Tahert

Tahert, the Berber Tihert or Lioness, gave its name to the farming country of the Tiaret region on the Tell Atlas highlands, about 150 km from the sea. It was the capital of the Rustamid imams of the Ibadi sect from 761 to 909, a centre of learning that welcomed Mu'tazila and many other schools until the Fatimids took it in 909. It held a mountain pass at 1,083 metres and so commanded the central Maghreb.

Later it was ruled from Tlemcen. In the fourteenth century the fortress of Qal'at ibn Salama near Frenda sheltered the scholar Ibn Khaldun from 1375 to 1379, and there he wrote the Muqaddimah. The Ottomans took the region in the sixteenth century, and Tiaret then belonged to the Beylik of the West, which answered to Algiers.