The only writing from the Sudan belt itself before the Timbuktu chronicles. At Gao-Saney, the royal cemetery beside Gao, marble tombstones carved in Almería in Spain commemorate kings and queens who died between 1100 and about 1120, proving a Muslim dynasty at Gao with Andalusi connections and giving names that can be set against the Tarikh al-Sudan's Za list; local stelae continue the series into the fourteenth century. At Essuk-Tadmakka in the Adrar des Ifoghas, inscriptions from 1013 onward record a Muslim Berber town on the trans-Saharan road and the names of its notables, and others at Bentyia (Kukiya) and Junhan complete the picture of the middle Niger around 1200. They are dates and names only, but they are contemporary, which nothing else for this region is.
About this source
- Title
- The Arabic epitaphs of Gao-Saney, Bentyia and Essuk-Tadmakka
- Author
- Various
- Author's dates
- stone-cutters and scribes of Gao and Tadmakka, eleventh to fifteenth centuries
- Written
- dated epitaphs from 1013 (Essuk) and 1100 (Gao-Saney) onward
- Language
- Arabic
- Covers
- about 1010 to 1400
- Kind
- Inscriptions
Neither corpus is freely online. The relation between the kings of the epitaphs and the chronicles' Za kings is disputed (Lange against Hunwick); Moraes Farias argues that the chronicles reshaped the earlier past.
Where to read it
Editions
- P. F. de Moraes Farias, Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali: Epigraphy, Chronicles and Songhay-Tuareg History (Oxford, 2003), the corpus (not freely online)
- J. Sauvaget, Les épitaphes royales de Gao, Bulletin de l'IFAN 12 (1950), pp. 418 to 440 (not freely online)
Translations
- Translations accompany Moraes Farias's corpus, see editions (not freely online)