Gao (Kawkaw): the Songhay kingdom

Who rules

Title

za or zuwa (king) of Kawkaw; malik (king) in the Arabic epitaphs

Since

not known

Born

not known

Family

not pinned: the Za (Zuwa) line of al-Sa'di's Ta'rikh al-Sudan, or the Muslim royal house of the Saney epitaphs (Lange's 'Zaghe'), or one line that took in the other

Confidence

low

No source names a king of Kawkaw between the Saney epitaphs (royal deaths dated 1100, 1110 and 1120; royal women 1119 and about 1140) and the Mali conquest of the late thirteenth century. Al-Sa'di's Ta'rikh al-Sudan (1650s) lists 32 Zuwa kings with no dates; the 15th, Zuwa Kusoy, became a Muslim in 400 AH (1009-10). A plain generation count from Kusoy would put 1 January 1200 somewhere around the 23rd to 27th names of the list (Tib, Yama Dao, Fadazaw, Ali Kur, Ber Falaku in Hunwick's spelling), but that is arithmetic, not evidence, and Moraes Farias showed the list is not a reliable single line of succession.

Dierk Lange equates some list names with the Saney kings; John Hunwick rejects this.

What the realm holds

• Kawkaw (Gao Ancien), the king's town on the east bank, with the palace, mosque and market
• Saney (Gao-Saney), the old trading town (al-Muhallabi's Sarnah, tenth century) east of Gao, largely deserted by the 1150s, with the royal cemetery
• Kukiya near Bentiya, the dynasty's ancestral town and island, about 130 km down the river
• the river, its islands and floodlands from the Tosaye narrows to the Fafa rapids below Kukiya
• the ferry and the caravan road up the Tilemsi valley to Tadmekka (nine days, al-Bakri)
• an overlordship over the Songhay villages above and below the core that is not attested for 1200

How it was acquired

Old: al-Khwarizmi (early ninth century) names Kawkaw; al-Ya'qubi (about 872) calls it the greatest kingdom of the Sudan, with Maranda, al-Hazban and Tikarkarin among the kingdoms under its sway. By its own tradition the Za line came from Kukiya and moved its seat to Gao by the tenth century. Al-Bakri (1068) describes twin towns, one the king's and one the Muslims', and a Muslim king who on accession received a seal-ring, a sword and a Qur'an said to have been sent by the caliph (some translations give a shield for the ring).

Marble epitaphs carved in Almeria (al-Andalus) mark royal tombs at Saney: Abu Abd Allah Muhammad (died 1100), descended from one Zaghi, and successors bearing the names of the first caliphs (Abu Bakr, died 1110; Umar, died 1120).

Allies and rivals

Trading partners: Tadmekka in the Adrar (nine days north), and through it the Ibadi merchants of Ouargla, the Jarid and the Jabal Nafusa and the merchants of Ghadames. Neighbours: the Berber herders of the Tilemsi, the Adrar and the Azawagh; the self-governing Songhay villages up and down the river; the peoples of the Gourma, the Volta plateau and the Gurma to the south. Further off: the Soninke successor states of Ghana and the rising Sosso in the west, Timbuktu (a small Tuareg camp and market founded about 1100), and Takedda and Air to the east.

No war, alliance or marriage is recorded for 1199-1200.

The realm that morning

The king at Gao holds the river from about the Tosaye narrows to the Fafa rapids below Kukiya. Above Tosaye the Songhay and Sorko villages of the bend up to about Gourma-Rharous, and below the rapids the villages down to the Dendi, govern themselves under their own masters of the water and earth; how far the king's tribute reaches them is not known. The north bank's pastures and the Tilemsi belong to Berber herders (realm tuareg), the Gourma inside the bend to farming and herding peoples with no king (realm peoples).

Across the river to the west, the lakes of the bend and Timbuktu are on the gha researcher's ground. The Almeria epitaphs show that a century earlier the court bought marble from the Almoravid ports of al-Andalus; Almeria is Almohad in 1200.

Wealth

The caravan trade: gold dust from the south and west, slaves and ivory northward; salt, copper, cloth, glass beads (Egyptian glass after about 1000), horses, books and fine marble southward. Copper working (crucibles at old Gao, Mauny). The river: fish, hippopotamus and game, river transport by Sorko boats, millet and sorghum on the floodlands. Market dues at Gao.

Military

Horsemen and camel-riders (al-Idrisi); Sorko boats on the river. No walled fortress is known. No numbers in any source.

Threats

• Berber herders of the Tilemsi and the Gourma (no war recorded)
• the drift of the gold trade westward to Walata and Timbuktu and eastward to the Kawar road
• succession quarrels between royal lines (inferred from the two dynasties of the sources, not attested for 1200)
• later: Mali's conquest, about 1275-1300 by Cissoko's reckoning

Who rules

The za (zuwa) and his court at Gao. Royal women carried the title malika (queen): an epitaph of 1119 commemorates a queen whose office the Met's curators describe as a high office of Gao kept by its Muslim rulers, and a stela of about 1140 marks the tomb of Hawa, daughter of a Muhammad. Officials are not named for 1200; in the eleventh century the kings bore the Songhay title kanda or kanta (Cissoko; al-Bakri calls the king Kanda).

The great offices known from the Askia empire (the kurmina-fari, dendi-fari, hi-koi and the rest) belong to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and should not be assumed for 1200.

Roads

North: up the Tilemsi valley to Tadmekka, nine days (al-Bakri). From Tadmekka the oldest road ran to Ouargla, the Ibadi merchants' road, branching near El Golea, and on to the Jarid and Qayrawan; another ran to Ghadames, forty days by al-Bakri through the Saghmara's country and four deserts, with a secondary track near In Ouzzal and Timissao, and so to Tripoli by the Jabal Nafusa. Tuat: no road from Gao or Tadmekka to Tuat is attested for 1200; it is plain only in the fourteenth century (Ibn Battuta's caravan from Takedda by the Hoggar to Buda in Tuat, 1353-4).

East: by Air and the Ighazer plain (Takedda; earlier Maranda, a month from Kawkaw and two months from Zawila in Ibn Hawqal) toward Ghat and the Fezzan, a road on which Kanem's Kawar route was the stronger rival. West: up the river to the Niger bend, Timbuktu and the inland delta.

Coinage and khutba

The Friday sermon in the king's own name (al-Idrisi, 1154). No coin is known to have been struck at Gao; gold dust, copper and salt pass by weight.

Religion

Islam since Zuwa Kusoy (1009-10 by the Ta'rikh al-Sudan; al-Muhallabi, who died in 990, already knew a king who professed Islam before his subjects). Al-Zuhri (mid twelfth century) speaks of a conversion of Gao in 1083 that may mean a turn from Ibadi to Maliki Sunni Islam under Almoravid influence. Arabic epitaphs at Saney through the twelfth century. Mosques at Gao Ancien (a building of the early tenth century and a mosque dated late twelfth to fourteenth century).

The river spirits of the Sorko and Do cults remain the faith of most commoners.

What the year holds

What happened next, if nothing in play changes it. Each event carries what it depends on and what would stop it.

In 1200

1. 1200No dated event is recorded for Gao in 1200.

Later, on the likely course

1. mid thirteenth century (Ta'rikh al-Fattash as cited by Izard)Mossi raids into the Gao country are placed about the middle of the thirteenth century: outside 1200, noted for the campaign's long view.Depends on: the rise of a raiding power on the Volta plateau, which does not exist on 1 January 1200 Stopped by: anything that keeps the plateau's peoples without a war leader

Places of note

• Gao Ancien (Kawkaw): the king's town: Palace of fired brick of the tenth and eleventh centuries and later mosque (Takezawa and Cisse).
• Saney (Gao-Saney): old town mound and royal cemetery: Almeria marble epitaphs of kings dead in 1100, 1110 and 1120; mound largely deserted by the 1150s.
• Kukiya near Bentiya: The Za dynasty's ancestral town and island (coordinates of the modern village).
• The Tosaye narrows: The rock gorge of the Niger above Bourem; upstream limit of the drawn core.

Where the sources disagree

• Kusoy's conversion: 400 AH (1009-10) in the Ta'rikh al-Sudan; Cissoko's chapter in UNESCO GHA IV prints 1019 in one place and 1010 in another.
• Wikipedia's Gao-Saney page says the Almeria epitaph kings 'ruled at the end of the 12th and beginning of the 13th centuries'; the epitaphs are dated 1100, 1110 and 1120 (Gao Empire page; Moraes Farias). The page's statement is an error.
• Wikipedia's Gao page states that Sanhaja Berbers inspired by the Almoravids took control about 1079-1082; that is Lange's interpretation of the Saney names, not a recorded event.
• Al-Idrisi's Kugha, 'populous and walled', is read by Cissoko as Kukiya; most readers place Kugha far to the east. Not used here.
• Mali's conquest of Gao: about 1275, or more likely 1285-1300 (Cissoko); 1325 (fr.wikipedia). Both are long after 1200.
• The fifth-century and Yemeni origin legends of the Za (al-Sa'di) are legends; Delafosse made the Za Lemta Berbers, Boubou Hama a mixed northern Songhay minority.

Evidence: Arabic geographers before (al-Bakri 1068, al-Idrisi 1154) and after (Ibn Sa'id, al-Umari) the date, read through the UNESCO General History and Wikipedia; dated royal epitaphs at Saney (1100-1140); archaeology at Gao Ancien and Saney; al-Sa'di's undated king list. Nothing is dated between 1140 and 1200.

On the map: The corridor is a convention: the king's reach (villages that paid him, pastures his riders used) is not known and was surely uneven, thicker near Gao and Kukiya.

Primary sources for this realm

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
• Medieval Arabic inscriptions of the Niger bend and the Adrar (dated epitaphs from 1013 (Essuk) and 1100 (Gao-Saney) onward). The only writing from the Sudan belt itself before the Timbuktu chronicles.
• The Book of Geography, Ibn Said al-Maghribi (Ali ibn Musa ibn Said) (about 1250 to 1275). Written two generations after 1200 but drawing on the travels of Ibn Fatima, a merchant who had been in the Sudan, Ibn Said gives the first clear picture of Kanem as an empire: the mai Dunama Dibalemi (reigned about 1210 to 1248), his capital Njimi, his Muslim subjects and his reach to the Fezzan, Tajuwa and the Zaghawa, with the Sao and other peoples on his borders. Read online
• Dictionary of Countries: the entries on Africa, Yaqut al-Hamawi (1224 to 1228, at Mosul and Aleppo). Entries written within a generation of 1200 from earlier books and from informants: Maqdishu (Mogadishu), described as a town of the Barbar (Somali) on the edge of the Zanj country with no single ruler but elders for each group, the earliest notice of the town; Manbasa (Mombasa), Lanjuya (Zanzibar) and the Zanj coast; Zayla, Barbara and the Dahlak islands; Dunqula (Dongola) and the Nubians; the Beja; Kanem, Zaghawa, Ghana, Kawkaw and the Sudan, mostly from al-Bakri and al-Idrisi; and the towns of Ifriqiya and the Maghreb. Read online
• The Book of Examination of the Wonders of the Cities (1191). The nearest geographical survey to 1200: a description of the Almohad lands written nine years earlier, town by town, from Alexandria and Barqa through Tripoli, Gabès, Mahdia, Tunis, Bougie, Tlemcen, Fez, Marrakesh and Sijilmasa, with a section on the Sahara routes and the Sudan (Ghana, Zafun, Kawkaw). Read online
• The Book of Routes and Realms: the Description of North Africa, al-Bakri (Abu Ubayd Abd Allah ibn Abd al-Aziz al-Bakri) (1068, at Cordoba). Old by 1200 but still the standard description of the Sahara and the Sudan that the Almohad-period writers copied: Ghana under Tunka Manin with its twin towns and its Muslim quarter, Awdaghust, Tadmakka, Kawkaw, Takrur and Sila, the gold trade and the routes from Sijilmasa and the Dar'a; the Ibadi towns of the Jarid and the Fezzan; the Berber peoples of the Maghreb. Read online
• The Pleasure of One who Longs to Cross the Horizons (the Book of Roger), al-Idrisi (Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Sharif al-Idrisi) (completed in 1154 at Palermo, for Roger II of Sicily). The fullest geography of Africa a generation before 1200: the Maghreb and Ifriqiya town by town with distances and products; the Sahara routes through Sijilmasa, Awdaghust, Ghadames and Zawila; the Sudan with Ghana, Takrur, Sila, Barisa, Kawkaw (Gao) and Kugha, and Kanem with its towns Manan and Njimi; Nubia and Dongola, the Beja and the Red Sea ports; Zeila and Berbera; and the Zanj coast with Malindi, Mombasa, Qanbalu and Sofala with its gold, the earliest systematic notice of the Swahili towns. Read online
• The Travels of Ibn Battuta: Egypt, the Horn, the Swahili coast and Mali, Ibn Battuta (dictated to Ibn Juzayy) (1355, at Fez). A century and a half late, but the first eyewitness of places that in 1200 are known only from hearsay: Zeila and its stench, Mogadishu with its sultan, qadi and merchant hosts, Mombasa, and Kilwa under the Mahdali sultan Abu'l-Muzaffar al-Hasan, raiding the Zanj of the mainland; and the Sahara road from Sijilmasa through Taghaza and Walata to the court of Mali under Mansa Sulayman, then Timbuktu, Gao and Takedda among the veiled Berbers. 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.