GHANA MEDIEVAL EMPIRE

The land of Medieval Ghana lay far inland from the Atlantic coast of West Africa, and about 100 miles north of the Niger River in the sparse grasslands of the Sahel. One of the earliest of the medieval empires of that region was the Ghana Empire. It came into existence some time after 500 c.e. and lasted until late in the 12th century.

(The name of the modern republic of Ghana was chosen in honor of that ancient kingdom, but there is no direct relationship between the two. Modern Ghana lies hundreds of miles to the southeast, on the Atlantic coast.)

The dominant people of ancient Ghana were the Soninke. They were the most northern of the Mande peoples, and they called their area Wagadu. Some ancestors of the Soninke were probably among the Stone Age farmers who began growing sorghum and millet in the Sahel grasslands from 3000 b.c.e. to 1000 b.c.e.

By about 1000 b.c.e., the Soninke’s ancestors began establishing small settled communities, and around 600 b.c.e. these grew into large villages administered by chieftains. These early farmers were among the first to take advantage of the iron-working technology that developed in West Africa by about 500 b.c.e. to 400 b.c.e.

The Soninke were in contact with the nomads of the Sahara, from whom they acquired small horses brought from North Africa. The early Soninke’s superior iron weapons and horses made it possible for them to establish a kingdom. They gradually expanded their territories and dominated neighboring rulers until, by the 10th century, the kingdom had become an empire.

Visitors from North Africa began referring to the Soninke state as Ghana, but the Soninke themselves and other Mande peoples know the ancient kingdom as Wagadu.

The Legend of Wagadu

Just like other peoples of sub-Saharan West Africa, the Soninke have their own ideas of what is important about the distant past. They prefer to emphasize things such as family rivalries, the heroic deeds of their ancestors, and their ancestors’ relationship with the spirit world.

The Soninke people’s ideas about their history are expressed in the Legend of Wagadu. This is an oral tradition told by many generations of gesere (Soninke professional storytellers and musicians). Details vary from one version to the next, but the legend generally describes the origins and early deeds of the different Soninke clans.

The legend often begins by describing how the ancestor Dinga came from somewhere in the Middle East. Some say he stayed for a time at Jenne, an ancient city that still exists on the Niger River north of Bamako, the capital of modern Mali. Dinga later moved to the town of Dia on the Inland Delta of the Niger. There, he married and had two sons. They became Soninke ancestors in other towns of the Sahel.

Dinga’s movements from place to place are the storytellers’ way of explaining the presence of Soninke populations in various parts of the Sahel.

Dinga is said to have eventually arrived at a place southwest of Nioro in today’s Mali. When he arrived there, it was dominated by genies, or spirits, of the bush. Various versions of the legend describe a kind of magician’s duel that took place between Dinga and the genies. Dinga won the contest and married the three daughters of the chief genie. Their sons became the ancestors of many Soninke clans. One clan was the Cissé. It was the Cissé that became the ruling clan of Wagadu.
In the next episode in the legend, Dinga had grown old and blind. He decided that before he died, he wanted to pass his chiefly power on to his oldest son, Khiné. But a younger son named Diabe Cissé disguised himself as the oldest brother and tricked his father into giving him the chiefly powers.
According to one version of the story, after Dinga died, Diabe Cissé had to run away from his angry older brother. He hid in the wilderness. One day a mysterious drum fell out of a tree and landed at his feet.

When he beat the drum, four troops of cavalry (soldiers who fight on horseback) came out from the four corners of the wilderness. The four commanders recognized Diabe Cissé as their leader and became his lieutenants. Later, after the kingdom was founded, they became chiefs or governors of the four provinces, and were known as fado.

Diabe Cissé set out to find a location where he could settle down. He wound up at a place that became Kumbi Saleh. It is located in the southern part of what is now Mauritania.

When Diabe Cissé arrived at the site where the town of Kumbi Saleh was to be established, he found it was guarded by a giant snake named Bida. In several versions of the legend, Bida is said to have lived in either a well or a cave. The great snake is usually thought of as a python. The python is a snake that often lives near streams and rivers, so having Bida take this form suggests the new settlement was located near water.

Diabe Cissé entered into an agreement with the snake Bida. They agreed that Diabe Cissé could settle there and Bida would remain the guardian of the place. They also made a deal that every year the great snake would be given the most beautiful young virgin. In return, Bida would guarantee that plenty of rain would fall on the region and that there would be lots of gold.

The new kingdom was called Wagadu, and its capital was Kumbi Saleh. It prospered under the rule of Diabe Cissé and his descendants, who were known by the title of maghan. The descendants of Diabe Cissé, and the descendants of the four fado, or commanders of the provinces, were recognized as the aristocratic clans (the clans with the highest social position) of the Soninke.

These aristocratic clans were collectively called wago. That term, and the name of the kingdom, Wagadu, are probably related. “Wagadu” is a contraction of wagadugu, which can be translated as “land of the wago.”

Once a year, representatives of the four provinces of Wagadu would assemble at Kumbi Saleh to participate in the virgin sacrifice to Bida, the guardian serpent. This ceremony was the annual renewal of the agreement between Diabe Cissé and Bida. According to some versions of the legend, each year a different province was required to supply a virgin for the sacrifice. If this was actually the practice, it was a custom that probably helped promote unity in the kingdom.

After an unspecified number of generations passed, a year arrived when the virgin to be sacrificed happened to be the girlfriend of a young aristocratic man. When the girl was about to be given to Bida, the young man leaped forward with his sword and cut off the snake’s head. As Bida’s head flew up into the sky, it pronounced a terrible curse that from that time on, no rain would fall on Wagadu and no more gold would be found there.

Without rain and gold, Wagadu declined and fell into ruin. The Soninke people moved away and the countryside became a desert. Some versions of the legend have a final episode that is probably meant to explain how the Soninke people ended up in other places. It is said that the people of Wagadu were enraged that the young man killed Bida, the guardian of the kingdom. He was not a hero, but rather, the villain of the story. He had destroyed the security and well-being of the entire community. To show the importance of the guardian serpent, in some versions of the legend Bida was included in the royal family tree as an ancestor.

The snake killer had to flee for his life on a fast horse. One of his relatives, who also had a strong horse, was told to lead the chase. But he refused to harm his young relative.

The young man hid in a town to the south, at the home of his mother. When the angry mob caught up with him, his mother offered to feed the people of Wagadu if ever there was a famine (a dangerous shortage of food).

Is There History in the Legend?

The Wagadu legend’s magical elements are obvious. But parts of it reflect social and environmental realities that could have actually been a part of Soninke history. The kind of competition seen between the younger brother, Diabe Cissé, and his older brother, Khiné, was common in families of the Soninke people. In the early history of the Western Sudan kingdoms, there are many stories of brothers being involved in bloody rivalries for their father’s throne (especially in the Songhay Empire).

The offer made by the snake-killer’s mother to provide for any refugees from Wagadu is also of interest. It corresponds to what one Arab geographer said about matrilineal descent (power passed to the son of the king’s sister) in those early times. There might even have been instances of female chieftains.

Looking at the environmental elements in the legend, it is a fact that pythons are equally at home in the water and on land. Their presence was a sure sign of a climate with enough water to support a settlement, and this is suggested by the bargain struck between Bida and Diabe Cissé. In recent times, zoologists (scientists who study animals) have found that during the heat of the day in the dry season, pythons usually seek water in which to submerge themselves.

Before the arrival of Islam and Christianity in Africa, the great pythons were sacred religious symbols throughout sub-Saharan West Africa, from the Sahel to the Atlantic coast. So it is not difficult to see how the idea of the great snake as a highly spiritual water guardian could develop.
As for the riches symbolically linked with the great snake Bida, there is a real connection between rainfall and gold production. In ancient times, when the climate supported cities of the Sahel such as Kumbi Saleh, the annual rain fell very heavily, flooding otherwise dry gullies and washing gold into alluvial deposits (layers of sand, rock, and debris deposited by flowing water). In the ancient goldfields of Bambuk, the gold was collected from just such alluvial deposits.

If the climate of Ghana dried up and there was a drought for many years, the lack of an annual rush of water through the dry gullies would mean no new deposits of gold. No water would also mean the farmers could not grow their food crops. The loss of both food and gold production from drought provides a possible environmental explanation for the gradual decline of the ancient kingdom of Wagadu. Historians believe this destruction was complete by the early 13th century.

Regional and Trans-Saharan Trade

In 738, a governor of the Maghrib sent a trading expedition to the “the land of the blacks”—Sudan. The expedition returned successfully, bringing slaves and gold. The trade seems to have originated not with the Arabs, but with the Berber peoples of the desert.

The most powerful of these desert Berbers were the Sanhaja, who lived in the Sahara and traded with the Soninke people who lived to the south. The Soninke’s early involvement with the traders of the Sahara is one reason Ghana emerged as the first of the great medieval empires.

The other main reason is that Ghana controlled the sources of gold. “The ruler of Ghana is the wealthiest king on the face of the earth because of his treasures and stocks of gold extracted in olden times for his predecessors and himself,” wrote Arab geographer Muhammad ibn Hawqal (10th century) in 988 (quoted in N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins’s Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History).

As has already been mentioned, efficient food production, early control of iron technology for superior weapons, and having horses helped the Soninke achieve early superiority over their neighbors. Arab geographer Ahmad ibn al-Yaqubi described Ghana as one of the two most powerful kingdoms of the Western Sudan. He said Ghana’s ruler had other kings under his authority.

What eventually raised the Soninke kingdom to the level of an empire was its control of both regional trade and trade across the Sahara Desert. The regional trade involved the exchange of salt, copper, and dates from the Sahara. Products from the savanna areas included slaves, livestock, iron tools, iron weapons and utensils, animal hides, leather goods such as sandals, cushions, and bags, locally woven and dyed cloth, clay pottery, woven grass products such as baskets and sleeping mats, medicinal herbs, and foods such as dried fish, rice, various grains, spices, honey, and fruit. From farther south, nearer the forest, came gold and kola nuts.

Beyond this regional trade, Ghana was well positioned to dominate the international caravan trade that went across the Western Sahara and on to the Middle East and the Mediterranean Sea. One of the reasons such commercial development was possible was the introduction of the camel into North Africa.

The camel is often referred to as the ship of the desert. Because of its unique physical characteristics, the camel can survive in very dry climates. Its large, flat feet are well suited for walking across the shifting sands. The camel could also carry large loads for many days without food or water.

In the second and third centuries c.e., the use of camels quickly expanded among North African Berber peoples. The Sanhaja people of the western Sahara acquired large numbers of camels by the fourth and fifth centuries. As a result, they began to develop and control increasingly busy desert trade routes. The caravans that crossed the Sahara Desert (a route called “Trans-Saharan”) could consist of as few as six camels or as many as 2,000. They usually left North Africa in April or May, and were led by professional Sanhaja guides who could find the wells and water holes that dotted the desert.

The dangerous journey lasted from two and a half to three months, depending on the size of the caravan and the conditions of the route. Unusually dry years could leave the wells with insufficient water. If a severe sandstorm came up, it could bury the entire caravan alive. Ghana’s location in the Sahel enabled the Soninke people to control commerce from the savanna and forest zones in the south, and the Sahara and Maghrib (northwest Africa) in the north. The northward trade passed over a network of routes connecting Ghana not only with the Maghrib, but also with Tripoli and Egypt.

The geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi (1179–1229), a freed slave of Greek origin who became a Muslim, described Ghana’s commercial position (quoted in Levtzion and Hopkins): “Merchants meet in Ghana and from there one enters the arid wastes towards the land of Gold. Were it not for Ghana, this journey would be impossible, because the land of Gold is in a place isolated from the west in the land of the Sudan. From Ghana the merchants take provisions [food and water] on the way to the land of Gold.”

The trans-Saharan trade southward mostly involved manufactured objects and various luxury goods from the Mediterranean world, Europe, and North Africa. They included iron products such as knives, scissors, needles, and razors, brass and copperware, luxury garments of silk, velvet, and brocade, glass and porcelain beads, other kinds of ornaments and jewelry, mirrors, carpets, perfumes, paper, tea, coffee, and sugar. Horses from North Africa were one of the most important items moving south. So were cowrie shells, which were used as currency in West African markets.

Salt, dates, and copper were traded northward out of the Sahara. From the forest region went gold and kola nuts. From the savanna went slaves, elephant and hippopotamus ivory, ostrich feathers, wild and domestic animal hides, and gum arabic (obtained from acacia trees and used in the manufacture of ink, textiles, and drugs).

The City of Awdaghust

During the period of Ghana’s greatest power in the late 10th and early 11th centuries, one of the most important commercial cities under its control was Awdaghust. This city was about 125 miles northwest of Kumbi Saleh. Abu Ubayd al-Bakri (d. 1094), an Arab scholar living in Islamic Spain, described it as a large, crowded town with well-built, handsome houses. The buildings sat on sandy ground below a big mountain that had absolutely nothing growing on it.

Most of the population was Muslim traders from Ifriqiya (the North African region between the Maghrib and Egypt). Al-Bakri said the local farmers grew wheat, sorghum, date palms, fig trees, and henna shrubs (the leaves of which produce a reddish brown dye). The vegetable gardens were watered using buckets, which was the usual method in Sahel towns and Sahara oases.

Awdaghust sat on a trade route for gold that was shipped northward to the city of Sijilmasa in southern Morocco. There the gold was minted into coins. The caravan journey between Awdaghust and Sijilmasa took two months. The Arab geographer Ibn Hawqal visited Sijilmasa in 951 and reported seeing a steady stream of trade with the lands south of the Sahara. He saw “abundant profits and the constant coming and going of caravans” (quoted in Levtzion and Hopkins).

The main traders of Awdaghust were Berbers of the Zanata clan. They were from the Atlas mountain region in Morocco. In the 10th century, Zanata traders in the city began to dominate the trans-Saharan trade between Awdaghust in the south and Sijilmasa in the north.

But it was the Sanhaja nomads of the desert who really held power over the markets. The Sanhaja are sometimes called “the people of the veil” because the men covered their faces (not the women, as is the case in many Muslim societies).

The Sanhaja avoided living in the city because they preferred living in tents and wandering the open land on their camels. From out in the desert, they asserted great authority over all the routes leading to the cities. The Sanhaja got their income from controlling these trade routes. They were the guides and protectors for some caravans, but they demanded tolls from others. Sometimes, they simply raided and robbed caravans.

The Sanhaja also profited from trade centered in Awdaghust by sharing control of the city with the Zanata Berbers. But around the middle of the 11th century the Soninke of Ghana took control of Awdaghust.

The Zanata traders of the city accepted Soninke authority. This caused the Sanhaja people of the desert to lose an important source of income, so they continued to compete with the Soninke for control of trade and had a great impact on 11th century Ghana Eventually, many Sanhaja clans unified into a powerful Islamic state that recaptured Awdaghust from the Soninke. The unified Sanhaja groups came to be known as the Almoravids. The Almoravids were strict Muslims who took control of Islamic Northwest Africa around 1085. The Almoravid Empire eventually reached from the Sénégal River through the Maghrib into Spain.

The Almoravids

Some time during the eighth century, the Zanata and other Berbers of the Atlas region became Muslims. Later, the Sanhaja were also converted to Islam. The religious conversion gave them all wider commercial connections with the Muslim world. This increased the scale and complexity of their trade, and generally made them more prosperous. It was in the century following the Soninke takeover of the city of Awdaghust, that the Sanhaja became involved in the Almoravid movement. This had a great influence on the spread of Islam, which was a major factor in West African history.
At the beginning of the 10th century, the Sanhaja were masters of the Western Sahara. But they were spread over a vast territory and were divided into clans. They dominated trade routes and salt mines.
The clans living in the southern part of the desert were the Juddala and the Lamtuna, who bordered the kingdom of Ghana. Control of Awdaghust was disputed between the Lamtuna and the Soninke. Islam was spreading through the region, but it was weaker and less strict in the south than it was in the north. Around 1035, the chief of the Juddala clan, Yahya ibn Ibrahim (d. ca. 1039; his name is Arabic for “John, son of Abraham”), made a pilgrimage (a journey to a special sacred place) to Mecca (in today’s Saudi Arabia). During his long journey to the Muslim holy land, Yahya realized that his people back in the Western Sahara had only a very basic idea of what Islam was about. They were not behaving like the stricter Muslims in Arabia and North Africa. On his way home, Yahya visited with a famous Muslim theologian (someone who studies religion) in the city of Qayrawan. Yahya asked the theologian if he had a very wise follower who could come back with him to the Sahara to teach true Islam. But nobody at Qayrawan was willing to suffer the hardships of living in the desert. So they sent Yahya to a religious center in southern Morocco, where he met Abdallah ibn Yasin (d. 1059). Yasin’s mother was a Sanhaja of the Jazula clan from a desert town near Ghana, and Yasin had no fear of living in the Sahara.

In 1039, Yahya arrived back at the tents of his Juddala people. Yasin was with him. As a teacher of Islam, Yasin proved to be a strict master He was determined to convert everyone, even if he had to do so under the threat of physical harm.

At one point, along with Yahya, Yasin led the Juddala to attack a branch of the Lamtuna clan and force them to join his new religious movement. Yasin’s strictness and attitude of superiority over the local people were deeply resented by the Juddala. He became increasingly unpopular. He survived under the protection of Yahya. But when Yahya died, the Juddala looted and destroyed Yasin’s house and exiled him from the community.

Yasin fled with some devoted followers and went into hiding at a kind of fortified monastery (a place where monks live) called a ribat. In 1042–1043, three or four years after going into hiding, Yasin left the ribat as supreme leader of a powerful n new religious movement. His followers were called the Almoravids, from the Arabic word al-murabitun, which means “people of the ribat.” Yasin soon formed a new alliance with Yahya ibn Umar (d. 1056), chief of the Lamtuna. They became the dominant force of the Almoravid movement.

The essential concern of the Almoravids was that the laws of Islam should be strictly observed. They wanted all the rules to be followed: prayer and fasting (not eating anything), not drinking alcohol or eating forbidden foods, making the pilgrimage to Mecca, and learning the Quran, the Muslim sacred book.

They were prepared to promote these things by force through jihad, or armed struggle. This meant the Almoravids had to have a firm base from which to launch their military campaigns, and that the clans involved had to be united. They began a campaign to incorporate the Massufa and other Sanhaja peoples of the Southern Sahara into their movement. Some Sanhaja clans continued to rebel. But most of them joined the alliance and were united into an effective political federation of desert clans.
As soon as Yasin knew he had a strong enough army, he returned to the lands of the Juddala clan and killed the ones who had rebelled against him. By 1048, the Almoravids had become the most powerful force in the Western Sahara. But they still had many battles ahead of them. In 1054 they recaptured Awdaghust from the Soninke of Ghana. In the same year, they marched north through the Sahara and captured the great trading city of Sijilmasa in southern Morocco, where gold coins were minted.

In 1056, the Almoravids learned Sijilmasa had been taken back by the Zanata, its former rulers. Yasin and most of his army marched north to recapture that city. But in the south the Juddala had revolted again. Umar, the Lamtuna chief, had to stay behind to face the Juddala, and was killed in the fighting. His brother, Abu Bakr ibn Umar (d. 1087), took his place as supreme military commander of the Almoravids. In 1059, on one of many later Almoravid campaigns, the movement’s founder, Yasin, was killed.

The Almoravid Impact on Ghana

In 1056, when the Almoravids captured Awdaghust from Ghana, the Zanata merchants there were punished for having cooperated with the Soninke. Many Soninke of Ghana had held on to their traditional religious rituals with the sacred serpent and other spirits. But because of the powerful Almoravid influence, in the following years they were converted, sometimes by force, to Islam.
The Almoravid commander Abu Bakr died in 1087. He was replaced by six men from among his sons and nephews. The six men fought with one another in a power struggle that destroyed Almoravid unity. This cost them whatever advantage they had gained over the Soninke. As a result, by around 1100 Ghana regained its commercial and political dominance.

The Arab geographer al-Idrisi (1099–1166), writing in 1154 (quoted in Levtzion and Hopkins), thought of “Ghana” as a single city. He described it as “the greatest of all the towns of the Sudan in respect of area, the most populous, and with the most extensive trade.” Some modern scholars believe this is supported by archaeological digs at a site called Kumbi Saleh. The evidence indicates that this important city of the Ghana Empire (though maybe not its capital) was still prosperous in the 12th century.

In the 12th century, Ghana gradually lost its dominant position in the Sahel. Climate change, the desert expansion into formerly fertile land, and decades of struggle with the powerful Sanhaja groups of the Western Sahara, pushed many Soninke to move to more prosperous areas. The city of Walata, which was about 75 miles to the northeast of Kumbi Saleh, had taken over as the main southern endpoint of the trans-Saharan trade.

The decline of the Soninke left a power vacuum in the Western Sudan. For a time it was filled by some smaller savanna kingdoms to the south, which were closer to rivers and lakes and where there was better rainfall. In the first half of the 13th century, the Malinke chiefdoms of the Upper Niger began to join together into a new state that would eventually rise to become the Mali Empire.

CONNECTIONS

The Giant Rock Python

The giant African rock python is a non poisonous snake with a triangular head and a thick body. it is colored with shades of brown, yellow, and green. this python can grow to more than 20 feet long, and kills its prey by coiling around it and squeezing it to death. Pythons live around rivers and swamps. The African rock python normally eats birds and small mammals. But the legends about it eating people are not so hard to believe.

In 2002 near Durban, South Africa, a 20-foot long snake swallowed a 10-year-old boy. According to local newspapers, the boy was picking mangoes when the python suddenly wrapped its coils around him, pinning his arms to his sides and squeezing him to death before eating him whole. Children who were with the boy were too frightened to run away, so they hid in the mango trees for several hours.
The only evidence found by police and snake specialists was a trail of flattened grass leading to a nearby stream. One theory was that the python had come out of its winter hibernation and was hungry when the boy showed up looking for mangoes. African rock pythons are a protected species in South Africa, so residents were told that if they found the snake, they should not kill it.

Kola Nuts and Cola

The kola nut is not really a nut, but the edible seed of several species of evergreen trees. These trees are native to the tropical rainforests of Africa. The nut is either pink or yellow and is roughly the size of an unshelled walnut or a golf ball. The nut contains caffeine. In many West African cultures, people chew it, individually or in a group, to ease hunger and feel renewed. Kola nuts first have a bitter taste, then turn sweet.

In West Africa, the kola nut is considered a symbol of hospitality. It can be divided easily into several segments to be shared between host and guests. It is used in marriage, birth, funeral, and other ceremonies.

In the late 1800s, kola nuts began to be exported to the United states. originally, the “secret” ingredient flavoring all cola drinks (including Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola) was extracted from kola nuts. Today, most manufacturers use artificial flavorings that resemble the taste of kola nuts to flavor cola soft drinks. But some premium brands of cola still use the original kola nut.

The Land of Gold

The early Arab geographers who wrote about Ghana described it as an exotic land of mystery and wealth. That became the essence of Ghana’s reputation in the Muslim world. Some Arabic writers had fantastic ideas about gold just lying around, waiting to be picked up and carried home. Classical writer Ibn al-Faqih al Hamadhani (d. ca. 912) said, “in the country of Ghana gold grows in the sand as carrots do, and is plucked at sunrise.” (quoted in N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins’s Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History).

About the end of the 10th century, the anonymous author of Akhbar al-Zaman claimed that traders would secretly slip into the kingdom of Ghana where “all the earth . . . is gold.”

He said they would build fires, melt the precious metal, and steal away with it. the same author mentioned a traveler in Ghana who “found. . . places where stalks of gold were growing” (quoted in Levtzion and Hopkins).

We know such tales continued to be told for a long time, because in the 14th century, Syrian historian and geographer al-Umari (1301–1349) was still describing two kinds of plants that had roots of gold.

Money Cowries

In Sub-Saharan West Africa, cowries were the most popular currency for many centuries. These so-called “money cowries” are the shells of small snail-like creatures that live in the tropical waters of the Indian and Pacific oceans.

As early as the 13th century, Arab traders were carrying cowries from the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean to Egypt, then across the desert to the markets of Sub-Saharan West Africa. Europeans were interested to find that Africans usually preferred cowries to gold when doing business. By the 16th century, the shells were being imported in the ships of Dutch and English traders to the Guinea coast of West Africa.

As the Atlantic slave trade grew, cowries were among the items Europeans exchanged with coastal West African groups for slaves. By the early 18th century, cowrie shells were becoming the bubble wrap of their day. Tons of them were exported from South Asia to Europe to cushion porcelain and other fragile items, and then exported again from Europe to Africa.

In 2003, evidence of their use in the slave trade was found in Yorktown, an important 18th-century Virginia port. On property once owned by a slave trader named Phillip Lightfoot, archaeologists found hundreds of cowries in a trash dump dating to about 1760.

Also in Virginia, a single cowrie was found at Monticello, the home of president Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). the shell was found during the excavation of a storage cellar beneath a slave house that was occupied from the 1770s to the 1790s.

A hole and small grooves on the cowrie indicate that it was worn as jewelry. People who have examined it think it was probably carried to Virginia attached to the clothing of an African slave. In West Africa, cowries are still used for many things, including decorating clothing, drums, and headdresses, and on sculptures used in rituals, such as masks and statuettes.

They are also used to predict the future. Fortune-tellers toss handfuls of them to make predictions that are based on whether the shells land with the open side up or down.

Muhammad and the Islamic Empire

Islam was founded by Muhammad (570–632), who was born in the Arabian city of Mecca. His name means “worthy of praise” in Arabic. After the age of eight, Muhammad began accompanying his uncle on long caravans. when he was 25, he married a wealthy 40-year-old widow named Khadijah (d. 620), whose husband had been the owner of the caravans.

In 610, Muhammad reported that while he was on retreat in a mountain top cave near Mecca, he was visited by the angel Gabriel. He received the first of a series of divine revelations that would become part of the Quran, the sacred book of Islam.

Eventually, making a pilgrimage to Mecca, as Yahya ibn ibrahim did, became a religious requirement for all Muslims. But Mecca was already an ancient center of pilgrimage long before Islam because it was the location of the Kaaba. The Kaaba is a one-room structure made of dark stone that is home to the sacred Black stone.

This stone, embedded in one of the walls, is believed to have been placed there originally by Adam, the first man, and later by the prophet Abraham (from whom the Arabs say they are descended). Before Islam, the Kaaba was also thought to be the home of the god Hubal and more than 300 other minor gods.

Muhammad began an effort to renew the ancient religion of Abraham. He believed in worship of one god (Allah in Arabic). In the next few years, Muhammad and his followers fought and won a series of battles against the local ruling clans and their allies. Eventually, they established a great empire. After his death, the expansion of the Islamic Empire continued. within 100 years, it extended from india to Spain.

By David Conrad in the book ' Great Empires of the Past- Empires of Medieval West Africa, Chelsea Publishers, New York, 2010, p. 23-39. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa