The early history of the west Saharan region is largely unknown.

There are some written accounts by medieval Arab traders and explorers who reach the important caravan trading centers and Sudanic kingdoms of eastern Mauritania, but the major sources of pre-European history are oral history, legends, and archaeological evidence.

These sources indicate that during the millennia preceding the Christian Era, the Sahara was a more habitable region than it is today and supported a flourishing culture.

In the area that is now Mauritania, the Bafour, a proto-Berber people, whose descendants may be the coastal Imraguen fishermen, are hunters, pastoralists, and fishermen.

Valley cultivators, who may have been black ancestors of the riverine Toucouleur and Wolof peoples, lived alongside the Bafour.

Climatic changes, and perhaps overgrazing and overcultivation as well, lead to a gradual desiccation of the Sahara and the southward movement of these peoples.

In the third and fourth centuries CE, this southward migration had been intensified by the arrival of Berber groups from the north who were searching for pasturage or fleeing political anarchy and war.

The wide-ranging activities of these turbulent Berber warriors were made possible by the introduction of the camel to the Sahara in this period.

This first wave of Berber invaders had subjugated and made vassals of those Bafour who did not flee south.

Other Berber groups follow in the seventh and eighth centuries, themselves fleeing in large numbers before the Arab conquerors of the Maghreb.

The Lemtuna, one of the Berber groups that had arrived in Mauritania in the eighth century, had attained political dominance in the Adrar and Hodh regions by the ninth century.

Together with two other important Berber groups, the Messufa and the Djodala, they set up the Sanhaja Confederation.

From their capital, Aoudaghast, the Lemtuna control this loose confederation and the western routes of the Saharan caravan trade that had begun to flourish after the introduction of the camel.

At its height, from the eighth to the end of the tenth century, the Sanhaja Confederation is a decentralized polity based on two distinct groups: the nomadic and very independent Berber groups, who maintain their traditional religions, and the Muslim, urban Berber merchants, who conduct the caravan trade.

Although dominated by the Sanhaja merchants, the caravan trade has its northern terminus in the Maghrebi commercial city of Sijilmasa and its southern terminus in Koumbi Saleh, capital of the Ghana Empire.

Later, the southern trade route will end in Timbuktu, capital of the Mali Empire.

Gold, ivory, and slaves are carried north in return for salt (ancient salt mines near Kediet Ij ill in northern Mauritania are still being worked), copper, cloth, and other luxury goods.

Oualata is a major relay point on the gold and salt trade route, as well as a chief assembly point for pilgrims traveling to Mecca.

Koumbi Saleh is a large cosmopolitan city comprising two distinct sections: the Muslim quarter, with its Arab-influenced architecture, and the black quarter of traditional thatch and mud architecture, where the non-Muslim king of Ghana resides.

Chinguetti, later an important religious center, is another important Mauritanian trade city of the Sanhaja Confederation.

Although Koumbi Saleh does not outlive the fall of the Ghana Empire, Aoudaghast and particularly Oualata will maintain their importance well into the sixteenth century, when trade begins shifting to the European-controlled coasts.

In Mauritania, Abu Bakr leads the Almoravids in a war against Ghana (1062-76), culminating in the capture in 1076 of Koumbi Saleh.

This event marks the end of the dominance of the Ghana Empire.

Important towns develop along the trade routes.

The easiest, though not the shortest, routes between Ghana and Sijilmasa are from Koumbi Saleh through Aoudaghast, Oualata, Tichit, and Ouadane.

These towns along the route grow to be important commercial as well as political centers.

Aoudaghast, with its population of five thousand to six thousand, is a big town with a large mosque and several smaller ones, surrounded by large cultivated areas under irrigation, as described by the Arab chronicler Al Bakri in the eleventh-century.

Islam had spread throughout the west Sahara by the eleventh century under the influence of Berber and Arab traders and occasional Arab migrants.

Nevertheless, traditional religious practices thrive.

The conquest of the entire west Saharan region by the Almoravids in the eleventh century makes possible a more orthodox Islamization of all the peoples of Mauritania.

The breakup of the Sanhaja Confederation in the early eleventh century leads to a period of unrest and warfare among the Sanhaja Berber groups of Mauritania.

In about 1039, a chief of the Djodala, Yahya ibn Ibrahim, returns from a pilgrimage to Mecca bringing with him a Sanhaja theologian, Abdallah ibn Yassin, to teach a more orthodox Islam.

Rejected by the Djodala two years later, after the death of Ibn Ibrahim, Ibn Yassin and some of his Sanhaja followers retire to a secluded place where they build a fortified religious center, a ribat, which attracts many Sanhaja.

In 1042 the murabitun (men of the ribat), as Ibn Yassin's followers come to be called, launch a jihad, or holy war, against the non believers and the heretics among the Sanhaja, beginning what later becomes known as the Almoravid movement.

The initial aim of the Almoravids is to establish a political community in which the ethical and juridical principles of Islam will be strictly applied.

First, the Almoravids attack and subdue the Djodala, forcing them to submit to Islam.

Then, rallying the other Berber groups of the west Sahara, the Almoravids succeed in recreating the political unity of the Sanhaja Confederation and adding to it a religious unity and purpose.

By 1054 the Almoravids have captured Sijilmasa in the Maghreb and have retaken Aoudaghast from Ghana.

The entire western Maghreb (to at least present-day Algiers) is under Almoravid domination by 1082.

In 1086 the Andalusian emirates, under attack from the Spanish Christian king Alfonso and the Christian reconquest of Spain, call on Ibn Tashfin and his Berber warriors to cross the Strait of Gibraltar and come to their rescue.

The Almoravids defeat the Spanish Christians and, by 1090, impose Almoravid rule and the Maliki school of Islamic law in Muslim Spain.

With the death of Ibn Yassin in 1059, leadership of the movement in the south passes to Abu Bakr ibn Unas, amir of Adrar, and to Yusuf ibn Tashfin in the north.

Under Ibn Tashfm, the Berbers capture Morocco and found Marrakech as their capital in 1062.