Taghaza

It sits astride or very near one of the great commercial arteries of the medieval world, and even a small child cannot help but absorb the texture of that commerce.

The caravans arriving dusty and depleted from the long crossing of the Sahara, laden with salt slabs cut from the mines at Taghaza far to the north, and departing weeks later laden instead with gold dust and gold nuggets drawn from the alluvial deposits and mines of Bambuk and Bure, regions whose exact locations the Mali rulers guarded as carefully as any treasury.

Musa would have seen from his earliest years the Wangara traders, the Soninke and Malinke merchants whose networks stretched from the forest edges in the south to the desert's edge in the north, men who spoke of Djenné and Timbuktu, of Oualata and Sijilmasa, place names that mapped a world far larger than the compound of his birth.

He would have watched, perhaps from a respectful distance, as his father and uncles and the senior men of the court received these merchants, exchanging pleasantries in the ritualized, unhurried manner that Malinke custom demanded before any business could be discussed.

Gold has been extracted from the lands south and west of the Mali heartland for centuries before Musa's birth, drawn from alluvial deposits along rivers and from shallow mining operations worked by local populations whose methods, while lacking the deep shaft techniques that would later develop elsewhere, nonetheless yielded quantities of gold sufficient to make West Africa the primary supplier of gold to the entire Mediterranean world and much of the Islamic world beyond it.

This gold moved north across the Sahara in caravans that could number in the thousands of camels organized by Berber traders from the desert edges, Tuareg and Sanhaja clans who possessed the specialized knowledge necessary to survive the crossing, the knowledge of wells and oases, of seasonal winds and star navigation that made the Sahara passable rather than an impenetrable barrier.

In exchange for gold, the caravans brought salt, that substance so scarce in the tropical south, mined in great slabs from deposits like Taghaza, where, according to later travelers' accounts, the very buildings of the mining settlements were constructed from blocks of salt for want of any other building material.

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.

And actually, there are entire...

And this is again, we have to start veering into exa- the world of exaggeration here potentially because, um, Arab sources describe the s- the land of Taghazza, which includes a castle built of rock salt.

The houses-

[sighs]