Lanzarote History

Aboriginal population
Before the conquest of the island began in 1402, the Mahos, or Majos, a root Berber people of North African origin who would have reached the island around 500 BC, inhabited Lanzarote. The indigenous name of the island is Tyterogakat, or Tytheroygatra, which was translated as “burnt” from a geographic place in central Algeria that the Berbers named Tuareg.

The Majos: Who were they and where are they from?
Although the ethnic name “Guanche” has been popularized as the adjective of all Aboriginals who inhabited the Canary Islands prior to their conquest, the fact is that, strictly speaking, this name refers only to the natives of Tenerife.

When the Genoese navigator, Lancelotto Malocello, arrived in Lanzarote at the beginning of the fourteenth century, its inhabitants seemed to call themselves Majos, an ethnic term which has survived as the source of names for the topography of the island. Examples include The Majos Cave and The Stone Majos.

It is proven that the first inhabitants of the island, like those on the rest of the Canary Islands, originated from North Africa, a geographical area that stretches roughly from the Atlantic coast to Tunisia, and from the Mediterranean to the southern boundary of the Sahara Desert.

The inhabitants are genetically and culturally linked with the Berber people of North Africa today. In the case of Lanzarote, there is a similarity in the type of habitat. The so-called “deep houses” are similar to those in the Middle Atlas and other regions of Morocco.

The rock engravings of the island are common to the rest of the Archipelago and northwest Africa, with great profusion of podomorfos symbols, also present in the peaks of the Atlas and the Kabylia. The symbols show parallels with the late Neolithic Sahara.
Finally, the phrases and words preserved from aboriginal times refer to the trunk language of the different Berber dialects spoken in the Canaries.

The existence of recorded alphabetic forms should also be noted. They are in the island’s own Libyan-Berber script, or Tifinagh, along with another kind of writing, which seems unique to Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. This other kind of writing has been called “America” due to its similarity to the Pompeian alphabet. It might have evolved to some degree from the romanization of Berber populations due to European arrivals to the island.

As for the timing of settlement, most theories point to a time close to 500 BC as the date of the arrival of the first human to the Canaries. In the case of Lanzarote, archeology has shown that the cultural horizon of the first settlers of the island corresponds to the northwest African cultural history that has been influenced by the Berber peoples’ Punic culture, and perhaps also by the Latin culture. The exact causes that led to the displacement of people to the island are unknown.

Of the physical appearance of the aborigines of the island, little is known with certainty because of the scarcity of anthropological studies. The limited bone pieces that have been studied refer to a kind of half-height and high-strength person, with Mediterranean-North African features. Ethnohistorical sources, mostly a chronicle of the Norman Conquest, called The Canaries, merely noted that the “people are beautiful and well-item”.