Gao-Saney is a medieval town close to Gao, the capital of the Gao Empire, situated on the eastern Niger Bend in the present-day Republic of

Mali Mali (; ), officially the Republic of Mali,, , ff, 𞤈𞤫𞤲𞥆𞤣𞤢𞥄𞤲𞤣𞤭 𞤃𞤢𞥄𞤤𞤭, Renndaandi Maali, italics=no, ar, جمهورية مالي, Jumhūriyyāt Mālī is a landlocked country in West Africa. Mal ...

. Its ruins are four km distant from the royal town of Gao. Gao-Saney became well-known among African historians because French administrators discovered here in a cave covered with sand in 1939 several finely carved marble stelae produced in Almeria in Southern Spain. Their inscriptions bear witness of three kings of a Muslim dynasty bearing as loan names the names of

Muhammad Muhammad ( ar, مُحَمَّد; 570 – 8 June 632 CE) was an Arab religious, social, and political leader and the founder of Islam. According to Islamic doctrine, he was a prophet divinely inspired to preach and confirm the mo ...

and his two successors. From the dates of their deaths it appears that these kings of Gao ruled at the end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth centuries CE. According to recent research, the Zaghe kings commemorated by the stelae are identical with the kings of the Za dynasty whose names were recorded by the chroniclers of

Timbuktu Timbuktu ( ; french: Tombouctou; Koyra Chiini: ); tmh, label=Tuareg, script=Tfng, ⵜⵏⴱⴾⵜ, Tin Buqt a city in Mali, situated north of the Niger River. The town is the capital of the Tombouctou Region, one of the eight administrativ ...

in the Ta'rikh al-Sudan and in the Ta'rikh al-Fattash. Their Islamic loan name is in one case complemented by their African name. It is on the basis of their common ancestral name Zaghe corresponding to Za and the third royal name Yama b. Kama provided in addition to 'Umar b. al-Khattab that the identity between the Zaghe and the Za could be established. It appears from this table that Yama b. Kima (or 'Umar b. al-Khattab), the third king of the stelae of Gao-Saney, is identical with the 18th ruler of the list of Za kings. His name is given in the '' Ta'rikh al-Fattash'' (1665) as Yama-Kitsi and in the '' Ta'rikh al-Sudan'' (1655) as Biyu-Ki-Kima. On account of this identification the dynastic history of the Gao Empire can now to be established on a solid documentary basis.Lange, ''Kingdoms'', 498-509; Moraes Farias ignoriert die Synchronismen, ''Inscriptions'', 3-8;

Bibliography

* Hunwick, John: "Gao and the Almoravids: a hypothesis", in B. Swartz and R. Dumett (eds.), ''West African Culture Dynamics'', The Hague, 413-430. * Insoll, Timothy: ''Islam, Archaeology and History: Gao Region (Mali) ca. AD 900-1250'', Oxford 1996. * Lange, Dierk:
Ancient Kingdoms of West Africa
', Dettelbach 2004 (here pp. 495–544). * --
"Review of P. Moraes Farias, ''Medieval Inscriptions'' (2003)"
''Afrika und Übersee'', 87 (2004), 302-5 * Moraes Farias, Paolo de: ''Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali'', Oxford 2003 (for the three kings see pp. 3, 7-8, 15). * Sauvaget, Jean: "Les épitaphes royales de Gao", ''Bulletin de l'IFAN'', series B, 12, 1950, 418-440.

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