One of the 3 Muslim tombs discovered in Nîmes. EVIDENCE. These are excavations carried out by the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap) which are at the origin of this discovery. They were carried out prior to the construction of an underground car park, avenue Jean-Jaurès in Nîmes. Archaeologists have unearthed an ancient residential area of the city, as well as about twenty burials. Among them, 3 particularly caught their attention. These are graves that clearly show Muslim burial rites:the bodies of three men were placed on their sides, their heads looking in the direction of Mecca. "We knew that Muslims had come to France in the 8th century but until then we had no material trace of their passage “, explains to AFP the anthropologist Yves Gleize, of the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP), main author of a research published in the journal Plos One. “ We had a few coins and ceramic fragments, signs of commercial exchanges but nothing more" , says the researcher. In this, the situation in France is very different from that of the Iberian Peninsula, which was under Arab occupation for centuries.
According to AFP, analyzes of DNA taken from teeth and bones indicate that they were from North Africa. They were respectively aged 20 to 29 for one, around thirty for the second, and over 50 for the third. They had no trace of injury. "The realization of several radiometric dates on the three individuals makes it possible to specify their age:between the 7th century and the 9th century of our era" wrote Inrap in a press release. Until now, the oldest Muslim burial discovered in France, in Marseille, dated from the 13th century. Another update in Montpellier could date back to the 12th century. "All of these data suggest that the skeletons discovered in the tombs of Nîmes belonged to Berber soldiers enlisted in the Umayyad army during the Arab expansion in North Africa" in the 8th century takes over the Inrap.
Coexistence of Muslims and Christians
The maternal and paternal genetic lines of the three skeletons are relatively rare in the modern French population, they point out. Compared to the Iberian Peninsula or Italy, it is clear that the genetic impact of the Arab occupation is much lower in France, point out the researchers. For Yves Gleize, "the archaeological, anthropological and genetic analysis of these early medieval burials in Nîmes provides material evidence of an 8th century Muslim occupation in the south of France ". However, it is not possible with these indices to know what was the size of these communities whose presence is also attested in ancient texts which relate the presence of Muslims in Nîmes between 719 and 752. But they are not stayed a very long time.
Charles Martel took control of the city in 737, five years after the decisive victory of Poitiers against the Saracens, possibly destroying it to punish the population who had accepted the protection of the Muslims, these anthropologists speculate. A sign of a possible coexistence of these Muslims with the indigenous populations, the three tombs were relatively close to Christian burials. And all these tombs were inside a Roman enclosure which was to delimit an urban community, specify the researchers. Several historians have advanced the hypothesis that in Narbonne, a time under Muslim domination in the early Middle Ages, the local populations may have accepted a kind of protection in exchange for being able to preserve their laws and their traditions. The discovery of the Nîmes burials seems to confirm this hypothesis of a more complex relationship between the Muslim and Christian communities at the beginning of the Middle Ages according to Yves Gleize.
OL with AFP