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WonderTrade history fact

From around the eighth century, camel caravans crossing the Sahara linked West Africa with North Africa and the Mediterranean, carrying gold north, salt south, and books, scholars and ideas in both directions.

Trans-Saharan trade

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The story behind the card

Camels, which spread across the Sahara in the first centuries AD, made the crossing practical: they could go for days without water between wells and oases. Salt cut in desert mines such as Taghaza was in huge demand in the West African savanna, which had gold but little salt, and the gold of the Ghana, Mali and Songhai empires reached Mediterranean mints. Caravans could number thousands of camels. Timbuktu grew rich on this trade and, from the fourteenth century, became a centre of Islamic learning around mosques such as Sankore; many thousands of manuscripts from its libraries survive today. The same routes also carried enslaved Africans north across the desert.

Türkçe oku
Sekizinci yüzyıldan itibaren Sahra'yı aşan deve kervanları, Batı Afrika'yı Kuzey Afrika'ya ve Akdeniz'e bağladı. Kuzeye altın, güneye tuz taşındı; kitaplar, âlimler ve fikirler de iki yönde yol aldı.

Develer MS ilk yüzyıllarda Sahra'ya yayılınca çölü geçmek mümkün hâle geldi; kuyular ve vahalar arasında günlerce susuz yürüyebiliyorlardı. Taghaza gibi çöl madenlerinden kesilen tuza, altını bol ama tuzu az olan Batı Afrika savanında büyük talep vardı; Gana, Mali ve Songhay imparatorluklarının altını da Akdeniz'deki darphanelere ulaşıyordu. Kervanlar binlerce deveden oluşabiliyordu. Bu ticaretle zenginleşen Timbuktu, 14. yüzyıldan itibaren Sankore gibi camilerin çevresinde gelişen bir İslam ilim merkezine dönüştü; kütüphanelerindeki binlerce el yazması günümüze ulaştı. Aynı yollar, köleleştirilmiş Afrikalıları da çölün kuzeyine taşıdı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Trans-Saharan trade
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