ABSTRACT
Ancient Ghana and Mali was a landmark volume, unique in its mastery of the Arabic texts coupled with its compelling picture of the ancient western Sudan that was accessible to specialists and students alike. The idea of updating Ancient Ghana and Mali as a project incorporating history, archaeology, and oral tradition had been on Nehemia Levtzion’s mind since 1993, when he approached me about a possible collaboration at the MANSA meetings in Bamako, shortly after I met him for the first time. Two years later, David Conrad, Rod McIntosh, and I met with him in Jerusalem for a week-long set of meetings to reconceptualize Ancient Ghana and Mali within a new multi-disciplinary and multi-authored format. He started our brainstorming session by giving us a set of the reviews of Ancient Ghana and Mali and saying: “we must address all the criticisms of the first edition, indicating where new evidence supports the critics and where it does not.” It was characteristic of his formidable scholarship that he was much more interested in seeking out the best-supported argument than in shoring up a prior interpretation that had lost its luster or been superceded by new information. In this article, I look at what we have gleaned from archaeology and related fields since 1973 that can help us understand the emergence of Ghana, as well as the other early polities of Takrur, and Kawkaw, by the later first millennium CE.
