Macaronesia (2637 – 910 BCE): The Islands of the Western Wind — Contact and Isolation at the Ocean’s Edge

Regional Overview

In Early Antiquity, Macaronesia stood at the outermost limit of the known Atlantic.
Its two island groups—the Southern Canaries and Cape Verde near Africa’s shores, and the Northern archipelagos of Madeira and the Azores far out to sea—formed a bridge between continents that no one yet fully crossed.
While the northern islands remained wild sanctuaries of forest and seabird, the southern chain became the westernmost horizon of Amazigh exploration, where small groups of voyagers from North Africa brought their language, herding traditions, and spiritual landscapes into a new island world.

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Southern Macaronesia: Guanche–Amazigh Voyaging to the Canaries; Cape Verde Still Empty

The Canary Islands, rising from the Canary Current off northwest Africa, became the first Macaronesian archipelago to host enduring human communities.
By the first millennium BCE, Amazigh (Berber) colonists from North Africa—probably from the western Sahara or coastal Morocco—had reached several of the larger islands: Gran Canaria, Tenerife, La Palma, La Gomera, and eventually El Hierro.
Settlement on the more arid eastern islands (Fuerteventura and Lanzarote) required austere adaptation but succeeded through herding and dry-farming ingenuity.

Subsistence & Lifeways

Islanders practiced barley and pulse cultivation on terraced slopes and in valley bottoms, combined with goat and sheep pastoralism.
They gathered wild figs and coastal shellfish, stored grain in caves and stone silos, and built stone huts or cave dwellings along reliable springs.
Springs and fog-drip were sacred lifelines; their guardianship intertwined with ancestor rites and communal feasts.

Material & Symbolic Culture

With no native metals, the Guanche–Amazigh toolkits remained stone, bone, and fiber-based: polished adzes, grinding stones, hide sandals, leather garments, and woven goat-hair textiles.
Ceramics were plain but functional; basketry and cordage showed high refinement.
Cave burials and occasional mummification on Tenerife and Gran Canaria displayed complex mortuary ritual.
Petroglyphs and idoliform carvings marked sacred peaks and springs, embedding kinship and ritual in the island terrain.

Isolation & Adaptation

Once founded, the communities became self-contained archipelagic societies, with little or no contact with the mainland.
Dryland barley, herding mobility, and grain storage buffered drought years; spring sanctuaries and terracing stabilized fragile soils.
Meanwhile, to the southwest, the Cape Verde Islands—though visible from trans-Saharan wind lanes—remained uninhabited, their volcanic ridges untouched and seabird rookeries untroubled.

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Northern Macaronesia: Atlantic Outliers Beyond Known Worlds

Farther north, beyond the reach of Amazigh navigation or Mediterranean trade, the Azores, Madeira, Porto Santo, and the Selvagens remained unpeopled sanctuaries of wind, cloud, and forest.
The Azores’ volcanic cones and crater lakes, the laurel forests of Madeira, and the Selvagens’ seabird cliffspersisted in ecological equilibrium.
Rainfall and volcanic renewal maintained lush soils; no grazing or fire yet disturbed the canopy.
If Bronze Age mariners of Phoenicia or Iberia ever glimpsed these islands, they left no mark.

Symbolic Echoes

In later Mediterranean mythology, tales of the Isles of the Blessed or Hesperides may faintly echo these unseen lands—conceptual horizons rather than charted geography.
For now, they existed solely within nature’s cycles: forests, seabirds, and the Atlantic wind.

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Environmental Adaptation & Continuity

Across both halves of Macaronesia, isolation defined resilience.
In the south, herding and granary systems stabilized small human populations amid drought and volcanic soils; in the north, pristine ecosystems endured undisturbed.
Orographic rain, fog-drip, and nutrient upwelling sustained life at all altitudes—from laurel forests to guano-enriched headlands—creating natural laboratories of long-term ecological balance.

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Transition

By 910 BCE, Macaronesia embodied two contrasting realities:

• The Canaries, inhabited by self-reliant Guanche–Amazigh communities cultivating grain and memory in volcanic isolation;

• Cape Verde, Madeira, and the Azores, still untouched wildernesses, blank on the human map.

The region stood as the western edge of the known world, where early voyagers halted and where, for the next two millennia, the Atlantic wind would guard islands suspended between myth and discovery.

Southern Macaronesia (2,637 – 910 BCE) Bronze and Early Iron — Guanche–Amazigh Voyaging to the Canaries; Cape Verde Still Empty

Geographic and Environmental Context

Southern Macaronesia includes:

• The Canary Islands (Gran Canaria, Tenerife, Fuerteventura, Lanzarote, La Palma, La Gomera, El Hierro).

• The Cape Verde archipelago (Sotavento and Barlavento groups).

Anchors: Tenerife (Teide massif), Gran Canaria (Caldera de Tejeda), La Palma (Caldera de Taburiente), La Gomera (garajonay–laurisilva), El Hierro (El Golfo fault scarp), Fuerteventura–Lanzarote (low, arid shield islands and malpaísfields), Cape Verde (Fogo stratovolcano, Santo Antão and Santiago highlands, Sal–Boa Vista arid flats).

• Canary Islands: c. 1st millennium BCE, the first Amazigh (Berber) colonists reached select islands (island-by-island trajectories varied).

• Cape Verde: remains uninhabited.

Climate & Environmental Shifts

• Trades stable; orographic wetness on high islands supported dry-farming niches and springs.

Subsistence & Settlement

• Canaries: pastoral–horticultural hamlets founded in Gran Canaria, Tenerife, La Gomera, La Palma, later El Hierro; Fuerteventura–Lanzarote settled with more arid strategies.

• Staples: barley (dry-farmed), pulses, figs; goat/sheep herding central; wild plant gathering; coastal shellfish/fish supplement.

• Water from springs and fog-drip; terracing in pockets; cave-dwelling and stone huts/complexes.

Technology & Material Culture

• No metals initially; lithic and bone toolkits; polished stone adzes; grinding stones; basketry, tanning, spinning–weaving with plant fibers and goat hair; simple pottery.

• Clothing and sandals from leather/plant fibers; granaries (silos/ caves) maintained grain stores.

Movement & Interaction Corridors

• Inter-island movement limited and episodic; no persistent contact with mainland after founding pulses (isolation model).

• Coastal footpaths ringed islands; goat transhumance across altitudinal belts.

Cultural & Symbolic Expressions

• Funerary practices: cave burials; in some islands mummification (e.g., Tenerife/Gran Canaria) with wrappings and grave goods.

• Rock art (petroglyphs, engravings) and idoliforms; sanctuaries at springs/peaks; ancestor veneration and seasonal feasts after harvests.

Environmental Adaptation & Resilience

• Pastoral–dry farming with granary storage buffered drought; spring sanctuaries marked water rights; terracing and soil-stone mulching reduced erosion.

Transition

By 910 BCE, Guanche–Amazigh societies were established across much of the Canary chain; Cape Verde remained pristine.

The precariousness of existence in southern Mesopotamia also leads to a highly developed sense of religion.

Cult centers such as Eridu, dating back to 5000 BCE, had served as important centers of pilgrimage and devotion even before the rise of Sumer.

Many of the most important Mesopotamian cities have emerged in areas surrounding the pre-Sumerian cult centers, thus reinforcing the close relationship between religion and government.

The Sumerians are pantheistic; their gods more or less personify local elements and natural forces.

The gods of Sumer are to provide the individual with security and prosperity in exchange for sacrifice and adherence to an elaborate ritual.

A powerful priesthood emerges to oversee ritual practices and to intervene with the gods.

Sumerian religious beliefs also have important political aspects.

Decisions relating to land rentals, agricultural questions, trade, commercial relations, and war are determined by the priesthood, because all property belongs to the gods.

The small farming villages of the Ubaid culture consolidated into larger settlements, arising from the need for large-scale, centralized irrigation works to survive the dry spell as the climate changed from relatively moist to drought in the early third millennium BCE.

The Sumerians dig canals along the southern reaches of the Tigris River near the site of Ur, inhabited in the earliest stage of village settlement in southern Mesopotamia, the Ubaid period, but later apparently abandoned.

Ur, located near the mouth (at this time) of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers on the Persian Gulf, has become one such center, by this time considered sacred to Nanna.

The southernmost of the great Sumerian cities known to archaeology, well-situated for trade into Arabia by both sea and land routes, Ur begins again to flourish as a Sumerian capital, where street vendors hawk fried fish and grilled meats to passersby.

Egypt is divided into nomes or districts administered by nomarchs or governors.

At first, the nomarchs were royal officials who moved from post to post and had no pretense to independence or local ties.

The post of nomarch eventually becomes hereditary, however, and nomarchs pass their offices to their sons.

Hereditary offices and the possession of property turn these officials into a landed gentry.

Concurrently, kings begin rewarding their courtiers with gifts of tax-exempt land.

From the middle of the Fifth Dynasty can be traced the beginnings of a feudal state with an increase in the power of these provincial lords, particularly in Upper Egypt.

The first known Hurrian kingdom emerges around the city of Urkesh (modern Tell Mozan) during the third millennium BCE.

There is evidence that they are allied with the Akkadian Empire, indicating they have a firm hold on the area by the reign of Naram-Sin of Akkad, who reigns from about 2254 BCE to 2218 BCE).

This region hosts other rich cultures; the city state of Urkesh has some powerful neighbors.

The neighboring state of Lagash enjoys a century of complete independence, between Shar-kali-sharri and the beginning of Ur III, during which time it shows expansionist tendencies and has widely ranging trade connections.

Among the wide range of views regarding the Amorite homeland, the more extreme of these is the view that kur mar.tu/m t amurrim covered the whole area between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean, Arabia included.

The other extreme is the view that the “homeland” of the Amorites was a limited area in Syria (Jebel Bishri).

One minority theory refers to Arabia in general as the area from where the Amorites once came.

Another refers to a limited area (unknown) in Arabia, the mountain district of Martu.

However, as the Amorite language is a northwestern Semitic language, it is likely that they originated from what is now modern Syria.

A large-scale migration of federated Amorite tribes, likely triggered by the twenty-second century BCE drought, infiltrates Mesopotamia from the west from the twenty-first century BCE, resulting in the occupation of Babylonia proper, the mid-Euphrates region, and Syria-Palestine.

They set up a mosaic of small kingdoms and rapidly assimilate the Sumero-Akkadian culture.

They are one of the instruments of the downfall of the Sumerian Third Dynasty of Ur, and acquiring a series of powerful kingdoms, culminate in the triumph under Hammurabi of Babylon.

The land of the Amorites ("the Mar.tu land") is associated in the earliest Sumerian sources, beginning about 2400 BCE, with the West, including Syria and Canaan, although their ultimate origin may have been Arabia.

The ethnic terms Amurru and Amar were used for them in Assyria and Egypt respectively.

Amorites seem to have worshipped the moon-god Sin, and Amurru.