Empire of Ghana
▶ Explore on the mapThe Empire of Ghana was a West African state that flourished between roughly the fourth and eleventh centuries in what is now southeastern Mauritania and western Mali. Its founders were the Soninke, who controlled the land between the Sahel and the Sahara, and its capital, Kumbi Saleh, grew into a pair of towns with a great mosque and thousands of inhabitants. The empire's wealth came from gold: the western forests produced it, and Ghana sat astride the trans-Saharan routes where camels carried salt north from Taghaza and gold south to the Mediterranean. The king taxed each load and kept a standing army; the geographer al-Bakri, writing in the eleventh century, described a ruler who sat in a pavilion and whose court used interpreters and ceremony. Islam was present among the merchants but was not the state religion, and the kings continued traditional rites. From the mid-eleventh century the empire was attacked by the Almoravid Berbers from the north and by the Susu from the south, and by 1200 it had been replaced by the Sosso and then by the Mali Empire of Sundiata Keita. The name Ghana was a royal title rather than what the people called themselves, and it has stuck to the modern state.