Who Lived in Africa before the Roman Conquest?
As the desert surrounding them began to dry up around 2000 BC, the people who occupied the plains and mountains of northwest Africa became virtually isolated. They remained at an early form of cultural development, hunting wild animals, herding stock, or settling to simple agriculture. The Greek called them Libyans, Romans referred to them as Africans, Numidians and Moors; the Arabs would dub them Berbers. The Berber were fair skinned people, closer to Indo-Germanic than Semitic, who gathered in tribes and practiced subsistence economy, either through basic farming or transhumance herding (the movement of flocks and herds from winter and summer pastures, some up to 200 miles apart!). It is thought that loose alliances were formed between farming and herding tribes to avoid the conflict of one tribe bringing their cattle through the crops of another. Around 1000 BC, the Phoenicians began to use the North African coastline as a trade route to Spain from Syria. The Phoenicians, who prefer
