Gao Empire

Map of Mali

Gao was founded in the 7th century on the Niger River, instantly becoming a hub for fishermen and trade, Gao grew between the eighth and tenth centuries and became a kingdom of lesser power than the Wagadu. Gao prospered because of the commercial importance that it had along the Niger. Gao was also a major manufacturing center. Craftspeople fashioned carnelian into beads, which are dated as early as the third century, and which were greatly valued in the Sudan and West African rainforest.[4]

Apart from some Arabic epitaphs on tombstones discovered in 1939 at the cemetery of Gao-Saney (6 km to the east of the city)[5] there are no surviving indigenous written records that date from before the middle of the 17th century.[3] Our knowledge of the early history of the town relies on the writings of external Arabic geographers living in Morocco, Egypt and Andalusia, who never visited the region. These authors referred to the town as Kawkaw or Kuku. The two key 17th century chronicles, the Tarikh al-Sudan and the Tarikh al-Fattash, provide information on the town at the time of the Songhai Empire but they contain only vague indications on the time before.[6] The chronicles do not, in general, acknowledge their sources.[7] Their accounts for the earlier periods are almost certainly based on oral tradition and for events before the second half of the 15th century they are likely to be less reliable. For these earlier periods the two chronicles sometimes provide conflicting information.

The earliest mention of Gao is by al-Khwārizmī who wrote in the first half of the 9th century.[8] In the 9th century Gao was already an important regional power. Al-Yaqubi wrote in his Tarikh in around 872:

There is the kingdom of the Kawkaw, which is the greatest of the realms of the Sūdān, the most important and most powerful. All the kingdoms obey its king. Al-Kawkaw is the name of the town. Besides this there are a number of kingdoms of which the rulers pay allegiance to him and acknowledge his sovereignty, although they are kings in their own lands.[9]

Ibn al-Faqih (writing c. 903) mentions a caravan route from Egypt to ancient Ghana via Kawkaw.[10] but Ibn Hawqal (writing c. 988) states that the old route from Egypt to the Sudan was abandoned in the reign of the Egyptian ruler Ibn Tulun (ruled 868-884) as some of the caravans were attacked by bandits while others were overwhelmed by the wind-blown sand.[11] The more direct route was replaced by one that went to Sijilmasa before heading south across the Sahara.

In the 10th century Gao was already Muslim and was described as consisting of two separate towns. Al-Muhallabi, who died in 990, wrote in a lost work quoted in the biographical dictionary compiled by Yaqut:

Their king pretends before his subject to be a Muslim and most of them pretend to be Muslims too. He has a town on the Nile [Niger], on the eastern bank, which is called Sarnāh, where there are markets and trading houses and to which there is continuous traffic from all parts. He has another town to the west of the Nile [Niger] where he and his men and those who have his confidence live. There is a mosque there where he prays but the communal prayer ground is between the two towns.[12]

Towards the end of the 13th century Gao lost its independence and became part of the expanding Mali Empire.[26] What happened to the Zuwa rulers is not recorded.[27] Ibn Battuta visited Gao in 1353 when the town formed part of the Mali Empire. He arrived by boat from Timbuktu on his return journey from visiting the capital of the Empire:

Then I travelled to the town of Kawkaw, which is a great town on the Nīl [Niger], one of the finest, biggest, and most fertile cities of the Sūdān. There is much rice there, and milk, and chickens, and fish, and the cucumber, which has no like. Its people conduct their buying and selling with cowries, like the people of Mālī.[28]

After staying a month in the town, Ibn Battuta left with a caravan for Takedda and from there headed north back across the Sahara to an oasis in Tuat with a large caravan that included 600 slave girls.

Sometime in the 14th century, Ali Kulun, the first ruler of the Sunni dynasty, rebelled against Mali hegemony, and was defeated.;[29][30] It was not until the first half of the 15th century that Sunni Sulayman Dama was able to throw off the Mali yoke. His successor, Sunni Ali Ber (1464–1492), greatly expanded the territory under Songhay control and established the Songhay Empire.

The tomb for the Songhai Emperor Askia Mohamed was built in Gao in 1495. The tomb demonstrates how well Gao did under Songhai rule as well as demonstrating the style of their mud-building.[2]

• Cissé, M.; et al. (2013). "Excavations at Gao Saney: New Evidence for Settlement Growth, Trade, and Interaction on the Niger Bend in the First Millennium CE". Journal of African Archaeology. 11 (1): 9–37. doi:10.3213/2191-5784-10233.
• Hunwick, John (1980). "Gao and the Almoravids: a hypothesis". In Swartz, B.; Dumett, R. (eds.). West African Culture Dynamics. The Hague. pp. 413–430. ISBN 90-279-7920-0.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Hunwick, John (1994), "Gao and the Almoravids revisited: ethnicity, political change and the limits of interpretation", Journal of African History, 35 (2): 251–273, doi:10.1017/s0021853700026426, JSTOR 183219, S2CID 153794361.
• —— (2003). Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: Al-Sadi's Tarikh al-Sudan down to 1613 and other contemporary documents. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 90-04-12822-0.
• Insoll, Timothy (1996). Islam, Archaeology and History: Gao Region (Mali) ca. AD 900–1250. Oxford: Tempus Reparatum. ISBN 0-86054-832-5.
• —— (1997). "Iron age Gao: an archaeological contribution". Journal of African History. 38 (1): 1–30. doi:10.1017/s0021853796006822. JSTOR 182944. S2CID 163151474.
• Kâti, Mahmoûd Kâti ben el-Hâdj el-Motaouakkel (1913). Tarikh el-fettach ou Chronique du chercheur, pour servir à l'histoire des villes, des armées et des principaux personnages du Tekrour (in French). Houdas, O., Delafosse, M. ed. and trans. Paris: Ernest Leroux.. Also available from Aluka but requires subscription.
• Lange, Dierk (1991). "Les rois de Gao-Sané et les Almoravides". Journal of African History (in French). 32 (2): 251–275. doi:10.1017/s002185370002572x. JSTOR 182617. S2CID 162674956.
• Lange, Dierk (1994), "From Mande to Songhay: Towards a political and ethnic history of medieval Gao", Journal of African History, 35 (2): 275–301, doi:10.1017/s0021853700026438, JSTOR 183220, S2CID 153657364.
• —— (2004a). Ancient Ancient Kingdoms of West Africa. Dettelbach. pp. 495–544. ISBN 9783897541153.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• —— (2004b). "Review of P. Moraes Farias, Medieval Inscriptions (2003)" (PDF). Afrika und Übersee. 87: 302–5.
• Levtzion, Nehemia (1973), Ancient Ghana and Mali, London: Methuen, ISBN 0-8419-0431-6.
• Levtzion, Nehemia; Hopkins, John F.P., eds. (2000). Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West Africa. New York, NY: Marcus Weiner Press. ISBN 1-55876-241-8.
• Moraes Farias, Paulo F. de (1990), "The oldest extant writing of West Africa: medieval epigraphs from Essuk, Saney, and Egef-n-Tawaqqast (Mali)", Journal des Africanistes, 60 (2): 65–113, doi:10.3406/jafr.1990.2452. Link is to a scan on the Persée database that omits some photographs of the epigraphs.
• Moraes Farias, Paolo de (2003). Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali. Oxford.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) (for the three kings see pp. 3, 7-8, 15).
• Sauvaget, Jean (1950). "Les épitaphes royales de Gao". Bulletin de l'IFAN. series B. 12: 418–440.