Mauretania

Mauretania is the Latin name for the ancient Mediterranean Maghreb, a kingdom of the far north-west that at its height covered northern and central Morocco with western and central Algeria. Its native peoples, of Berber and Phoenician stock, were the Mauri and Masaesyli known to Rome, also called Libyans, the name for all Berber peoples west of Egypt. The Phoenicians had called it the Western Land, and Greek myth set Atlas, the garden of the Hesperides and the tomb of Antaeus in its bounds. The first documented king, Baga, freed the land from Carthage about 225 BC, ruling from the Atlantic to the Moulouya with his capital at Volubilis, and in the Second Punic War he sheltered the exiled Massinissa and gave him four thousand Moorish horse to carry him home. Bocchus I, reigning from 110 to 80 BC, broke with neutrality, married his daughter to Jugurtha of Numidia and fought beside him, then betrayed him to Sulla for western Numidia, making Mauretania Rome's friend and its supplier of lions, bears and leopards for the arenas. In 25 BC Mauretania became a Roman client kingdom under Juba II and then Ptolemy, and about 44 AD Rome annexed it and cut it into the two provinces of Tingitana, named for Tangier, and Caesariensis, named for Caesarea. From the third century Christianity spread through the provinces, and after the Arab conquest of the seventh century Islam became the faith of the Maghreb.