Message #8010

[dhill757]

Historical background

The native term Guanchinet means "man of Tenerife" (from Guan = person and Chinet = Tenerife). It was corrupted, according to Juan Núñez de la Peña, by Spaniards into "Guanchos". Strictly speaking, the Guanches were the primitive inhabitants of Tenerife, where the population seems to have lived in relative isolation up to the time of the Spanish conquest, around the 14th century (though Genoans, Portuguese, and Castillians had occasionally landed there since the second half of the 8th century).

The name came to be applied to the indigenous populations of all the seven Canary islands. The Guanches, now extinct as a distinct people, appear, from the study of skulls and bones discovered, to exhibit similarities to Cro-Magnon populations of the Mesolithic era, and links to the Berbers, who have long inhabited northern Africa from Egypt to the Atlantic, have been suggested.

Pliny the Elder, deriving his knowledge from the accounts of Juba, king of Mauretania, states that when visited by the Carthaginians under Hanno the Navigator the archipelago was found by them to be uninhabited, but that they saw ruins of great buildings. This may suggest that the Guanches were not the first inhabitants, if this account is accurate. From the absence of any trace of Islam among the peoples found in the archipelago by the Spaniards, it would seem that this extreme westerly migration of Berbers took place either before or as a result of the conquest of northern Africa by the Arabs. Many of the Guanches fell in resisting the Spaniards, while others died from infectious diseases that accompanied the invaders, diseases to which the Guanches, because of their long isolation, had little immunity. Many were sold as slaves, and many conformed to the Roman Catholic faith and married Spaniards. This pattern of events would be repeated in the Spanish subjugation of the Arawaks and other peoples of the New World only a century later.

What remains of their language, Guanche—a few expressions, vocabulary words and the proper names of ancient chieftains still borne by certain families—exhibits positive similarities with the Berber languages. The first reliable account of Guanche language was provided by Genovese explorer Nicoloso da Recco in 1341, with a translation of numbers used by the islanders.

Petroglyphs attributed to various Mediterranean and northern African civilizations have been found on some of the islands. In 1752, Domingo Vandewalle, a military governor of Las Palmas, attempted to investigate them, and Aquilino Padron, a priest at Las Palmas, catalogued inscriptions at El Julan, La Candía and La Caleta on El Hierro. In 1878 Dr. R. Verneau discovered rock carvings in the ravines of Las Balos that bear similarities with Libyan or Numidic writing from the time of Roman occupation or earlier. In other locations, Libyco-Berber script has been identified. However, according to chroniclers, the Guanches did not possess a system of writing at the time of conquest.