Tin Hinan, "she of the tents" or "the woman of the tents," is the legendary ancestress of the Tuareg of the Hoggar and a foundational figure in the genealogical narratives of the northern Tuareg confederations. She is conventionally placed in the fourth or fifth century CE, having migrated south into the Saharan Hoggar from a Berber community in the Tafilalt region of southeastern Morocco.
Her tomb at Abalessa in the Atakor sub-range of the Hoggar — a stone funerary monument identified by French excavators in 1925–1927 under the direction of Maurice Reygasse and Byron Khun de Prorok — yielded a richly furnished elite female burial dated by radiocarbon and stratigraphy to the fourth century CE. The skeleton was accompanied by a cedar-and-leather bed, gold and silver jewellery, glass beads, and a partial collection of low-denomination Roman coins of the early fourth century.
Whether the Abalessa burial is in fact that of the legendary Tin Hinan, or whether the local oral tradition has retrospectively attached the name to an earlier historical individual, remains debated in the scholarly literature. The Tuareg genealogical tradition treats the connection as established and the Abalessa monument as the foundational sacred site of the Kel Ahaggar.
The figure of Tin Hinan structures Kel Ahaggar political memory in the same way that the Kahina structures Aurès political memory: a foundational woman around whose lineage the contemporary social order is organised. Her name is preserved in the autonyms of several Tuareg sub-tribes and in the contemporary onomastics of the Hoggar.