A sheet of the Catalan Atlas of 1375 showing Mansa Musa of Mali holding a gold nugget, with a trader on a camel
Mansa Musa on the Catalan Atlas, 1375
Marked Sijilmasa

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Across the Sahara

Camel caravans crossed the Sahara between North and West Africa, carrying gold, salt, copper, cloth, books and enslaved people. Islam travelled with the merchants.

Place
Sijilmasa · Taghaza · Awdaghust · Timbuktu · GaoAfrica, The Middle East
Laid out as
A routeA road, a sea lane or a trade network, followed stop by stop.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet
Image
Attributed to Abraham Cresques, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. Sijilmasa
  2. Taghaza
  3. Awdaghust
  4. Timbuktu
  5. Gao
  1. IThe camel
  2. IISijilmasa, the gateway
  3. IIISalt mines of Taghaza
  4. IVGold from Bambuk and Bure
  5. VFaith along the road
  6. VIPeople sold across the desert

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Ibn Battuta
  • Leo Africanus

Objects

  • Salt slabs
  • Gold dinars

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

AD 700 to 1600. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?