The veiled Berber camel confederation of the western Sahara, built from the Lemtuna, Massufa and Gudala (Djodala) tribes, which controlled the western trans-Saharan trade road between Sijilmasa in the Maghrib and the Ghana Empire's terminus at Koumbi Saleh. It was a decentralised polity split between independent nomads who kept traditional religion and Muslim oasis merchants who ran the caravans, and it was the parent stock of the Almoravid movement — Ibn Yasin's jihad of 1042 grew out of its Gudala and Lemtuna tribes and rebuilt its unity as an empire.
Absorbed into its own offspring: the confederation broke up in the early 11th century, and the Almoravids who launched their jihad from it in 1042 re-created Sanhaja unity as an empire that took Sijilmasa and Aoudaghost by 1054. Sanhaja Berber tribes survived the empire's fall as the zawaya (clerical) stratum of western Saharan society until the Beni Hassan Arabs defeated them in the Char Bouba war of 1644–74; their Znaga name and language persisted in southern Mauritania.
Norris works directly from the Arabic sources (al-Bakri and after) that are the only written evidence for the Sanhaja/Lemtuna confederation and its Aoudaghost capital.
Traces the Sanhaja tribes from the confederation through to their defeat by the Beni Hassan — i.e. the whole downstream fate this record's fate field summarises.