Tamazgha is the name. The country of the Imaziɣen, the free people. The territorial extent of a civilisation that has occupied north Africa and the Sahel for at least four thousand years, that gave rise to the Numidian, Mauretanian, Almoravid, and Almohad polities, that has spoken some variant of the same language family from the Canary Islands to the western desert of Egypt, and that has survived the successive arrivals of Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Ottomans, French, Spanish, and Italians.
The name itself is a modern reassertion. The form Tamazɣa is constructed in classical Berber morphology — feminine of the autonym Amaziɣ, by the same pattern that gives Tafransist (a French-speaking woman) or Tamurt n Leqbayel (the country of the Kabyles) — but the country-name Tamazɣa was not in continuous use across the long history it now claims. The medieval and early modern populations of north Africa did not know themselves under a single shared political name. They were Sanhaja, Zenata, Masmuda, Kutama; they were the Aith Waryaghar of the Rif and the Aït Atta of the Saghro and the Kel Ahaggar of the Hoggar; they were the speakers of Tachelhit or Taqbaylit or Tarifit or Tamasheq.
The unifying name has been recovered. The work of recovery began in the colonial period, in the linguistic and ethnographic monographs of Hanoteau and Letourneux, of Mouliéras, of Bates and Foucauld; it accelerated in the post-independence period through the writings of Mouloud Mammeri and Salem Chaker; it became a mass political fact in the Berber Spring of 1980, the Black Spring of 2001, the constitutionalisation of Tamazight in Algeria and Morocco, and the Hirak of the Rif. The name Tamazɣa now travels with the modern Amazigh movement.
What does the name describe? A geography of mountains and oases — the Atlas chains, the Aurès, the Hoggar, the Tassili, the Aïr — surrounded by a coastal Mediterranean strip and a deep Saharan reach. A linguistic continuum of varieties that share more grammar and vocabulary than any other comparable language family of comparable extent. A history, fragmented but recoverable, of indigenous polities that took the form of confederations and tribal federations more often than of consolidated states, but that produced caliphates and empires when occasion required.
Above all, a present. Tamazgha today is the lived sphere of perhaps thirty to forty million people for whom Berber is the principal or secondary language of household, of trade, of worship in some communities, of song. It is a sphere within a larger and overlapping Arabic-speaking and French-speaking and Spanish-speaking and Italian-speaking sphere; the boundaries are thick and permeable, the populations are mixed in their daily lives, and the political relationship between Tamazigh-speaking and other populations of the Maghreb is in active negotiation.
This archive does not romanticise the past or the boundary. It accepts that the name Tamazgha is a modern political claim; it accepts that the populations it describes are bilingual or trilingual in their daily speech; it accepts that membership in Imazighen is one identity among several available to any given individual. What it asserts is that the geography, the language family, the history, and the contemporary political fact are sufficiently coherent to merit a single archival treatment.
The brief is to gather. To gather the places — the regions, mountains, oases, valleys, cities, and sites — into a structured atlas. To gather the peoples — the confederations, tribes, and linguistic groupings — into a connected set of entries. To gather the words, the symbols, the persons, the events, and the published sources into modules that point at one another and that can be read together. The graph is the structure, the entry is the unit, the cross-reference is the proof of coherence.
The eight modules are fixed. The atlas, the peoples, the lexicon, the symbols, the persons, the timeline, the library, the essays. The first six are descriptive: they answer "what is in Tamazgha." The library is methodological: it answers "from where do we know this." The essays are interpretive: they answer "what does it add up to."
The archive is openly licensed, in English, designed to be readable by humans and by machines. It cites and stands on prior scholarship rather than competing with it; the Encyclopédie berbère of Camps and Chaker remains the canonical academic reference and is itself an entry in this archive's library. What this archive offers in addition is the digital-native form: graph-organised, geographically organised, openly trainable, mobile-first.
Tamazgha is the name. The work is the gathering.