The Zenata were the second of the three great medieval Berber confederations, occupying the central and eastern Maghreb between the Atlas and the Mediterranean coast and into the Saharan steppe. They are remembered in the medieval sources as a population of horse-riding pastoralists, organised in mobile clans across what is today eastern Morocco, northern Algeria, Tunisia, and northwestern Libya.
The Zenati branch of the Berber language family — distinct in phonology and lexicon from both Sanhaja and Masmuda — survives in the modern Tarifit of the Rif, the Tachawit of the Aurès, the Tumzabt of the M'zab, the Nafusi of western Libya, and several Saharan oasis dialects. The category is linguistic as well as historical.
Several major dynasties of the central medieval Maghreb were Zenati. The Maghrawa dominated central Morocco around Sijilmasa and Fez in the tenth and eleventh centuries; the Banu Ifran competed with them at Salé and Tlemcen; the Marinids took Fez from the Almohads in 1248 and ruled Morocco until 1465; the Wattasids succeeded them; the Zayyanids of Tlemcen ruled western Algeria from 1235 to 1556; the Hafsid sphere in Ifriqiya grew from the same milieu.
The Zenata name is now an ethnonym of memory rather than of ongoing community: no modern population calls itself Iznaten as a primary identity, but the Zenati linguistic and historical category remains foundational to the analysis of the medieval Maghreb.