Mauri Tribes in 218 B.C.

Mauri Tribes — Spring 218 BC · The Peoples Beyond the Pillars.

The Mauri — the Greeks call them Maurusians — are the Berber peoples of the far north-west corner of Africa, beyond the Masaesyli of the Numidians, in the land that runs from the great mountain the Greeks name Atlas down to the Ocean and the Pillars of Heracles. In 218 BC they are no single realm but a patchwork of tribes — herders and horsemen of the fertile coastlands, farmers of the well-watered valleys, and nomads of the inland slopes — spread over the country on the strait opposite Iberia. They are reckoned a large and prosperous people, though most still keep to the wandering life even where the soil is richest. They breed and ride the small swift horses of the west, fighting after the manner of their Numidian neighbours with the javelin, bareback and bridled with rush; and through the old Phoenician harbours of their coast — Lixus under its hill, Tingis on the strait — they touch the trade of Carthage and the long sea-road that runs south past the edge of the world.

While Carthage and Rome gather for war over the inland sea, the Mauri keep to the ocean corner of Libya, past the Pillars of Heracles where the Mediterranean opens at last upon the outer water. Theirs is the land between the Atlas mountain and the surf — a country reckoned fertile and well-favoured, and yet held mostly by wandering herders who follow their flocks and their horses rather than gather into towns. No single king binds them: they are a weave of tribes, the Baniurae and the rest, each to its own valley and pasture. What unites them is a way of life and a way of war — the light horse of the west, the javelin and the rush bridle — and the long Phoenician thread of trade that runs along their coast from Lixus and Tingis, the harbours through which the goods of Carthage and the gold of the deep south have passed for centuries. Eastward lie the Masaesyli, nearest of the Numidians; beyond the mountains, desert and rumour.