Dia is a complex of three mounds (Dia-Shoma of 49 ha, the oldest and the only one abandoned for good; Dia of 23 ha, still lived in; Dia-Mara of 28 ha, settled from the sixth century AD), between Diafarabe and Tenenkou.
The Leiden-Malian excavations (from 1998) show the complex at its height about the tenth century. It was one of the first towns of the region to turn Muslim: Ibn Battuta's Zagha, usually identified with it, had people 'old in Islam'. Niane calls Dia 'the town of the marabouts' in the thirteenth century, and the Jakhanke clerics of the far west remember it as the town of their ancestor Suware.
On 1 January 1200 it is the delta's centre of Muslim learning.
Who holds it
- Name
- The heads of the clerical lineages (not named)
- Title
- Town of the clerical lineages
- Since
- Not pinned
- Confidence
- low
Lord in 1200
The clerical lineages of Dia; its tie to the ruler of Jenne is not pinned.
How things stand that morning
A clerics' town of standing.
Charter
None known: towns of the Sudan had no charters; they were governed by the ruler's officers, the clan and quarter heads and, where Muslims lived, by their imam and qadi.
Council
The heads of the clerical lineages; the masters of the waters among the Bozo for the fishing.
Communities
Soninke (Marka) clerics; Bozo, the oldest people of the delta.
Trade and crafts
Koranic teaching, rice, fish; a link on the road between Walata and the upper Niger (Benoist).
Where the sources disagree
Evidence: Excavated (Leiden-Malian project); later tradition for the clerics.
On the map: The town and its near fields and waters.
Primary sources for Jenne
Chronicles, registers, sagas and inscriptions written in or near 1200 that cover this entry. Each has its own page with editions, translations and where to read it.
- History of the Sudan, Abd al-Rahman al-Sadi (about 1655, at Timbuktu). The Timbuktu tradition on the middle Niger four and a half centuries later, and the only narrative there is: the Za (Zuwa) kings of Gao and Kukiya, whose fifteenth king Za Kusoy is said to have accepted Islam in 1010 and whose successors ruled at Gao through the twelfth century; the foundation of Jenne and the conversion of its king Kunburu with his people towards the end of the sixth century of the Hijra, that is about 1200, with Jenne's early trade; and the position of Mali and Ghana as al-Sadi understood it. Read online
- The Chronicle of the Researcher, Ibn al-Mukhtar (attributed to Mahmud Kati); rewritten by Nuh ibn al-Tahir (about 1665, rewritten about 1830 to 1845). Later than the Tarikh al-Sudan and far less reliable: a seventeenth-century Timbuktu chronicle rewritten in the nineteenth century to serve the Masina caliphate, with insertions. Read online
- Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, Various (edited by N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins) (ninth to sixteenth centuries; the collection published 1981). The standard English collection of every Arabic passage on the western and central Sudan.
Sources and studies
Last revised 4 November 2026. Published 4 November 2026. Suggest a correction on the OMNIA Discord.