3000 BC to 203 BC

Rock art and Phoenician ports

Thousands of paintings and engravings in the Tassili n'Ajjer, in the Sahara, record hunters and herders from a time when the desert was greener. The ancestors of the Berbers, or Amazigh, people the north. During the first millennium BC Phoenician and then Carthaginian traders found ports along the coast, among them Ikosim, the future Algiers, and Hippo Regius, near today's Annaba.