ABSTRACT
Maps of Africa before 1500 invariably included an image of the king of Mali seated on his throne, holding a gold nugget nearly the size of his head. It was the fourteenth-century Malian ruler and his entourage, who had given away so much gold while on hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca that the price of gold on the Cairo market had collapsed shortly thereafter. Egyptian chroniclers wrote about the event in the next century, and the traveler Ibn Battuta described the West African ruler around 1350: “[The sultan] has a lofty pavilion, of which the door is inside his house, where he sits for most of the time.” His image of the gold-turbaned sultan under a silken dome stands in stark contrast to the vivid description of the desert caravans that actually carried goods such as highly prized salt and copper in exchange for gold. Ibn Battuta writes of the merchants of Sijilmasa that “they load their camels at late dawn, and march until the sun has risen, its light has become bright in the air, and the heat on the ground has become severe. . . . When the sun begins to decline and sink in the west, they set off [again].” Twenty-five days later, the caravans would reach Taghaza, a major saltmining area. Describing the enormous amounts of gold traded in the grim and perilous mining town, Ibn Battuta says, “This is a village with nothing good about it. It is the most fly-ridden of places” (Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the 14th Century, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989, pp. 302, 296-7).
