In addition to carpets, the historical, cultural and traditional Amazigh heritage represents a real and often little-known wealth. A large part of this wealth is made up of a very diverse material heritage where one can find objects such as pottery, weaving, real estate art and wall decorations, but also jewellery and tattoos which have a precious aesthetic value. Indeed, these objects, which are part of the daily life of the Amazighs, are distinguished by the appearance of signs of great symbolic value, raising them far, far above the decorative dimension.
The symbols appearing on the interior wall decorations of the houses of the Amazigh tribes recall the means of attack and defence for the preservation of happiness. They are also magical and superstitious rites with the power to make a home happy and fortunate. Today, the meanings of the symbols found in the carpets are lost.
While being assimilated with elements of the surrounding landscape, such as chevrons, triangles, rhombuses and zigzags, these symbols have become artistic motifs that have survived the ages since the Neolithic period. These signs are often considered to have a magical-religious intention: self- and species conservation, fertility of the earth and of people, worship of the dead and protective magic. For religious reasons, this heritage has long been denied and somehow ignored, but it is still present and its significance is very strong among the Amazighs of Morocco.
The meaning of many other symbols has unfortunately been lost over time, and despite the fact that mothers and grandmothers have passed on specific patterns and designs over the generations, weavers might say that they are just weaving what they have learned and cannot be very precise about their meaning.
Designs, even when they reflect specific traditions and beliefs, have been intensely deprived and, to that end, they must be interpreted with care, because we simply do not understand what some designs are meant to do and we have great difficulty in translating them all.
Many of the patterns in carpets have their origin in sexual symbolism. They represent in different ways the woman, the man, the meeting of the two sexes, marriage, love (badad), the beloved (tasmount), then pregnancy, childbirth and life (tudart).
In some Amazigh regions, women, who are mostly illiterate or to be politically correct, pre-literate, use weaving as a kind of calendar to count the months of pregnancy and thus make carpets that represent three important elements :
9 strips containing different brightly coloured patterns that express life and coming into this world, but also the baby's initial cry at birth;
The pregnancy, the bloating of the belly and the heaviness that follows; and
The exit of the baby through its mother's vagina.
Thus, a real Amazigh mat is blown up at the top and thinned at the bottom to indicate the birth. Thus a real handmade Amazigh rug is never geometrically perfect, except in the case of those made by machine.
And for this, one would also need to understand the songs, cultures and legends of the different Amazigh tribes. Feminine symbols are the most numerous and often the most recognizable. They have been the same since the Paleolithic:
- The X sign expresses an open female body, ready to conceive;
- The chevron is close to the X sign symbolizing spread legs; and
- The rhombus represents the uterus, the womb.
Male symbols are not less numerous but simply less visible, as they occupy space differently and generally frame female motifs. These are usually strip or bar patterns:
- Scales;
- Folder;
- Right; and
- Fish bone.
These patterns are often associated with the number three (three-toothed comb, triple bar, two rings around a ring). The snake is the recurring phallic symbol and very legible, as it is found everywhere in the Mediterranean and the East. The cross is the sign of mating, while the double-hooked diamond is one of the most common birth symbols.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
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