, he managed in 683 to destroy an Umayyad expeditionary force led by the Arab general Oqba ibn Nafi, at Tahouda (near present-day Sidi Okba), expel the Umayyad occupiers from eastern Algeria and modern Tunisia, and take Kairouan. He died around 688, during the battle of Mammès.
One of the most prominent Chaoui characters that symbolized resistance against arabs was Aksil (Koceila) and Queen Dihya who originated from the Chaoui tribe of Jarāwa The Zenata tribe (awarba and jarawaHistoire de l'Afrique septentrionale depuis les temps les plus reculs jusqu'à la conquête française 1830, , Enest Mercier, tome 1) inhabited the territory at the time of the Islamic conquest, followed by the Huwara and Luwata tribesIbn Khaldoun, History of the Berbers, especially at the height of the war between Hassan Ibn Numan and the armies of Dihya.
Then by Dihya, known as " Queen Kahina ", of the Djerawa tribe. She succeeded king Aksil as war chief of the Berber tribes around 688, against the Umayyad armies. A number of Arabic sources, including several of the oldest, establish an explicit link between Koceïla and the Dihya. According to the historian al-Waqidi, Kahina rose up against the Umayyads, " as a result of the indignation she felt at the death of Koceila ". In 698, the battle of the Nini wadi took place north of Baghaï (present-day Aurès, in Algeria), between the Umayyad armies of General Hassan Ibn Numan, and the Berber forces of Queen Dihya. The battle ended in the rout and expulsion of Arab forces from Ifriqiya and for five years Al-Kahina ruled a sovereign Berber state from the Aurès Mountains to the oasis of Ghadames (698–703). She is considered one of the most famous figures in the history of the Berber resistance to the Arab conquest. On his return, five years later, Hassan obtained from the Umayyad caliph Abd Al-Malik an additional number of men to attack Kahina. She enlisted once again, but was finally defeated at Tabarka around 703.
The kingdom of Aures continued through to the 16th century with the famous queen Fatma Tazoughert from the Berber Tazeggʷaght, "the Red," who was a Chaoui Berber queen from the Aurès Mountains of present-day Algeria. According to the writer Mohamed Nadir Sebaa, in 1566, Tazoughert conquered the cities of Marrakesh, Meknes, and Fez in what is now Morocco. This inspired Abd al-Rahman al-Majdoub, a Sufi poet from a Berber family in Morocco, to write a pamphlet addressed to her. She was known as a formidable warrior, a military leader with an excellent sense of organization and command at the head of her troops. Dressed as a hoplite, she retained her freedom of movement while leading the masses and wielded unquestionable influence over the mountain communities of north africa.
Umayyad period Following this, the Umayyads asked the Chaouia to provide them with twelve thousand fighters for the conquest of Andalusia as a condition for the cessation of the war.
Musa ben Nusayr's intervention settled the problem with the Berbers by appointing Tariq ibn Ziyad to head the Chaoui army and the other Berbers (he who was already converted since). He would later become one of the main players in the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.
French conquest of Algeria