Mauritania

During the Neolithic, the peoples who lived in Mauritania adopted a more sedentary lifestyle when they began to domestic animals and plants as agro-pastoralists and created settlements using dry stone masonry in the Dhar Tichitt region of Tagant. Around what is now the copper mining town of Akjoujt in Inchiri, there is one of the very early evidence of people working copper in Africa.

The area of modern Mauritania entered the annals of written history when the then Governor of the Roman province of Mauretania, modern northern Morocco, Gaius Seutonius Paulinus led the first Roman expedition around 40 CE across the Atlas Mountains and may have gone as far south as Azougui on the Adrar plateau. He gained later notoriety as the 2nd Governor of Roman Britain during the revolt of Queen Boudicca of the Iceni in 61 CE.

During the Middle, Ages Azougi was the southern capital of the Almoravid Empire founded in the 11th century by Berber people living in the area and stretched, at its apogee, from the river Senegal in the south to the river Ebro in Moslem dominated Spain in the north with its main capital at Marrakesh, the city that the Almoravids founded in modern Morocco.