Stone Age cultures have been found in northern Mauritania. Berber nomads moved into the area in the 1st millennium A.D. and subjugated the indigenous black population. The newcomers belonged to the Sanhaja Confederation that long dominated trade between the northern parts of Africa and the kingdom of Ghana, the capital of which, Kumbi Saleh (Koumbi Saleh), was in southeastern Mauritania.

Under Almoravid leadership, the Sanhaja razed Kumbi Saleh in 1076, although Ghana survived until the early XIIIth century. The Berbers, in turn, were conquered by Arabs in the XVIth century. The descendants of the Arabs became the upper stratum of Mauritanian society, and Arabic gradually displaced Berber dialects as the language of the country.

French forces, moving up the Sénégal River, made the area a French protectorate by 1905 and a colony in 1920.
In 1946 Mauritania became an overseas territory of the French Union. Under French occupation, slavery was legally abolished.

Mauritania was first peopled by Negroes and by the Sanhadja Berbers. It was the cradle of the Berber Almoravid movement. The Almoravids imposed Islam upon all the neighbouring peoples. A caravan route at that time linked Mauritania with Morocco. Arab tribes infiltrated by this route and in the XVth century submerged the Berbers.

The nomadic tribes formed several powerful confederations : Trarza and Brakna, which dominated the Sénégal River valley ; Kunta in the east ; and Rigaibat (Regeibat) in the north.

The Islamic Republic of Mauritania was proclaimed on November 28, 1958, under the constitution of the Fifth French Republic, and on November 28, 1960, it became fully independent.
It joined the United Nations in 1961.

That same year Moktar Ould Daddah was elected its first president ; he was reelected in 1966, 1971, and 1976.
Mauritania was severely affected by a drought in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nevertheless, its economy expanded as newly discovered iron and copper deposits were exploited.
In 1976 it annexed the southern third of adjacent Spanish Sahara, which at that time was ceded by Spain ; Morocco received the rest of the territory.
A Saharan nationalist movement, the Polisario Front, seeking to make the Western Sahara an independent nation, weakened Mauritania with guerrilla warfare.

In July 1978, President Daddah was ousted in a coup led by Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Ould Salek.
After he was replaced by another army officer, Mohamed Ould Louly, Mauritania agreed, in August 1979, to withdraw from the Western Sahara.

President Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya was elected by popular vote for a six-year term on December 12, 1997 (next election will be held in November 2003).

President Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya was reelected with 90.9% of the vote in 1997. In 1992 he was elected with 63% of the vote.