Ghana Empire

But most of that, we have some common foundation.

When we are looking, uh, uh, in our empires, uh, they are, there was not so long when I was talking about Egypt, when I was talking about the Empire of Ghana or Wagadu, uh, the Empire of Mali, the, the Empire of, and different other kingdom.

We have the same roots.

We have the same foundation.

If we look at West Africa, Golden Chain, Ghana, Mali, Songhai, you know, the, the, the great trading empires of the West, West African Sahel, strung together like a golden chain across centuries, Ghana, then Mali, then Songhai, each rising as the last declined, each controlling the flood of gold and salt across the Sahara.

The empire of Ghana, its own people called it Wagadu, rose as early as the third century and speaking its peak around the ninth to the 11th century.

Ghana's wealth came from controlling the trans-Saharan trade routes, taxing gold moving north and salt moving south.

Koumbi Saleh was the capital, is believed to have housed over 20,000 people at a time when few cities in Western Europe could claim as many.

They brought also cloth, copper, and various manufactured goods from North Africa and, by extension through Mediterranean trade networks, from Europe and the Islamic heartlands of the Middle East.

This trade had already, by Musa's childhood, transformed the political landscape of the western Sudan, enabling the rise of powerful states like the earlier Ghana Empire, whose decline had opened the way for Mali's ascendance and now sustaining the wealth and power of the Keita dynasty itself.

Musa would have understood from a young age that his family's authority rested significantly on their capacity to control and tax this trade, to ensure the safety of merchants passing through Mali's territory, and to maintain the goodwill of the various trading communities, Wangara, Soninke, Berber, and others, whose cooperation made the entire system function.

He would have seen the arrival of scholars and holy men alongside the merchants, for trade and Islamic scholarship traveled together across the Sahara, each caravan potentially carrying not just goods, but ideas, texts, and teachers who would settle for a time or permanently in the growing towns of the Mali Empire, particularly in Timbuktu and Djenné, cities whose reputations as centers of learning were only beginning in this era to take the shape they would later hold in the broader Islamic imagination.

So right here, Jolof, sometimes with a W.

And then, you know, this is the Ghana Empire, the Ghanaian Empire, although Ghana is down here.

But, you know, what's really cool about this map here, I pulled this up just to see, just Africa, just to have a sense of Africa, you know, really studying Africa, just have a vision for all the different peoples.

Can you interpret what you're saying? Because

Honey! Of the

Ghana Empire.

You're dick.

I apologize to you, oh lord of the penicillin.

Um, so there's lots of independent versions of the, um, the Epic of Sundiata, but they follow very similar beats, uh, which I'll run through very quickly now.

Um, so Sundiata's father is a local king, sort of one of the subject kings for the great power in the, in the ar- in West Africa at the time, which is the, um, the Empire of Ghana.

Um, so Sundiata's father is told a prophecy that if he marries an ugly woman, then she will give birth to a great king.

So when a hunchback woman appears in his court, he's like, "I'll be having her, thank you."