Noul Lamta

Nul Lamta was the caravan city of the Wadi Noun, where the Lamta and Lamtuna tribes lived along a river that flowed in from the east. Al-Idrisi, writing in 1154 for Roger II of Sicily, called it a large, irrigated city to which people from the surrounding regions came for their needs. It minted its own gold coins and was famous for the Lamta shields, light targes of oryx hide that the Maghribi armies carried against the Christians of Spain. By the time of the Sufi hagiographer al-Tadili, in the early thirteenth century, its splendour had faded, and in the centuries that followed the memory of the city lived on in the oasis villages of Asrir and Tighmert, which lie over its core.