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Koumbi Saleh, sometimes Kumbi Saleh is the site of a ruined medieval town in south east
Mauritania Mauritania (; ar, موريتانيا, ', french: Mauritanie; Berber: ''Agawej'' or ''Cengit''; Pulaar: ''Moritani''; Wolof: ''Gànnaar''; Soninke:), officially the Islamic Republic of Mauritania ( ar, الجمهورية الإسلامي� ...
that may have been the capital of the
Ghana Empire The Ghana Empire, also known as Wagadou ( ar, غانا) or Awkar, was a West African empire based in the modern-day southeast of Mauritania and western Mali that existed from c. 300 until 1100. The Empire was founded by the Soninke people, an ...
. From the ninth century, Arab authors mention the Ghana Empire in connection with the trans-Saharan gold trade.
Al-Bakri Abū ʿUbayd ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Muḥammad ibn Ayyūb ibn ʿAmr al-Bakrī ( ar, أبو عبيد عبد الله بن عبد العزيز بن محمد بن أيوب بن عمرو البكري), or simply al-Bakrī (c. 1040–1 ...
who wrote in eleventh century described the capital of Ghana as consisting of two towns apart, one inhabited by Muslim merchants, and the other by the king of Ghana. The discovery in 1913 of a 17th-century African chronicle that gave the name of the capital as Koumbi led French archaeologists to the ruins at Koumbi Saleh. Excavations at the site have revealed the ruins of a large Muslim town with houses built of stone and a congregational mosque but no inscription to unambiguously identify the site as that of capital of Ghana. Ruins of the king's town described by al-Bakri have not been found.
Radiocarbon dating Radiocarbon dating (also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating) is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon. The method was dev ...
suggests that the site was occupied between the late 9th and 14th centuries.


Arabic sources and the capital of the Ghana Empire

The earliest author to mention Ghana is the Persian astronomer Ibrahim al-Fazari who, writing at the end of the eighth century, refers to "the territory of Ghana, the land of gold". The
Ghana Empire The Ghana Empire, also known as Wagadou ( ar, غانا) or Awkar, was a West African empire based in the modern-day southeast of Mauritania and western Mali that existed from c. 300 until 1100. The Empire was founded by the Soninke people, an ...
lay in the
Sahel The Sahel (; ar, ساحل ' , "coast, shore") is a region in North Africa. It is defined as the ecoclimatic and biogeographic realm of transition between the Sahara to the north and the Sudanian savanna to the south. Having a hot semi-arid cl ...
region to the north of the West African gold fields and was able to profit from controlling the trans-Saharan gold trade. The early history of Ghana is unknown but there is evidence that North Africa had begun importing gold from West Africa before the Arab conquest in the middle of the seventh century. In the medieval Arabic sources the word "Ghana" can refer to a royal title, the name of a capital city or a kingdom. The earliest reference to Ghana as a town is by al-Khuwarizmi who died in around 846 AD. Two centuries later a detailed description of the town is provided by
al-Bakri Abū ʿUbayd ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Muḥammad ibn Ayyūb ibn ʿAmr al-Bakrī ( ar, أبو عبيد عبد الله بن عبد العزيز بن محمد بن أيوب بن عمرو البكري), or simply al-Bakrī (c. 1040–1 ...
in his '' Book of Routes and Realms'' which he completed in around 1068. Al-Bakri never visited the region but obtained his information from earlier writers and from informants that he met in his native Spain:
The city of Ghāna consists of two towns situated on a plain. One of these towns, which is inhabited by Muslims, is large and possesses twelve mosques, in one of which they assemble for Friday prayer. ... In the environs are wells with sweet water, from which they drink and with which they grow vegetables. The king's town is distant from this one and bears the name of Al-Ghāba. Between these two towns are continuous habitations. The houses of the inhabitants are of stone and acacia wood. The king has a palace and a number of domed dwellings all surrounded with an enclosure like a city wall. In the king's town, and not far from his courts of justice, is a mosque where Muslims who arrive in his court pray. Around the king's town are domed buildings and groves and thickets where the sorcerers of these people, men in charge of the religious cult, live.
The descriptions provided by the early Arab authors lack sufficient detail to pinpoint the exact location of the town. In fact, the sources appear contradictory with al-Idrisi placing the town on both sides of the
Niger River The Niger River ( ; ) is the main river of West Africa, extending about . Its drainage basin is in area. Its source is in the Guinea Highlands in south-eastern Guinea near the Sierra Leone border. It runs in a crescent shape through Mali, ...
. This has led to the suggestion that at some point the capital may have been moved south to the Niger River. The much later 17th-century African chronicle, the ''
Tarikh al-fattash The ''Tarikh al-fattash'' is a West African chronicle written in Arabic in the second half of the 17th century. It provides an account of the Songhay Empire from the reign of Sonni Ali (ruled 1464-1492) up to 1599 with a few references to even ...
'', states that the Malian Empire was preceded by the Kayamagna dynasty which had a capital at a town called Koumbi. The chronicle does not use the word Ghana. The other important 17th-century chronicle, the ''
Tarikh al-Sudan The ''Tarikh al-Sudan'' ( ''Tārīkh as-Sūdān''; also ''Tarikh es-Sudan'', "History of the Sudan") is a West African chronicle written in Arabic in around 1655 by the chronicler of Timbuktu, al-Sa'di. It provides the single most important primar ...
'' mentions that the Malian Empire came after the dynasty of Qayamagha which had its capital at the city of Ghana. It is assumed that the "Kayamagna" or "Qayamagha" dynasty ruled the empire of Ghana mentioned in the early Arabic sources. In the French translation of the ''Tarikh al-fattash'' published in 1913, Octave Houdas and
Maurice Delafosse Maurice Delafosse (20 December 1870 – 13 November 1926) was a French ethnographer and colonial official who also worked in the field of the languages of Africa. In a review of his daughter's biography of him he was described as "one of the most o ...
include a footnote in which they comment that local tradition also suggested that the first capital of Kayamagna was at Koumbi and that the town was in the Ouagadougou region, northeast of Goumbou on the road leading from Goumbou to
Néma Néma is a town in southeastern Mauritania, close to the border with Mali. It is located at around at the eastern end of the Aoukar. It is the capital of Hodh Ech Chargui Region and of the Néma Department. While the urban population of Nema ...
and
Oualata , settlement_type = Commune and town , image_skyline = Oualata 03.jpg , imagesize = 300px , image_caption = View of the town looking in a southeasterly direction , imag ...
. The
Soninke Wangara The Wangara (also known as Wakore, Wankori, Ouankri, Wangarawa, Dyula, Jula, Jakhanke, Jalonke) are a subgroup of the Soninke who later became assimilated (at varying degrees) merchant classes that specialized in both Trans Saharan and Secret ...
exchanged salt for
Bambuk Bambouk (sometimes Bambuk or Bambuhu) is a traditional name for the territory in eastern Senegal and western Mali, encompassing the Bambouk Mountains on its eastern edge, the valley of the Faleme River and the hilly country to the east of the riv ...
gold, though they kept the source of the gold a secret from Muslim traders, with whom they exchanged the gold for clothing and other
Maghrib The Maghrib Prayer ( ar, صلاة المغرب ', "sunset prayer") is one of the five mandatory salah (Islamic prayer). As an Islamic day starts at sunset, the Maghrib prayer is technically the first prayer of the day. If counted from mid ...
goods. The king received one
dinar The dinar () is the principal currency unit in several countries near the Mediterranean Sea, and its historical use is even more widespread. The modern dinar's historical antecedents are the gold dinar and the silver dirham, the main coin of ...
of gold for each load of Saharn salt imported from the north, and two for each load exported to the south, keeping each
gold nugget :''"Gold nugget" may also refer to the catfish Baryancistrus xanthellus or the mango cultivar Gold Nugget.'' A gold nugget is a naturally occurring piece of native gold. Watercourses often concentrate nuggets and finer gold in placers. Nuggets ...
for himself. Muslim secretaries were employed to keep records of the taxable trade. Yet, in the 11th and 12th centuries, the Bure goldfields were developed, so that by the end of the 12th century, Ghana no longer dominated the gold trade. The Soninke farmers and traders then settled further south and west in the early 13th century.


Archaeological site

The extensive ruins at Koumbi Saleh were first reported by Albert Bonnel de Mézières in 1914. The site lies in the
Sahel The Sahel (; ar, ساحل ' , "coast, shore") is a region in North Africa. It is defined as the ecoclimatic and biogeographic realm of transition between the Sahara to the north and the Sudanian savanna to the south. Having a hot semi-arid cl ...
region of southern
Mauritania Mauritania (; ar, موريتانيا, ', french: Mauritanie; Berber: ''Agawej'' or ''Cengit''; Pulaar: ''Moritani''; Wolof: ''Gànnaar''; Soninke:), officially the Islamic Republic of Mauritania ( ar, الجمهورية الإسلامي� ...
, 30 km north of the Malian border, 57 km south-southeast of Timbédra and 98 km northwest of the town of
Nara The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is an " independent federal agency of the United States government within the executive branch", charged with the preservation and documentation of government and historical records. It ...
in Mali. The vegetation is low grass with thorny scrub and the occasional
acacia ''Acacia'', commonly known as the wattles or acacias, is a large genus of shrubs and trees in the subfamily Mimosoideae of the pea family Fabaceae. Initially, it comprised a group of plant species native to Africa and Australasia. The genus nam ...
tree. In the wet season (July–September) the limited rain fills a number of depressions, but for the rest of the year there is no rain and no surface water. Beginning with Bonnel de Mézières in 1914, the site has been excavated by successive teams of French archaeologists. Paul Thomassey and Raymond Mauny excavated between 1949 and 1951, Serge Robert during 1975-76 and Sophie Berthier during 1980–81. The main section of the town lay on a small hill that nowadays rises to about 15 m above the surrounding plain. The hill would have originally been lower as part of the present height is a result of the accumulated ruins. The houses were constructed from local stone (
schist Schist ( ) is a medium-grained metamorphic rock showing pronounced schistosity. This means that the rock is composed of mineral grains easily seen with a low-power hand lens, oriented in such a way that the rock is easily split into thin flakes o ...
) using banco rather than mortar. From the quantity of debris it is likely that some of the buildings had more than one storey. The rooms were quite narrow, probably due to the absence of large trees to provide long rafters to support the ceilings. The houses were densely packed together and separated by narrow streets. In contrast a wide avenue, up to 12 m in width, ran in an east–west direction across the town. At the western end lay an open site that was probably used as a marketplace. The main mosque was centrally placed on the avenue. It measured approximately 46 m east to west and 23 m north to south. The western end was probably open to the sky. The
mihrab Mihrab ( ar, محراب, ', pl. ') is a niche in the wall of a mosque that indicates the ''qibla'', the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca towards which Muslims should face when praying. The wall in which a ''mihrab'' appears is thus the "qibla w ...
faced due east. The upper section of the town covered an area of 700 m by 700 m. To the southwest lay a lower area (500 m by 700 m) that would have been occupied by less permanent structures and the occasional stone building. There were two large cemeteries outside the town suggesting that the site was occupied over an extended period.
Radiocarbon dating Radiocarbon dating (also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating) is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon. The method was dev ...
of charcoal fragments from a house near the mosque have given dates that range between the late 9th and the 14th centuries. The French archaeologist Raymond Mauny estimated that the town would have accommodated between 15,000 and 20,000 inhabitants. Mauny himself acknowledged that this is an enormous population for a town in the Sahara with a very limited supply of water ("Chiffre énorme pour une ville saharienne"). The archaeological evidence suggests that Koumbi Saleh was a Muslim town with a strong
Maghreb The Maghreb (; ar, الْمَغْرِب, al-Maghrib, lit=the west), also known as the Arab Maghreb ( ar, المغرب العربي) and Northwest Africa, is the western part of North Africa and the Arab world. The region includes Algeria, ...
connection. No inscription has been found to unambiguously link the ruins with the Muslim capital of Ghana described by al-Bakri. Moreover, the ruins of the king's town of Al-Ghaba have not been found. This has led some historian to doubt the identification of Koumbi Saleh as the capital of Ghana.


World Heritage Status

The archaeological site was added to the
UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It ...
World Heritage A World Heritage Site is a landmark or area with legal protection by an international convention administered by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). World Heritage Sites are designated by UNESCO for h ...
Tentative List on June 14, 2001 in the Cultural category..


Notes


References

*. *. *. *. *. Volume 1 is the Arabic text, Volume 2 is a translation into French. Reprinted b
Maisonneuve
in 1964 and 1981. The French text is als
available
from Aluka but requires a subscription. * . First published in 1999 as . *. *. Reprinted by Holmes & Meier in 1980. *. First published in 1981. *. *. *. Includes a detailed plan of the archaeological site as Figure 95 on page 480. *. *.


Further reading

*. *. *. *. *. *. *. *.


External links

*. {{Authority control Capitals of former nations Archaeological sites in Mauritania Ghana Empire History of Mauritania Former populated places in Mauritania Archaeological sites of Western Africa