Amerolqis is the archetypal poet and civilising hero of the Tuareg of Niger and the Air, a genie-like being whose name preserves that of the pre-Islamic Arabian poet Imru' al-Qays, reworked in Tamasheq oral tradition. He is credited with instituting language, poetry and the forms of social life, and above all with fashioning the imzad, the single-stringed bowed fiddle, which in the tales collected by Mohamed Aghali-Zakara and Jeannine Drouin he invented to overcome the fear his great size inspired in women and to draw them to him with music. As master of eloquence he stands at the head of the poetic tradition and is associated with the spirit-world from which poetic inspiration is felt to come.