Regional Descriptions: Help the EBII Team

[The Irate Pirate]

I'll have a go at taking on Kilikia and Kypros, i've still got a little while before my exams so I can get through at least one of them.

Also I did a travellor's log for Mauretania before realising someone had already got to it. I'll post it here anyway just so it wasn't a completely pointless endeavour. Tried to do it in the style of someone like Pliny who did not have much first hand experience of the region. Also did a rough draft of some of the later parts.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

This is the great land of Atlas, a region of craggy mountains and lions who devour the local nomads’ flocks with great frequency. Once these peaks to the south are surmounted beyond them lays the great impassable desert of the west, a barrier to all but the hardiest of men. Much of this region is a plain between the mountains stretching towards the tumultuous ocean and it is here most of the inhabitants live, tending to their crops and herds as all men do.
Though the land is hot (as of course, one is much closer to the sun here), mountain tops curiously always seem to have snow falling onto them as it is in colder regions of the world. From these frosty peaks local rivers are formed, it seems the gods have been forced to give even these hardy peoples respite and as such agriculture is a possibility in the mountain valleys and plains of the interior. The melt water allows mighty trees to grow on the mountain slopes from which a type of cloth can be created.
The coastal region, though not massively hospitable compared to the Mediterranean coastline is reasonable enough and several settlements exist here. Once away from the fertile coastal plain however the land begins to turn rocky as one approaches the mountains to the east and south. There are few fixed poleis, instead roaming nomadic tribes become more plentiful in number inland, surviving off their goats alone and not the crops of civilised men. The people who inhabit this land are disparate tribes, though we know of them as Mauri or Mauroi, they are western Aethiopians and more akin to the hardy Gaetulians than the Mauri coastal dwellers on the northern coast. These people braid their hair in elaborate ways and fight with light armaments, on horseback or with a shield of skin. The southerners are not as soft as the coastal dwellers and are famed for their ability to protect their livestock from the dangers of the mountains; the animals and the ever present dust storms.

Geography

Southern Mauretania is a land of mountains dominated by a large coastal plain that extends inland, rainwater from the Atlas Mountains collects into rivers and waters this plain enough to allow for a fertile region to exist, protected from the fierce conditions of the Sahara Desert by the Middle Atlas Mountains of the south and east. It is located in what is now modern day Morocco and includes parts of western Algeria.
The weather here is mostly Mediterranean in style with hot and dry summers with fairly mild yet very rainy winters, colder temperatures present in the mountains allow for year round snowfall on the highest peaks leading to a large system of rivers to exist and large areas of forest on the slopes of the eastern ranges.
The division between this coastal plain and the Mediterranean coastal plain to the north east by mountains governed Roman provincial policy in the area with the west regarded as Tingitana and the east Caesariensis. Mauretania is famous for its diverse flora as a result of great variations in terrain height and much of the wood used by Rome and Phoenician colonists was taken from here, some prevalent flora included the pinus halepensis (Aleppo pine) and cedrus libani (Lebanon Cedar).

The People, Society and Government

The inhabitants of the region are Mauretanian ‘Berbers’ with their own kingdom based further to the north on the coast though though at one point there was a fairly sizeable Phoenician presence, with numerous inscriptions found in some of the coastal cities and Volubilis itself. The term Berber stems from the Arabic readings of Greek texts which referred to ‘barbarians’, the Greeks called these Berbers peoples ‘Libyans’ to differentiate them from the eastern African peoples who were usually labelled as ‘Ethiopians’