North Africa

North Africa or Northern Africa is the region encompassing a northern member of the African continent. There is no singularly accepted scope for the region, as well as it is sometimes defined as stretching from the Atlantic shores of Mauritania in the west, to Egypt's Suez Canal.

Varying sources limit it to the countries of Algeria, Libya, Morocco, as well as Tunisia, a region that was call by the French during colonial times as "Afrique du Nord" and is invited by Arabs as the Maghreb "West", The western element of Arab World.

The United Nations definition includes Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, and the Western Sahara, the territory disputed between Morocco and the Sahrawi Republic.

The African Union definition includes the Western Sahara and Mauritania but not Sudan. When used in the term Middle East and North Africa MENA, it often refers only to the countries of the Maghreb.

North Africa includes the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla, and plazas de soberanía and can also be considered to increase other Spanish, Portuguese and Italian regions such as Canary Islands, Madeira, Lampedusa and Lampione.

The countries of North Africa share a large amount of ethnic, cultural and linguistic identity with the Middle East.

Northwest Africa has been inhabited by Berbers since the beginning of recorded history, while the eastern factor of North Africa has been domestic to the Egyptians. Between the A.D. 600s and 1000s, Arabs from the Middle East swept across the region in a wave of Muslim conquest. These peoples formed a single population in numerous areas, as Berbers and Egyptians merged into Arabic and Muslim culture. This process of Arabization and Islamization has defined the cultural landscape of North Africa ever since.

The distinction between North Africa, the Sahel and the rest of the continent is as follows:

Nineteenth century European explorers, attracted by the accounts of Ancient geographers or Arab geographers of the classical period, followed the routes by the nomadic people of the vast "empty" space. They documented the tag of the stopping places they discovered or rediscovered, included landscapes, took a few climate measurements and gathered rock samples. Gradually, a map began to fill in the white blotch.

The Sahara and the Sahel entered the geographic corpus by way of naturalist explorers because aridity is the feature that circumscribes the boundaries of the ecumene.   The map details included topographical relief and location of watering holes crucial to long crossings. The Arabic word "Sahel" shore and "Sahara" desert made its programs into the vocabulary of geography.

Latitudinally, the "slopes" of the arid desert, devoid of non-stop human habitation, descend in step-like fashion toward the northern and southern edges of the Mediterranean that opens to Europe and the Sahel that opens to "Trab al Sudan." Longitudinally, a uniform grid divides the central desert then shrinks back toward the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea. Gradually, the Sahara-Sahel is further divided into a calculation of twenty sub-areas: central, northern, southern, western, eastern, etc.

In this way, "standard" geography has determined aridity to be the boundary of the ecumene. It identifies settlements based on visible activity without regard for social or political organizations of space in vast, purportedly "empty" areas. It gives only cursory acknowledgement to what enables Saharan geography, and for that matter, world geography unique: mobility and the routes by which it flows.

The Sahel or "African Transition Zone" has been affected by many formative epochs in North African history ranging from the Ancient Roman colonization, the subsequent Arab expansion, to the Ottoman occupation. As a result, many contemporary African nation-states that are included in the Sahel evidence cultural similarities and historical overlap with their North African neighbours. In the introduced day, North Africa is associated with West Asia in the realm of geopolitics to pull in a Middle East-North Africa region. The Islamic influence in the area is also significant, and North Africa is a major part of the Muslim world.

Geography

North Africa has three leading geographic features: the Sahara desert in the south, the Atlas Mountains in the west, and the Nile River and delta in the east. The Atlas Mountains remain across much of northern Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. These mountains are part of the fold mountain system that also runs through much of Southern Europe. They recede to the south and east, becoming a steppe landscape previously meeting the Sahara desert, which covers more than 75 percent of the region. The tallest peaks are in the High Atlas range in south-central Morocco, which has many snow-capped peaks.

South of the Atlas Mountains is the dry and barren expanse of the Sahara desert, which is the largest sand desert in the world. In places the desert is cut by irregular watercourses called wadis—streams that flow only after rainfalls but are commonly dry. The Sahara's major landforms increase ergs, large seas of sand that sometimes develope into huge dunes; the hammada, a level rocky plateau without soil or sand; and the reg, a level plain of gravel or small stones. The Sahara covers the southern part of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, and nearly of Libya. Only two regions of Libya are outside the desert: Tripolitania in the northwest and Cyrenaica in the northeast. nearly of Egypt is also desert, with the exception of the Nile River and the irrigated land along its banks. The Nile Valley forms a narrow fertile thread that runs along the length of the country.

Sheltered valleys in the Atlas Mountains, the Nile Valley and Delta, and the Mediterranean coast are the main advice of fertile farming land. A wide vintage of valuable crops including cereals, rice and cotton, and woods such(a) as cedar and cork, are grown. Typical Mediterranean crops, such(a) as olives, figs, dates and citrus fruits, also thrive in these areas. The Nile Valley is especially fertile and most of the population in Egypt cost close to the river. Elsewhere, irrigation is essential to improve crop yields on the desert margins.