Ties worn in warm weather for reasons no WASP can remember ~ faldage

Well there is one Tuareg legend (not custom) that can be understood today, and if the people at the library hadn't demanded the return of their book I could give the legend's participants proper names.

But anyway...a folk tradition of the Tuareg says that their nation was founded by a great queen of fabulous wealth and great beauty who, like a reverse Moses, led the Tuareg people to their happy home in the desert.

A well known french archeologist found a large burial site of elaborate appointments in 1928. So elaborate in fact, that he proclaimed it The Tomb of the Tuareg's First Queen Mother. This discovery seemed to verify the real existence of the legendary Mother Queen and the story of the find was widely circulated in French newspapers.

Until it was discovered that the entire fable was the construction of a french novelist, who wrote a romantic novel set in the Sahara in 1902, and that no such Tuareg legend had existed until he wrote his novel.

The story of the wonderful founding Queen remains high on the long list of Tuareg legends even today.



(And I think I have also learned a useful lesson , henceforth I will think of the Tuareg's Queen when faldage cites his elaborate word-origin sources.)