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The description Moors has referred to several historic and modern populations of Muslim (and earlier non-Muslim) people of Berber, Black African and Arab descent from North Africa, some of whom came to conquer and occupy the Iberian Peninsula for nearly 800 years. The North Africans termed it Al Andalus, comprising most of what is now Spain and Portugal. Moors are not distinct or self-defined people, but the appellation was applied by medieval and early modern Europeans primarily to Berbers, but also Arabs, and Muslim Iberians and West Africans from Mali and Niger who had been absorbed into the Almoravid dynasty. As early as 1911, mainstream scholars observed that "The term Moors has no real ethnological value." Moreover, historian David Levering Lewis notes that "Moor and Saracen were applied indifferently by Christians to Arabs, Berbers, or Muslim Persians." In the Spanish language, the term for Moors is Moro; in Portuguese the word is mouro. There seems to have been some confusion about the relationship of the word moro/mouro to the word moreno (which means brown), both from Greek, i.e. black. However, the two words have different etymological roots. The Andalusian Moors of the late Medieval era inhabited the Iberian Peninsula after the Moorish conquests of the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates, and the final Umayyad conquest of Hispania.[citation needed]The Moors' rule stretched at times as far as modern-day Mauritania, West African countries, and the Senegal River. Earlier, the Classical Romans interacted (and later conquered) parts of Mauretania, a state which covered northern portions of modern Morocco and much of north western and central Algeria during the classical period. The people of the region were noted in Classical literature as the Mauri. The term Mauri, or variations thereof, was later used by European traders and explorers of the 16th to 18th centuries to designate ethnic Berber and Arab groups speaking the Hassaniya Arabic dialect.[citation nee