The Hoggar, in Tamasheq Ahaggar, is a high volcanic plateau in the central Sahara of southern Algeria, rising to 2,908 metres at Mount Tahat. Its core is a basalt and trachyte massif punctuated by older crystalline outcrops; the Atakor sub-range concentrates the most dramatic landscape of basaltic necks and plugs.
The Hoggar is the homeland of the Kel Ahaggar, the Tuareg confederation traditionally led from the oasis town of Tamanrasset. The Kel Ahaggar speak Tamahaq, the northern Tuareg variety, written in the indigenous Tifinagh script that has preserved the consonantal alphabet of ancient Libyco-Berber.
The plateau preserves rock paintings and engravings spanning the green Sahara of the early Holocene through the cattle period, the horse period, and the camel period — though the better-known galleries lie further east on the Tassili n'Ajjer.
Tamanrasset, on the southern flank of the massif, is the administrative capital of Algeria's largest province and a node in the Saharan trans-routes that link the Maghreb to Niger and Mali. Charles de Foucauld, the French priest and lexicographer of Tamahaq, was killed there in 1916; his four-volume dictionary remains a foundational reference for the language.