Region · as at first light, 1 January 1200

West Africa: the Sudan and Guinea

On the morning of 1 January 1200 the Atlas records 21 realms and principalities in West Africa: the Sudan and Guinea, with 28 lords and officers, 89 towns, ports and sites, 0 church lands and religious houses and 120 provinces, peoples and free lands.

The realms

  1. The kingdom of TakrurKingdom

    Takrur is the oldest Muslim kingdom south of the Sahara and, at the last written report before 1200, the strongest power on the Senegal river.

  2. Ghana (Wagadu)Old kingdom

    Ghana was the first great kingdom of the western Sudan, the Soninke state that taxed the salt coming south and the gold going north.

  3. The Sosso kingdom of the KanteKingdom

    Sosso is the kingdom of Kaniaga, the Sahel and savanna south of Wagadu and north of the Beledugu, in what is now the north of the Koulikoro region of Mali.

  4. DiaraKingdom

    Diara, also written Zara or Jaara, was a Soninke kingdom in the Kingui (a Pulaar name for the country round modern Nioro du Sahel) that grew out of Ghana's southern lands after the Almoravid period of the later eleventh century.

  5. MemaKingdom

    Mema (Méma) is the dry old delta of the Niger west of Lake Debo and north of Macina, a land of mounds and abandoned channels round modern Nampala and Boulel.

  6. The Mande chiefdoms (Manden)No single holderChiefdoms

    Manden (Mande, Manding; Mali is the Fulani form and Mallal the Berber) is the country of the Malinke on the upper Niger between the Manding mountains and the Sankarani.

  7. Jenne and the inland deltaKonboro, or a predecessor of his: not pinnedTown kingdom

    The inland delta of the Niger and the Bani is a vast floodplain of rice fields, fishing waters and dry-season pastures.

  8. Gao (Kawkaw): the Songhay kingdomKingdom

    On the morning of 1 January 1200 Kawkaw (Gao), on the east bank of the middle Niger, is the seat of an old Muslim Songhay kingship whose king is not known by name.

  9. Kanem: the Sayfawa maiSelema IIKingdom

    Kanem is the oldest and strongest kingdom of the central Sudan: a Muslim monarchy of horsemen and herders on the dunes and the dry valley of the Bahr el Ghazal east and north-east of Lake Chad, living from cattle, millet, the lake's fish and natron, and above

  10. The Sao townsNone known for 1 January 1200Walled towns

    South and south-west of Lake Chad, on the clay plains of the Chari, the Logone, the Ngadda and the Yedseram, people lived on raised mounds above the flood, many of them walled with mud-brick ramparts: these are the Sao of the Kanuri tradition.

  11. KanoNaguji, son of YusaHausa town-state

    Kano in 1200 is a walled town at the foot of Dala hill, the old iron-working settlement and shrine centre, ruled by kings of the Bagauda line who came as incomers and imposed themselves on the older people of the plain, the worshippers of the god Tsumburbura (

  12. Katsina (the Durbawa)Hausa town-state

    Before the Korau dynasty made Katsina a walled trading city, the country north-west of Kano was held in tradition by the Durbawa, whose chief priest, the Durbi, served a solar cult; their sacred centre and royal burial ground was at Durbi Takusheyi, 32 km east

  13. DauraHausa town-state

    Daura is remembered by all the Hausa as their mother town: there the stranger Bayajidda killed the snake Sarki that guarded the Kusugu well and married the queen Daurama, and from their son Bawo came the founders of Kano, Katsina, Zazzau, Gobir and Rano, while

  14. GobirHausa town-state

    Gobir is the northernmost Hausa state, the 'shield' of the Hausa against the desert.

  15. ZazzauHausa chiefdom

    Zazzau is the southern frontier state of the Hausa, later famous for raiding the peoples to its south for slaves.

  16. Rano and BiramHausa towns

    Two of the seven 'true' Hausa states lie outside the realms drawn separately: Rano, south of Kano, a town-state of the Kano plain's southern edge with its own kings, and Biram, at Garun Gabas in the Hadejia country on the road toward Bornu, which the legend ma

  17. The Akan of the Bono country and BeghoVillages and a trading town

    On 1 January 1200 there is no Akan kingdom.

  18. IfeSacred city-state

    On 1 January 1200 Ife is the largest and holiest town of the Yoruba forest, in the middle of what archaeologists call its classical period (about 1000 to 1420 in Ogundiran's scheme).

  19. The Yoruba townsTown kingdoms

    The Yoruba-speaking country between the Ouémé in the west, the Akoko hills in the east, the lagoons in the south and the savanna towards the Niger in the north is, in 1200, a patchwork of small town-states rather than a kingdom.

  20. BeninKingship between dynasties

    Benin is the Edo kingdom of the forest west of the lower Niger, centred on Benin City.

  21. NriBuifePriest-kingship

    Nri is a ritual power, not a territorial state.

Self-governing peoples and other lands

Records of this region that belong to no single realm page.

Primary sources for West Africa: the Sudan and Guinea

  • Exhortations and Reflections on the Quarters and Monuments: the chapters on Nubia and the Beja, al-Maqrizi (about 1417 to 1442, at Cairo). Two centuries late, but al-Maqrizi copied earlier books that are now lost, above all the account of Nubia by Ibn Salim al-Aswani, who went as Fatimid envoy to Dongola about 970 and described the Nubian king, his court, the eparch, the church and the land, which is the fullest description of Makuria ever written and still broadly valid in 1200; he also gives the Beja tribes, the oases, the baqt treaty and the Ayyubid campaigns against Nubia of 1173.
  • 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.
  • 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).
  • The Book of Examples: the History of the Berbers and of the Muslim Dynasties of North Africa, Ibn Khaldun (1375 to 1379 at Qal'at Ibn Salama and Tunis, revised until 1406). Ibn Khaldun's tribal histories are the standard account of the powers that Almohad chronicles treat as background: the Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym in Ifriqiya and Tripolitania and their alliances with the Banu Ghaniya and Qaraqush; the Zenata of the central Maghreb (Banu Marin, Banu Abd al-Wad, Tujin, Maghrawa) before their rise; the Sanhaja and the veiled peoples of the Sahara; the Masmuda and the Almohad tribes.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Ife, Benin, Nri, the Yoruba towns and the Akan: archaeology and recorded tradition (no contemporary text; traditions written down from the 1890s). No text of any kind exists for the forest belt in 1200.
  • 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, 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 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.
  • 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.
  • The Diwan of the Sultans of Bornu (the Sayfawa king list) (kept and extended to the nineteenth century; Lange argues its core was first written down in the thirteenth century). A list of the Sayfawa mais with reign lengths, parentage, mothers' names and burial places, and the odd event.
  • The Epic of Sunjata, Various (Mande jeliw, the hereditary bards) (oral; the main recordings date from the twentieth century; Niane's version published 1960). Oral tradition, not a text of the period, but the only account from the Mande side of the world of 1200: the Sosso kingdom of Sumanguru (Sumaoro) Kante, which the epic shows ruling over the old Ghana lands and pressing on the Manden chiefdoms, with its smith-kings; the Manden of Sunjata's father Nare Maghan as a cluster of small chiefdoms; and the Mema, Diara and other states that sheltered the exile.
  • The Kano Chronicle (about 1880 to 1890, from older written lists and oral tradition). The only narrative of the Hausa towns, but a nineteenth-century compilation whose dates for early kings are reckoned back from reign lengths.
  • 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.

The whole sources library

How these entries are made

Every entry describes one morning, 1 January 1200, and keeps later events in a dated "what the year holds" list with the conditions each depended on. Each entry names its sources, rates its confidence and says where the sources disagree. Published 4 November 2026. Corrections are welcome.