The earliest extant geographies of the African continent made distinctions between people based on skin color. The Ancient Greeks divided Africa into “Libya” and “Ethiopia” (“burnt-face”), with “Ethiopia” beginning at the Upper Nile and stretched to the Nubian desert in present-day Sudan and “Libya” containing the rest of Africa from the Mediterranean to the edge of the Sahara. While the Romans added different sub-groups to each category, the dichotomy of black and non-black bodies and their corresponding geography remained relatively unchanged. This division between black and non-black bodies through geography continued in the emerging Arabic tradition. However, the physical territory of “Ethiopia”—translated into Arabic as “Bilad al-Sudan” (“Land of the Blacks”)—grew in scope as a result of the Arab conquests. At the same time, the spread of Islam opened up the possibility of erasing this previous geographical distinction by subsuming them into another geographic entity, the Bilad or Dar al-Islam. However, the formation and expansion of Muslim states in North Africa during the pre-modern period preserved this geographical distinction between black and non-black bodies. This paper will trace the ways in which the geography of black bodies interacted with the emerging geography of the Moroccan state during the pre-Modern period. It will track the ways in which Classical ideas of blackness in Africa emerged in Arabic geographies and examine how the construction of a specific and unified “Maghrib” came to rely upon the idea of a clear boundary line with the Bilad al-Sudan.