People
Nagmus
Relizane-Tiaret area (Barrington)
Listen to the story
The Nagmus were a people of Roman Mauretania, and their name on the map is oddly broken in two: the first three letters sit on one side of a road's distance figure, the last three on the other. The squeeze suggests that names of peoples went onto the copy only after the roads were drawn. The geographer Ptolemy lists them in an order that points to the Relizane and Tiaret area of Algeria, yet the Tabula places them far away, near the source of a river flowing into the Ampsaga. Scholars wonder whether this wandering tribe moved or split, and a mountain called Djebel Nagmous still seems to echo the name.