The oases of the northern Sahara

Who rules

Name

Not known: no notable of Tuat, Gourara, Tidikelt, the Saoura or Figuig is named for 1 January 1200

Title

No single ruler: each fortified village (qsar) is governed by its notables in council (jama'a)

Since

Not pinned: the qsur are older than the written record

Family

The settled people of these oases are Zenata Berbers by speech, with Ibn Khaldun's Matghara in Tuat; client cultivators (haratin) of Saharan and Sudanese origin work the gardens; a Jewish community at Tamentit is known from the fifteenth century and may be older.

Confidence

low

Ibn Khaldun, Histoire des Berberes (de Slane), vol. 1 (lists of the qsur of Tuat and Gourara, about 1380); fr.wikipedia (Touat, Gourara, Tamentit, Figuig)

Overlord

None effective. The Almohad governors of Sijilmasa and Tlemcen claim the desert in principle; the Banu Marin graze round Figuig; the Arab Ma'qil, who later dominate these oases, are not attested here so early.

What the realm holds

• Figuig: the qsur at the desert's edge (record Figuig, cmg-prov-figuig)
• The Saoura: the palm groves of Igli, Beni Abbes and Kerzaz (record Saoura)
• Gourara (Tigurarin): the qsur round Timimoun (records Gourara, Timimoun)
• Tuat: the qsur along the wadi from Buda and Tamentit to Reggane (records Tuat, Tamentit)
• Tidikelt: the qsur of Aoulef and In Salah's country (record Tidikelt)
• Kufra, in the Libyan desert, is written for the Ifriqiya area

How it was acquired

Not recorded. Local tradition places the founding of many qsur in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; the foggaras are of uncertain age.

Allies and rivals

Trade partners: Sijilmasa (Almohad), Tlemcen (Almohad), the Mzab and Ouargla (Ibadi), and the Sudanese markets of Tadmekka and Gao. Neighbours: the Banu Marin round Figuig and the Saoura; the veiled Berbers of the Hoggar to the south-east, who control the road to Tadmekka; the Sanhaja Massufa of the western Sahara, guides of the Sijilmasa road.

The realm that morning

Self-governing qsur under their notables, with no outside ruler recorded. Thinly attested: the record rests on later sources.

Wealth

Dates, gardens watered by foggaras and wells, salt and the caravan trade between the Maghreb and the Niger (gold, slaves, cloth, copper).

Military

Walled qsur and their townsmen; protection bought from the nomads. No numbers in the sources.

Threats

• Nomad raiders
• Drought and the silting of the foggaras
• Any power that seizes the caravan road

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.

1. Autumn and winter 1200The caravan season on the roads from Sijilmasa and Tlemcen through Tuat to Tadmekka and Gao.Depends on: Peace on the roads. Stopped by: War in the desert or a collapse of the Sudanese markets.

Where the sources disagree

• The brief asks for Tuat, Gourara and Tidikelt under their notables: no notable is named for 1200 in any source reached, and the oases themselves are first described in detail by Ibn Khaldun about 1380. The Ma'qil Arabs (Dhawu Ubayd Allah), whom Ibn Khaldun puts in Tuat in his own day, are not attested there in 1200.

Evidence: Almost everything rests on fourteenth-century writers (Ibn Battuta 1353, Ibn Khaldun about 1380) and on local tradition. The oases surely existed, and the trans-Saharan road through them is likely, but there is no contemporary record for 1200.

On the map: No map parts: the realm is drawn from its provinces (cmg-prov-figuig, Saoura, Gourara, Tuat, Tidikelt).

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.

• 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 Journey of al-Tijani, Abd Allah ibn Muhammad al-Tijani (after 1309 and before 1318, at Tunis). A Hafsid chancery official's travel book, which at each town stops to tell its history, and so preserves accounts of the Banu Ghaniya war and of Qaraqush in southern Ifriqiya and Tripolitania around 1200 (Gabès, Djerba, Tripoli, the Jarid oases) from lost Almohad-period sources. 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 Book of Geography, Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr al-Zuhri (about 1140 to 1150, at Granada). A short Andalusi geography fifty years before 1200 with notices on the Sahara and the Sudan that are independent of al-Bakri: the Lamtuna and the veiled Sanhaja, Sijilmasa and the gold road, and Ghana, which al-Zuhri says accepted Islam at the time of the Almoravid movement (he gives the year 469 of the Hijra, 1076 to 1077), the only source for that statement.
• The Picture of the Earth, Ibn Hawqal (about 977, revised to about 988). Two centuries old by 1200 but the only early geographer who had crossed the Sahara himself: he was at Sijilmasa and Awdaghust in 951, saw the gold trade and the famous cheque for 42,000 dinars, and described the king of Ghana as the richest on earth, with notes on the veiled Sanhaja, the Ibadi towns, the Fezzan, Nubia and Alodia, and the Zanj. 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.