Page 86 - Empires of Medieval West Africa

t h e s o n i n k e p e o p l e o f t h e G h a n a E m p i r e

In TheIr Own wOrds

Gold Dog Collars

al-Bakri wrote that tunka manin wore a door of the pavilion are dogs of excellent
“high cap decorated with gold and wrapped pedigree who hardly ever leave the place
in a turban of fine cotton,” and went on where the king is, guarding him. Round
their necks they wear collars of gold and
to describe the scene at the royal court of silver studded with a number of balls of the
Ghana as altogether splendid. same metals. The audience is announced
by the beating of a drum which they call
[The king] sits in audience or to hear
grievances against officials in a domed duba, made from a long hollow log. When
pavilion around which stand 10 horses the people who profess the same religion
covered with gold-embroidered materials. as the king approach him they fall on their
Behind the king stand 10 pages holding knees and sprinkle dust on their heads, for
this is their way of greeting him. As for the
shields and swords decorated with gold, Muslims, they greet him only by clapping
and on his right are the sons of the [lesser] their hands.
kings of his country wearing splendid
garments and their hair plaited [braided] (source: levtzion, Nehemia, and J. f. p. Hopkins,
with gold. The governor of the city sits on editors. Corpus of Early Arabic Sources
the ground before the king and around for West African History. cambridge, U.K.:
him are ministers seated likewise. At the cambridge University press, 1981.)

try. A tariff of five mithqals was charged for a load of copper, and there
were other kinds of goods that were charged 10 mithqals per load.
All gold nuggets found in the mines controlled by Ghana were
reserved for the king. Al-Bakri heard that the nuggets weighed any-
where from an ounce to a pound. Ordinary people were only allowed
to deal in gold dust, because otherwise they would accumulate so much
gold that it would lose its value.
Al-Bakri was not writing until about 1067, so his informants’ obser-
vations were made rather late in the empire’s history. Arab scholars
were always fascinated by stories of gold from the lands of the Sudan,
and had already been talking about the wealth of the kings of Ghana
for well over a century. In 889–890, al-Yaqubi published a description
of the powerful kingdom of Ghana in which he said gold was found all
over the country. Ibn Hawqal, writing between 967 and 988, said the
ruler of Ghana was “the wealthiest king on the face of the earth because
of his treasures and stocks of gold” (quoted in Levtzion and Hopkins).
Nearly 100 years after al-Bakri, stories like these (sometimes
no doubt exaggerated) were still coming from the Arab geographers.