Rise of the Aztecs and Mali

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Of the numerous empires that developed and disappeared on the African continent, Mali was one of the first south of the Sahara to capture the attention of both the Islamic and European worlds. Mali also illustrates the range and diversity of historical sources, written and nonwritten, that may be brought to bear on the reconstruction of empires. Mali is an example of an empire that used culture, ideology, and language (Mande) to dominate an expanding territory. The grassland and semiarid region included virtually all of what was known as the savanna, or “Sudan,” and the Sahel, from the Sahara’s edge to the forest’s edge in West Africa. The empire’s manipulation of technology (iron and horses) and ecology (beneficial climatic shifts) emphasizes two of the possible means by which smaller polities may be integrated into the structure of a larger empire. At its height in the fourteenth century C.E. the Mali Empire covered an area greater than 24,000 square kilometers (9000 square miles), and it influenced, through trade connections, an even larger portion of West Africa for several centuries. Early West African States and the Caravan Trade Mali was not the first empire to occupy the large grasslands region of West Africa that straddled the Sahara, the semiarid edge of the desert known as the “Sahel” (literally the “shore” of the great ocean of sand, in Arabic) and the inland delta of the Niger River. According to oral traditions, the first state in that area was known as Ghana by the sixth century C.E. These traditions suggest that the political unity of ancient Ghana was based on its control of the very lucrative gold trade of the western Sudan and Sahara. Two of the three major sources of gold, Bambuk and Bure, were situated within reach of the Senegambia region, between the Senegal and Gambia Rivers

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