Djenne-jeno

Who holds it

Name

The ruler of Jenne

Title

Old town under the ruler of Jenne

Since

Not pinned

Confidence

low

Lord in 1200

The ruler of Jenne.

How things stand that morning

Declining, partly abandoned.

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

Corporate groups (archaeological inference).

Communities

Old delta townsfolk (Nono, Bozo ancestors).

Walls and castle

The mud-brick wall of the later first millennium.

Trade and crafts

Iron, pottery, rice, fish; long-distance trade in copper and glass beads from early times.

Where the sources disagree

Evidence: One of the best-excavated sites in Africa (McIntosh and McIntosh, 1977, 1981 and later).

On the map: A point beside Djenne.

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.