Berber Crafts, 1906
From The Moors: A Comprehensive Description by Budgett Meakin, 1906.
From: 1906 C.E. To: 1906 C.E.
Location: Morocco
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From The Moors: A Comprehensive Description by Budgett Meakin, 1906.
Pottery
The pottery made in Morocco, often excellent both in colour and design, is very crude in execution, and is chiefly confined to basins and bowls for food, water-jars and lamps. Fez and Safifi produce the best, but a perfect piece is seldom to be obtained: green and blue are the prevailing tints.
Gun-making
In the mechanical arts the Moors do not excel, yet in whatever they do produce, good taste is shown, and only lacks encouragement. For some centuries past they have known how to manufacture flint-lock guns of clumsy construction and coarse workmanship, but generally well decorated by inlaying with ivory, silver, etc.
The best are made in Tetuan, and the most highly ornamented—with chased barrels and richly inlaid stocks, recognizable by a hoof-shaped butt,—in the province of Sus, which boasts the best workers in metal which this country contains. The Rif province has also a name for its guns, the butts of which are shod with a long transverse shoulder-piece, while those of Tetuan have a much smaller butt.
The barrels sometimes run to four feet long, and the total length of a gun may be six feet, but still more clumsy blunderbusses are also made.
The art of making barrels from twisted metal is said to have been imparted to the Moors by a Portuguese taken captive at the battle of El Kasar in 1578. Extreme subdivision of labour is employed in their manufacture, the making of stocks, locks and barrels being independent trades.
Metal Workers
As copper-smiths the Moors show average skill, principally in cooking utensils which are tinned inside, and embossed or engraved trays which hold their place among those of the East. The scabbards of their swords and daggers are often similarly decorated in brass, silver or gold, but the blades are now mostly of German manufacture, while the sheet brass comes from Birmingham.
Carpenters
As carpenters or turners they have little to show beyond occasional stalactite ceilings, beaded architraves and the well-known style of lattice called "mushrabiyah" work, from its employment in Egypt to protect shelves on which stand water-coolers.
Jewellery
The native jewellery, though artistic, is coarse, but this, with most of the minor mechanical arts, is chiefly in the hands of the Jews, so much more ready to adapt themselves to changing requirements and innovations.
Meakin, Budgett. The Moors: A Comprehensive Description. Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1906.
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