Koumbi Saleh Mauritania

Arabic-speaking people have spread Islam into the northern Sahara by 750.

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 lies in the Sahel region to the north of the West African gold fields and is 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 began importing gold from West African before the Arab conquest in the middle of the seventh century.

Most of our information about the economy of Ghana comes from merchants, and therefore we know more about the commercial aspects of its economy, and less about the way in which the rulers and nobles may have obtained agricultural products through tribute or taxation.

The empire becomes wealthy because of their trading.

They have an abundant amount of gold and salt.

Al-Bakri noted that merchants had to pay a one gold dinar tax on imports of salt, and two on exports of salt.

Other products paid fixed dues, al-Bakri mentioned both copper and "other goods."

Imports probably include products such as textiles, ornaments and other materials.

Many of the hand-crafted leather goods found in old Morocco may also have their origins in the empire.

The main center of trade is Koumbi Saleh.

The king claims as his own all nuggets of gold, and allows other people to have only gold dust.

In addition to the exerted influence of the king onto local regions, tribute is also received from various tributary states and chiefdoms to the empire's periphery.

The introduction of the camel had played a key role in Soninke success as well, allowing products and goods to be transported much more efficiently across the Sahara.

These contributing factors will all help the empire remain powerful for some time, providing a rich and stable economy that is to last over several centuries.

The empire is also known to be a major education hub.

The ninth-century Arab writer, Al Yaqubi, describes ancient Ghana as one of the three most organized states in the region (the others being Gao and Kanem in the central Sudan).

Its rulers are renowned for their wealth in gold, the opulence of their courts, and their warrior-hunting skills.

They are also masters of the trade in gold, which draws North African merchants to the western Sudan.

The military achievements of these and later western Sudanic rulers and their control over the region's gold mines constitute the nexus of their historical relations with merchants and rulers of North Africa and the Mediterranean.

Koumbi Saleh is a large cosmopolitan city comprising two distinct sections: the Muslim quarter, with its Arab-influenced architecture, and the black quarter of traditional thatch and mud architecture, where the non-Muslim king of Ghana resides.

In Mauritania, Abu Bakr leads the Almoravids in a war against Ghana (1062-76), culminating in the capture in 1076 of Koumbi Saleh.

This event marks the end of the dominance of the Ghana Empire.

The entire western Maghreb (to at least present-day Algiers) is under Almoravid domination by 1082.

In 1086 the Andalusian emirates, under attack from the Spanish Christian king Alfonso and the Christian reconquest of Spain, call on Ibn Tashfin and his Berber warriors to cross the Strait of Gibraltar and come to their rescue.

The Almoravids defeat the Spanish Christians and, by 1090, impose Almoravid rule and the Maliki school of Islamic law in Muslim Spain.

The Ghana Empire or Wagadou Empire, located in what is now southeastern Mauritania, Western Mali, is believed to be first of many empires that will rise in this part of Africa.

It had first begun in the eighth century, when a dramatic shift in the economy of the Sahel area south of the Sahara allowed more centralized states to form.

The introduction of the camel, which preceded Muslims and Islam by several centuries, had brought about a gradual revolution in trade, and for the first time, the extensive gold, ivory, and salt resources of the region could be sent north and east to population centers in North Africa, the Middle East and Europe in exchange for manufactured goods.

The empire of Ghana governs peoples living as far south and east as the middle reaches of the Senegal River and the great bend of the Niger River.

Ghana’s powerful monarch administers his extensive empire with the assistance of viceroys and counselors with oracular power.

Because the empire controls the major sources of Africa's alluvial gold, contemporary Arabic writings call the king of Ghana the richest person in the world.

In the markets of the Ghanaian capital (located in the southeastern corner of present Mauritania, not far from the Senegal River), local entrepreneurs trade the gold, ivory, and enslaved people of sub-Saharan Africa for the Sahara salt—worth its weight in gold—and for the books, swords, horses, and textiles of North Africa and Europe.

In addition to the major export of gold, which is taxed, the Ghanaians also trade honey, kola nuts, dried fruit, and cowry shells within the empire.

In 990, Ghana’s cavalry regiment conquers the state of Sanhaja (now part of Morocco), one of the largest Berber tribal confederations of the Maghreb, along with the Zenata and Masmuda.

Ghana appears to have had a central core region and was surrounded by vassal states.

One of the earliest sources to describe Ghana, al-Ya'qubi, writing in 889/90 (276 AH) says that "under his authority are a number of kings" which included Sama and 'Am (?)

and so extended at least to the Niger valley.

These "kings" were presumably the rulers of the territorial units often called kafu in Mandinka.

The Arabic sources, the only ones to give us any information are sufficiently vague as to how the country was governed, that we can say very little.

Al-Bakri, far and away the most detailed on, does mention that the king had officials (mazalim) who surrounded his throne when he gave justice, and these included the sons of the "kings of his country" which we must assume are the same kings that al-Ya'qubi mentioned in his account of nearly two hundred years earlier.

Al-Bakri's detailed geography of the region shows that in his day, or 1067/1068, Ghana was surrounded by independent kingdoms, and Sila, one of them located on the Senegal River was "almost a match for the king of Ghana."

Sama is the only such entity mentioned as a province, as it was in al-Ya'qubi's day.

In al-Bakri's time, the rulers of Ghana had begun to incorporate more Muslims into government, including the treasurer, his interpreter and "the majority of his officials."

Given the scattered nature of the Arabic sources and the ambiguity of the existing archaeological record, it is difficult to determine when and how Ghana declined and fell.

The earliest descriptions of the Empire are vague as to its maximum extent, though according to al-Bakri, Ghana had forced Awdaghast in the desert to accept its rule sometime between 970 and 1054.

By al-Bakri's own time, however, it was surrounded by powerful kingdoms, such as Sila.

Ghana will be combined in the kingdom of Mali in 1240 marking the end of the Ghana Empire A tradition in historiography maintains that Ghana fell when it was sacked by the Almoravid movement in 1076–77, although Ghanaians resisted attack for a decade.

but this interpretation has been questioned.

Conrad and Fisher (1982) argued that the notion of any Almoravid military conquest at its core is merely perpetuated folklore, derived from a misinterpretation or naive reliance on Arabic sources.

Dierke Lange agrees but argues that this doesn't preclude Almoravid political agitation, claiming that Ghana's demise owed much to the latter.

Furthermore, the archaeology of ancient Ghana simply does not show the signs of rapid change and destruction that would be associated with any Almoravid-era military conquests.

While there is no clear cut account of a sack of Ghana in the contemporary sources, the country certainly had converted to Islam, for al-Idrisi, whose account was written in 1154, has the country fully Muslim by that date.