Ghana (Wagadu): Gold, Salt, and the First Sahelian Trading Empire

Locally, the kingdom later known to history as Ghana was never called that at all: its own Soninke people knew it as Wagadu. "Ghana" was in fact the title of its ruler — whom the Soninke also called kaya-maghan, "lord of the gold" — a title Arab writers came to use for the kingdom itself. Wagadu arose in the western Sahel, across present-day Mauritania, Mali, and Senegal, through a long process of state consolidation running from the fourth to the eighth centuries CE, with its golden age between the eighth and eleventh centuries. The earliest written reference to it comes from the eighth-century Arab geographer Al-Fazari, who dubbed it the "land of gold," and its capital, Kumbi Saleh, had a distinctive double structure recorded by the eleventh-century geographer Al-Bakri: a royal city and, about six kilometers away, a separate quarter inhabited by Muslim merchants. The king himself was regarded as sacred and held a monopoly over the gold trade, and royal succession followed a matrilineal pattern, passing not to his own son but to his sister's son.