Guanche mencey

GUANCHE “MENCEY” (king) from the Canary Islands, more specifically the island of Tenerife, dating to sometime after the consolidation of the Berber / Amazigh colonization from the 1st to the 5th centuries AD, until the Spanish conquest in the 15th century AD.

THE IRON AGE NORTH AFRICANS WHO RETURNED TO THE STONE AGE: The subtropical Canary Islands, today a Spanish autonomous community located in the Atlantic Ocean roughly 100 km off the southern coast of Morocco, were colonized by North African Amazigh tribes (also known as Berbers) from the Maghreb during the early Christian Era. But a crucial question remains unanswered: how they got there in the first place. By the time when the first sporadic European sailors visited the archipelago in the Late Middle Ages, and during the subsequent Castilian conquest, indigenous Canarians were the only islanders in the world that didn’t know how to sail or make boats, although recent studies suggest they might have known how to sail at some point. But there’s one hypothesis that suggests that Berbers may have been brought to the Canary Islands as slaves by the Romans. The Canary Islands were already known in the ancient Mediterranean. Greek and Phoenician sailors probably reached the islands before the Romans. There is archaeological evidence of permanent Roman settlement in the Canary Islands during the 1st century AD. The Romans produced Tyrian purple dye there, and it is possible they brought North African slaves, that may have been abandoned there when the romans left to never come back. Regardless of how the Berbers got there, there are no sources of iron or any other metal in the archipelago, so they were forced to return to Neolithic technology, making their tools and weapons with wood and obsidian. They also dressed in vegetal fibres and the skins of goats and sheep brought from the continent, painted their bodies red and black and made jewellery with shells and clay beads. In the 8th century, the Arabs conquered North Africa, and the mainland Berbers became largely Arabized and Islamized, but Islam never reached the Canary Islands, where an isolated Amazigh polytheistic society survived until the 15th century.