Snapshot II: The World circa 1000 C.E.APWH Habits of the mind: Seeing global patterns over time and space Developing the ability to compare within and among societies Developing the ability to assess claims of universal standards, yet remaining aware of human

commonalties and differences Developing the ability to assess issues of change and continuity over time

Directions:1. Use the pages assigned below, reprints and lecture notes to fill in your SPEC worksheets2. As you read, use the SPEC worksheets to take notes and classify your information. If you are in doubt

as to what you are looking for, consult your SPEC information sheets for definitions.3. When you have completed gathering information, you want to develop a main idea sentence for each

category (it needs to umbrella all your notes). Try to make it one sentence, but we will accept up to three.

4. Now you are ready to move information to the actual Snap Shot chart:a. Color each empire on the mapb. Draw a line (using the same color you used to color in that region) from the text box to the place on

the map.c. Put dates of the empire under its name (Use the dates in Bentley)d. Using the SPEC letters as subheadings, transfer ONLY your main idea sentences to the chart under

each appropriate empire. Keep them in the same order for each empire so their similarities and differences can be easily compared.

5. ON THE BACK OF THE CHART:a. Write three specific sentences comparing similarities in two or more of the societies. Write another

sentence for each comparison that ANALYZE the significance of that comparison.b. Write two sentences contrasting an aspect of two or more of the societies. Write another sentence

for each contrast that ANALYZE the significance of that contrast.c. Write two sentences about continuities that can be made about the ENTIRE PERIOD of these

societies and ANALYZE why those continuities exist.

Byzantine Bentley Chapter 12Abbasid Bentley 312-325, Bulliet 234-238Tang Dynasty Bentley 330-333, 335-345 (Tang only NOT Song)Feudal Europe Bentley Chapter 16Heian Japan Bentley 348-349, Stearns ReprintGhana Bentley 434-436, Shillington ReprintMayan Bentley 108-114

Heian Japan and GhanaJAPAN: THE IMPERIAL AGE (Peter Stearns, et al. World Civilizations)

Chinese influence on Japan peaked in the 7th and 8th centuries as Japanese rulers and their courtiers tried to build a Chinese-style bureaucracy and army and to emulate Chinese etiquetteand art. But the isolated and ultracivilized court centers at Nara and later Heian lost political control to powerful aristocratic families and local warlords. Intensifying rivalries between these regional military leaders eventually plunged Japan into a, long series of civil wars from the 12th to the I7th century.

By the 7th and 8th centuries C.E. the Japanese court at Nara was awash in Chinese imports. Indigenous cultural influences, particularly those linked to Shinto views of the natural and supernatural world, remained central to Japanese cultural development. But in the Taika (645-710), Nara (710-784), and Heian (794-857) periods, Japanese borrowing from China—though selective—peaked. This borrowing touched nearly all aspects of Japanese life, particularly at the level of the elites and among the people of the court towns.

In 646, the emperor and his advisors introduced the far-reaching Taika reforms, aimed at completely revamping the imperial administration along Chinese lines. Japanese court scholars struggled to master thousands of Chinese characters, which bore little relationship to the language they spoke. They wrote dynastic histories patterned after those commissioned by the emperors of China, and followed an elaborate court etiquette that somewhat uneasily combinedChinese protocol with ancient Japanese ideas about politeness and decorum. The Japanese aristocracy struggled to master Confucian ways, worshiped in Chinese-style temples, and admired Buddhist art that was Chinese in subject matter and technique.

Even the common people were affected by the steady flow of influence from the mainland. In the towns they stared in awe at the great Buddhist temples and bowed to passing aristocrats trying to present themselves as Confucian scholars. The peasants turned to Buddhist monks for cures when they were side or to Buddhist magic when they needed a change of luck. They had begun to mesh the worship of Buddhist deities with that of the ancient kami, or nature spirits, of Japan.

Just as Chinese influence hi Japan peaked, it began to be challenged directly by the aristocracy, who increasingly argued for a return to Japanese ways, and silently by the peasantry, who steadily reworked Chinese Buddhism into a distinctly Japanese religion. In part, the erosion of support for Chinese ways reflected the failure of the ambitious reforms introduced by the emperor in 646. That failure led to a gradual seepage of power from the emperor and his administrators to, first the aristocratic families at court and later to local lords in the provinces. As this shift of power occurred, those who argued for a revival and strengthening of Japanese traditions at the expense of Chinese influence slowly gained the upper hand.

Crisis at Nara and the Shift to Heian (Kyoto)If they had succeeded, the Taika reforms of 646 would have represented the culmination of centuries

of Japanese borrowing from China. The central objectives of the proposed changes were to remake the Japanese monarch into an absolutist Chinese style emperor (even to the point of adding "Son of Heaven" to the Japanese ruler's many titles). The reforms also were intended to create a genuine professional bureaucracy and peasant conscript army in Japan to match those of Han and Tang China. But the changes necessary for these goals to be achieved were frustrated by the resistance of the aristocratic families and the Buddhist monastic orders, who dominated both the emperor and the capital as a whole. A century after the reforms were introduced, the Buddhist monks in particular had grown so bold and powerful that the court and aristocracy lived in fear of the escalating demands of the heads of the monastic orders. Their influence even threatened to engulf the throne in the 760s, when a clever Buddhist prelate worked his way into the inner circle of the empress Koken, His schemes to marry her and become emperor were uncovered and foiled. But it was clear to the emperor's advisors that measures had to be taken to ensure that women could never rule Japan and to check the growing influence of the monastic orders at court.

The emperor, Koken's husband, fled and established a new capital city at Heian, or what was later called Kyoto, about 28 miles away. The Buddhists were forbidden to build monasteries in the new capital.

But to get around this restriction, the monks established monasteries in the hills surrounding Heian, and they soon reemerged as a potent force at court as royal advisors.

In addition to trying to control the Buddhist monks, the emperor abandoned all pretense of continuing the Taika reforms, which had long been stalled by aristocratic and popular opposition. He fully restored the great aristocratic families, whose power the reforms had been intended to curb. The elaborate system of ranks into which the aristocrats were divided (patterned after that in China) was maintained. But like the Koreans, the Japanese broke with Chinese precedent in determining rank by birth and by allowing little mobility between the various orders. The aristocrats had already taken over most of the positions in the central government. Now, their formal right to build up rural estates was restored as well. The emperor also gave up an ambitious scheme to build a peasant conscript army. In its place, local leaders were ordered to organize militia forces, which would soon play a critical role in further eroding the control of the imperial household.

Ultracivilized: Court Life in the Heian EraAlthough the basis of imperial political power had been severely eroded within decades of the shift

to Heian, court culture soared to new levels of refinement. For several centuries more, the Japanese emperors and their courtiers continued to inhabit a closed world of luxury and aesthetic delights. Men and women of the aristocratic classes lived their lives in accordance with strict codes of polite behavior, under the constant scrutiny of their peers and superiors. In this hothouse atmosphere, social status was everything, love affairs were a major preoccupation, and gossip was rampant. By our standards, life in this constricted and very artificial world was false and suffocating. Yet rarely in human history has so much energy been so focused on the pursuit of beauty- or has social interaction—on the surface at least—been so gracious and well mannered.

At the Heian court, members of the imperial household and the leading aristocratic families lived in a complex of palaces and gardens, a section of which is depicted in the painting in Figure 13,1. The buildings were of unpainted wood, which the Japanese found the most appealing, with sliding panels, matted floors, and wooden walkways running between the separate residences where the many dignitaries lived. Fish ponds, artificial lakes with waterfalls, and fine gardens were scattered among the courtiers' living quarters. Writing verse was perhaps the most valued art at the court. The poems were often written on painted fans or scented paper, and they sometimes were sent in little boats down the streams that ran through the palace grounds. The verse was brief and full of allusions to Chinese and Japanese classical writings. In the following couplet, a young courtier expresses his disappointment at being denied access to a pretty young girl:

Having come upon an evening blossom The mist is loath to go with the morning sun.

Partly to accommodate the need for literary expression of this type, the written script the Japanese had borrowed from the Chinese was simplified, making it more compatible with spoken Japanese. One result of these changes was an outpouring of poetic and literary works that were more and more distinctively Japanese. The most celebrated of these was Lady Murasaki's The Tale of Genji. None of the works on court life captured its charm and its underlying tensions and sadness as wonderfully as Lady Murasaki's, which was the first novel in any language (Figure 13.2). In the story, she relates the life history of a prominent and amorous son of the emperor and the fate of his descendants. As the story makes clear, Genji's life is almost wholly devoted to the pursuit of aesthetic enjoyment, whether in affairs with beautiful women or in musical entertainments in a garden scented with blooming flowers. Uncouth commoners and distasteful things, such as dirt, cheap pottery, and rough popular entertainments, are to be avoided at all costs. When her rivals at the court want to insult Genji's mother, for example, they leave spoiled fruit in the passages where she or her maidservants must pass. An encounter with a shriveled piece of fruit contributes to the illness that leads to her premature death.

Everyone who matters in Genji's world is obsessed with the social conventions that govern everything from which gown is proper for a given ceremony to the composition of a suitable poem to woo a

potential lover or win the emperor's favor. Although women rivaled men as poets, artists, and musicians and in their pervasive cultivation of aesthetic pleasure, it was unseemly for them to openly pursue lovers. Nonetheless, as Lady Murasaki's poignant novel makes clear, some women did court prospective lovers with great guile and passion. It wasnot uncommon for a high-born woman to spurn a suitor and humiliate him in front of her maidservants.

Figure 13.1 from this artist’s impression of the elaborate dress and studied poses of Heian courtiers, as well as the carefully cultivated trees and the tasteful decor, one gains a vivid sense of the formality and attention to aesthetic pleasures that dominated the lives of the Japanese elite in this era. As the prominence of women in the painting suggests, the hothouse world of the He/an court provided a tiny minority of Japanese women with outlets for expressing emotion and creativity that have been denied to most women through much of civilized history.

In addition to novels such as Lady Murasaki's, some of the most elegant poetry in the Japanese language was written in this era. Again, it is sparing in words but rich in imagery and allusions to the natural world:

This perfectly stillSpring Day bathed in the soft lightFrom the spread-out sky,Why do the cherry blossoms so restlessly scatterThat he will not be comingIn the evening lightWhen the locusts shrilly callI go to the door and wait.

As the female authorship of this poem and The Tale of Genji clearly illustrate, women at the Heian court were expected to be as poised and cultured as men. They wrote poems, played flutes or stringed instruments in informal concerts, and participated in elaborate schemes to snub or disgrace rivals. Like their counterparts in China and the Islamic world, they also became involved in palace intrigues and elaborate schemes to snub or disgrace rivals. Like their counterparts in China and the Islamic world, they also became involved in palace intrigues and power struggles.

Figure: 13.2 The prominent roles played by women at the Japanese imperial court centers are evident in this painting illustrating one of the episodes in Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji. The painting also captures the intensely inward-looking character of court life that gradually cut the emperor and his entourage off from the warriors, townspeople, and peasants they ruled. The growing isolation of the court provided opportunities for regional links to the population as a whole to eventually seize effective control of Japan.

The Decline of Imperial PowerWhile the emperor and his courtiers admired the plum blossoms and the newest fashions in court

dress, some of the aristocratic families at court were busy running the rapidly shrinking imperial bureaucracy. By the mid-9th century, one of these families, the Fujiwara, exercisedexceptional influence over imperial affairs. Not only did they pack the upper administration, with family members and shape imperial policy, they increasingly married Fujiwaras into the imperial family. By the middle of the 10th century, one aged Fujiwara chief minister had seen four of his daughters married to emperors.

Families such as the Fujiwara also used the wealth and influence of their high office to build up large estates that provided a stable financial base for their growing power. Especially in the vicinity of the capital, they had to compete in these purchases with the Buddhist monasteries. But both could work together in the steady campaign to whittle down imperial control and increase their own. As the lands under their control expanded, both the monks and the court nobility greatly increased the number of peasants and artisans they in effect ruled. Cooperation between monastic orders and court aristocrats was promoted by the introduction of the secret texts and ceremonies of esoteric Buddhism in this period. These teachings and techniques to achieve salvation through prayers and meditation, which were focused by mystical diagrams and special hand positions, were the rage among the Heian elite. As aristocrats and monies steadily built up their own power in the capital, however, they failed to reckon with the growing power of the local lords.

The Rise of the Provincial Warrior EliteThe pursuit of landed estates that increasingly preoccupied the court aristocracy was also taken up

by elite families in the provinces. Some of these families had aristocratic origins, but most had risen to power as land owners, estate managers, or local state officials. These families came to control land and labor and to deny these resources to the court. They gradually carved out little kingdoms, ruled by "house" governments, in various parts of the islands. They dominated their ministates within the larger Japanese realm from small fortresses surrounded by wooden or earthen walls and moat like ditches. The local lord and his retainers were housed within the fortress, constantly on the alert for an attack by a neighboring lord or the forces of one of the powerful families at court. Granaries for storing the rice provided by local

peasants, blacksmith forges and stables, wells for water, and even armories made the fortresses self-contained worlds.

Within the mini-states ruled from the forts, the warrior leaders, or bushi, administered law, supervised public works projects, and collected revenue—mainly for themselves, not the court. The failure of the court's plans to build conscript armies also allowed the bushi to build up their own armies. These soon became the most effective military forces in the land. Althoughthese mounted troops, or samurai, were loyal to the local lords, not to the court or high aristocratic officials, they were increasingly called in to protect the emperor and his retainers and to keep the peace in the capital. As the imperial government's control over the country weakened in the 11th and 12th centuries, bandits freely roamed the countryside and the streets of the capital.Buddhist monasteries employed armed toughs to protect them and attack rival sects. In this atmosphere of rampant crime and civil strife, the court and high officials hired provincial lords and their samurai retainers to serve as bodyguards and to protect their palaces and mansions from robbery and arson.

These trends proved critical to the emergence of a warrior class, a characteristically fierce member of which is depicted in Figure 13.3. Counting on peasant dependents to supply them with food and other necessities, the bushi and samurai devoted their lives to hunting, riding, archery practice, and other activities that sharpened their martial skills. Until the 12th century, the main weapons of the mounted warriors were powerful longbows, although they also carried straight swords. From the 12th century on, they increasingly relied on the superbly forged, curved steel swords that we commonly associate with the Japanese samurai. The bushi and the samurai warriors who served them rode into battles that increasingly hinged on the duels of great champions. These combats represented heroic warfare in the extreme. The time and location of battles were elaborately negotiated beforehand, and each side tried to demonstrate the justice of its cause and the treachery of its enemies. Before charging into battle, Japanese warriors proudly proclaimed their family lineage and its notable military exploits to their adversaries, who often missed the details because they were shouting back their own.

A warrior code developed that stressed family honor and death rather than retreat or defeat. Beaten or disgraced warriors turned to ritual suicide to prove their courage and restore their family's honor. They called this practice seppuku, which meant disembowelment. But it has come to be known in the West by the more vulgar expression hara-kiri, or belly splitting. Battles were chaotic—lots of shouting and clashing but few fatalities—that were won or lost depending on the performance of the champions on each side. Although some centuries later, Japan was steadily moving toward a feudal order that was remarkably similar to that developing in Western Europe in this era.

The rise of the samurai frustrated all hopes of creating a free peasantry. In fact, Japanese peasants were reduced in the next centuries to the status of serfs, bound to the land they worked and treated as the property of the local lord. They were also separated by rigid class barriers from the warrior elite, which was physically set off by its different ways of dressing and by prohibitions against the peasants carrying swords or riding horses. In their growing poverty and powerlessness, the peasants turned to popular Buddhism in the form of the Salvationist pure land sect. The teachings of the pure land offered the promise of bliss in heaven for those who lived upright lives on earth. Colorful figures, such as the dancing monk Kuya, were intended to make Buddhist teachings comprehensible and appealing to both the peasantry and the artists in the towns. Buddhist shrines and images became popular destinations for pilgrimages and objects of veneration.

The artisans were concentrated at the court center in Heian and the fortress towns of some of the more powerful bushi. Although their skills in pottery making, painting, and textile manufacture were celebrated by subsequent generations, the artisans were paid almost as poorly as the peasants and accorded

little status. In contrast to China, where these activities were often pursued by the scholar-gentry, in Japan they were usually undertaken by professional artisans who had inherited their skills.

Figure 13.3 The imposing presence of a fully armed samurai warrior is captured in this pen-and-ink drawing.The slats that make up the warrior's armor were crafted of fine steel braided together with leather, giving him protection against enemy arrows and sword thrusts and some freedom of movement. Note the two finely forged swords, his major weapons, and the flag attached to his armor, which identifies both the lord he serves and the unit to which he is attached.

THE ERA OF WARRIOR DOMINANCEFrom the 12th century onward, Japanese history was increasingly dominated by civil wars between shifting factions of the court aristocracy and local warlords. Chinese influence declined steadily in the centuries that followed. But in the midst of strife anti social dislocation, the warrior elite and. the artisan classes that served them managed to produce sublime creations infields as diverse as ceramics, landscape architecture, and religious poetry. However, this creativity was obscured by continuing civil strife, which peaked in the late15th and 16tb centuries and ended only with the rise of the Tokuga-wa warlord family in the early 1600s.

As the power of the provincial lords grew, that of the imperial household and court aristocracy declined. Powerful families at the court, such as the Fujiwara, increasingly depended on alliances with regional lords to support them in disputes with their rivals. By the 11th and 12th centuries, the provincial families had begun to pack the court bureaucracy and compete for power. By the mid-12th century, competition turned to open feuding between the most powerful of these families, the Taira and the Minamoto. For a time, the Taira gained the upper hand by controlling the emperor and dominating at court. But when rivalry turned to open warfare in the early 1180s, the Minamoto commanders and their powerful network of alliances with provincial lords in various parts of the country proved vastly superior to the leaders or allies the Taira could muster. More importantly, the Tairas’ concentration of their powergrabbing efforts in the capital led to the breakdown of critical links with rural notables, who often sided with the Minamoto in the factional struggles.

For five years, the Gempei Wars raged in the heartland of the main island of Honshu. This conflict brought great suffering to the peasantry, whose farmlands were ravaged. At the same time, they were compelled to fight against each other. Often large numbers of poorly trained peasants were cut down by the better-armed, professional samurai warriors, who met these hapless rivals in the course of their seemingly endless ritual combats. By 1185, the Taira house faction had been destroyed. The Minamoto then established the bukufu (which literally means "tent"), or military government. The Minamoto capital was located at Kamakura in their base area on the Kan to plain, far to the east of the old court center at Heian (see Map 13.1). The emperor and his court were preserved; in fact, all the military houses that followed derived their legitimacy from the descendants of the sun goddess. But real power now rested with the Minamoto and their samurai retainers. The feudal age in Japan had begun.

The Kingdom of Ancient Ghana (Kevin Shillinton History of Africa)The kingdom of ancient Ghana is not to be confused with the modern republic of the same name.

Though the name of modern Ghana was chosen in honor of the ancient historic state, there was in fact no direct relationship between the two. Ancient Ghana was several hundred kilometers northwest of the modern republic. It was one of the most important, and certainly the best-known, of the early West African Iron Age states. It dominated the southern border region of modern Mauritania and Mali between about the fifth and thirteenth centuries AD. The principal people of ancient Ghana were the Soninke, that is, speakers of the Soninke language, a division of Mande which, along with Bantu, was a major language family of the Niger-Congo group. Ghana, the name by which the state was known to outsiders, was one of the titles of its king.

The origins of ancient Ghana The development of farming enabled people to live together in larger, settled communities. The subsequent development of iron-working further increased farming and hunting efficiency. In West Africa this occurred in the last few centuries BC and the early centuries of the BCE era. Many West African societies remained organized on a simple, small, village basis. In some cases, however, village clans grouped together to form larger chiefdoms. There were usually particular local reasons for this. In the Sahel grassland just south of the Sahara a number of such chiefdoms joined together to form a loose sort of empire - the empire, or kingdom, of Ghana. The origins of Ghana were thus; in the first place, an extension of the natural ability of iron-working farmers to form larger settled communities. But there

were particular reasons why Ghana should have arisen as a relatively large state at the particular time and in the way and on the scale in which it did.

The Sahel was one of the regions for the early domestication of sorghum and millet. As the Sahara grew drier towards the end of the BC era, farming techniques needed to be improved to make the most of limited fertile soil and rainfall. The ancestors of the original Ghanaians may have been descended from Neolithic fishermen who had long experience of living in large settled communities. They had taken the lead in developing new farming techniques. The farmers of the western Sahel quickly made use of new iron technology as it developed in West Africa. Iron swords and spears were used in the region from an early date. It is possible that the Soninke used superior iron weaponry to seize more farming and grazing land from weaker, less-organized neighbors. Beingnear the southern fringes of the desert, the Soninke were also in contact with Saharan nomads from whom they received horses. This gave their rulers additional military advantage over neighboring peoples of the savannah.

Contacts with Saharan nomads, however, were not necessarily peaceful. With the drying-out of the Sahara, desert nomads pressed further into the Sahel for their seasonal grazing. In years of drought their seasonal migrations took the form of raids on settled agricultural communities. As Sanhaja Berber nomads of the western Sahara raided deep into the Sahel, Soninke farmers may have been prompted to group together for their own defense. It thus seems likely that Sanhaja raids were at feast one stimulus to the early formation of the Ghanaian state.

But perhaps more important even than this was Ghana's position with regard to trade. At the height of its greatness the Ghanaian state grew powerful and its rulers grew rich on the strength of the trans-Saharan trade. It therefore seems likely that trade was a major factor in the growthof the state from the very beginning.

The Soninke were ideally placed to exploit a growth in trade to and from the Sahara. From their position in the western Sahel they were midway between the desert - the main source of salt - and the

territory of Bambuk - the goldfields of the upper Senegal River. Initially the Soninke could supply the desert salt-producers of Taghaza with their surplus gain in exchange for salt. Then the fifth-century introduction of the camel to trans-Saharan trade gave a great boost to cross-desert traffic. In particular it widened north African access to west African gold. As the trans-Saharan demand for gold increased, the Soninke were able to act as 'middlemen' in passing on Saharan salt to the gold-producers of the savannah woodland to their south. It would thus seem to be no coincidence that it is from the fifth century AD that the origins of the kingdom of Ghana seem to stem.

During the course of the eighth and ninth centuries north Arabs became more directly involved in the trade in gold. Islamic trading towns such as Sijilmasa to the south of the Moroccan High Atlas became important northern bases for the expanding trans-Saharan trade. There,Arab merchants bought west African gold and financed further Berber caravans Through closer Arab contact Berber nomads of the northern and western Sahara gradually converted to Islam. This eased their transactions with the Arab merchants of the Maghrib and also increased the sense of brotherhood and cooperation among the nomads themselves. Travel became safer, less subject to raids. At the same time, during the ninth and tenth centuries there was a great increase in the demand for gold for minting into coins by the Islamic states of north Africa, As the volume of trade increased, many former nomads became full-time desert traders. By the tenth century camels of a single trans-Saharan caravan might number several hundred. The expansion of the trans-Saharan trade in gold was paralleled by a growth in the state of Ghana.

On the southern side of the desert Islamic Berber traders had their own urban bases. Here southbound caravans were off-loaded and rested before the final stage of the journey to Ghana. It was also at the southern Saharan base that northbound caravans were loaded and stocked up for the two month trek across the desert. One of the most important of these Islamic Berber towns was Awdaghust in the south-western Sahara. As trade expanded there was considerable rivalry between the Muslim Berbers of Awdaghust and the Soninke of Ghana. At the height of its power in the eleventh century Ghana expanded to enclose Awdaghust within its kingdom.

An important result of increasing Arab interest in the source of gold was the appearance of Ghana in the Arabic writings of the time. The non- Islamic peoples of sub-Saharan Africa were not at this stage literate so they produced no written records of their own. For written descriptions of theGhanaian kingdom, the historian must rely on the accounts of outsiders. Some of these had never visited west Africa and merely recorded what they had heard passed on by word of mouth from distant merchants. The historian studying these Arabic accounts must also beware of their tendency to be biased against non-Islamic peoples. In other words, like most historical records, they cannot be taken as totally reliable. Nevertheless the best of these provide a useful insight into the kingdom of Ghana at its height.

The earliest written mention of Ghana was by the eighth-century Arab geographer al-Fazari who made a brief passing reference to 'the territory of Ghana, the land of gold’. Clearly as far away as the Asian Islamic capital of Bagdad, Ghana was famed for its trade in gold. Later Arabic writers provided more detailed descriptions of Ghana and in particular of its capital Kumbi-Saleh. The fullest account was written by the eleventh century Arab geographer al-Bakri. Based in Islamic Spain, al-Bakri obtained most of his information from Arabic-speaking merchants of the Maghrib. Judging by the extent of the detail recorded, some of these merchants had wide personal experience of travel in west Africa.

The eleventh-century Ghanaian capital, Rumbi-Saleh, was described as two separate towns situated a little distance from each other. One was a distinctly Islamic town, set aside for visiting Arab and Berber merchants and containing many mosques. Though the king's royal town was some ten kilometres away, the area between the two was covered with the stone and wooden houses of the Soninke.

The king's residence comprises a palace and conical huts, the whole surrounded by a fence like a wall. Around the royal town are huts and groves of thorn trees where live the magicians who control their religious rites. These groves, where they keep their idols and bury their kings, areprotected by guards who permit no one to enter or find out what goes on in them.

None of those who belong to the imperial religion may wear tailored garments except the king himself and the heir-presumptive, his sister's son. The rest of the people

wear wrappers of cotton, silk or brocade according to their means. Most of the men shave their beards and the women their heads. The king adorns himself with female ornaments around the neck and arms. On his head he wears gold-embroidered caps covered with turbans of finest cotton. He gives audience to the people for the redressing of grievances in a hut around which are placed 10 horses covered in golden cloth. Behind him stand 10 slaves carrying shields and swords mounted with gold. On his right are the sons of vassal kings, their heads plaited with gold and wearing-costly garments. On the ground around him are seated his ministers, whilst the governor of the city sits before him. On guard at the door are dogs of fine pedigree, wearing collars adorned with gold and silver. The royal audienceis announced by the beating of a drum, called daba, made out of a long piece of hollowed-out wood. When the people have gathered, his co-religionists draw near upon their knees sprinkling dust upon their heads as a sign of respect, whilst the Muslims clap hands as their form of greeting.

(Adapted from translation in J.S. Trimigham’s. A History of Islam West Africa, OUP, 1970, p. 55)

Clearly the Muslim visitors to Ghana were impressed by the power and obvious wealth of the king and his court. In particular they were concerned about the source of gold, but the Soninke managed to keep this secret from them. They themselves bought the gold in exchange for salt from the Bambuk miners to their south. The gold was then sold to Muslim traders at the capital Kumbi-Saleh in exchange for Saharan salt, clothing and other manufactured imports from the Maghrib. It was from the taxing of this trade that the kings of Ghana obtained most of their wealth. According to al-Bakri the king charged a tax of one dinar of gold for each load of Saharan salt imported into the kingdom and a further two dinars on each load of salt re-exported to the goldfields of the south. (A dinar was an Arab gold coin with a weight equivalent to that of 65 grains of barley.) The import and export of gold itself was not actually taxed. But the king ensured his income from it by taking all solid nuggets of gold, leaving the gold dust for the trade. This enabled the king and his courtiers todisplay their wealth in gold in the ways described above. .The king employed literate Muslims as secretaries and ministers to keep account of trade and taxation.

The majority of the Ghanaian population got little mention from writers whose main concern was trade in gold. But we can assume that most people remained farmers, fishers and herdsmen. The king exercised little direct control over the outlying districts of his kingdom. Local government beyond the capital was left in the hands of local hereditary chiefs. These were required to recognise the overall authority of the king and send him regular tribute in the form of food and hunting produce. To ensure their cooperation the king kept their sons and heirs as hostages at his royal court. These were the 'sons of vassal kings' referred to by al-Bakri. In return for their tribute the king was expected to protect the people of his kingdom from raids by desert nomads. Though there was no regular standing army, the various districts of the kingdom sent young men for military service when the occasion demanded. According to al-Bakri the eleventh-century Ghanaian king was able to summon an army of 200,000 men. The army was sometimes used to raid other less powerfulpeoples to the south. Captives from these raids were sold as slaves to Muslim traders. On the whole, however, this was not a major part of the trade conducted at Kumbi-Saleh. The main trade in captives across the desert to Muslim north Africa was from further east in the region of LakeChad.

By about 1050 AD the kingdom of Ghana had expanded to take over the Islamic Berber town of Awdaghust. Some time after this the rulers and people of Ghana became Muslims. It has traditionally been claimed by Arab sources that this was the result of Islamic Berber conquest by followers of the Almoravid movement But the sources are not at all clear on this matter. Several ofthose that refer to a conquest were written much later and may have been a little over-keen to boast of Islamic Berber victory over pagan Sudanese. Recent careful study of the Arabic sources suggests that it may have been a peaceful conversion. Even if this were so, however, there was undoubtedly

some level of conflict in the Sahel between Saharan Berbers and the Soninke of Ghana. This and the wider destructive wars of the Almoravids did much to weaken former trading links. For centuries the Ghanaian state had thrived on its domination of the gold trade of the western Sudan. By the end of the twelfth century Ghana had lost its domination of that trade. With their loss of trade the newly-convened Islamic rulers of Ghana lost the ability to hold together their loose and largely pagan empire.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Bure goldfields were opened up in the woodland savannah country to the south. At the same time new trans-Saharan routes were developed further east of Awdaghust. This gave the southern Soninke and Malinke chiefdoms of the south the chance to assert their independence. In the early 1200s the southern Soninke chiefdom of Sosso took over most of former Ghana as well as their southern neighbours, the Malinke. The struggle for Malinke independence from the tyrannical rule of the Sosso gave birth to the great Sudanese empire of Mali,

A further reason for the decline in the kingdom of Ghana was a deterioration in the environment. The Sahel, between the savannah proper and the desert, was already a marginal zone for growing cereal crops. It seems that by the early thirteenth century the land was worn out and theregion could no longer support a large settled population. At the same time Berber pastoralists were pushing southwards and overgrazing the region with their flocks and herds. In the early 1200s therefore the Soninke farmers and traders of the former Ghanaian kingdom dispersed from Kumbi-Saleh. They moved away in small groups to settle in the more favourable regions of the woodland savannah to their south and west. This Soninke dispersal further stimulated the development of trade and state formation already in progress in many parts of west Africa.