Introduction
In ancient times, water was at the centre of North-African peoples' religious preoccupations: rains, springs and rivers were vested with sacred import, the more potent since the ancient Maghreb was a region peopled first and foremost with farmers and shepherds for whom the fertility of crops and the fecundity of herds were the most precious of divine gifts. To their way of thinking, the sacred nature of these waters was linked to the tutelary presence of a force which they named genie[1] or divinity. Accordingly, such sacred water conjured up fearful feelings towards a supernatural reality beyond their knowledge and understanding. Although it is difficult, for want of documents, to define the beliefs related to water in those early times one may venture to say that a specifically Libyan religious substrate existed, in the form of local genies of the waters, who were probably supplanted by Roman gods, namely Neptune[2] and the nymphs[3] in the regions reached by Roman civilisation.
