Northern Africa and the Greater Mediterranean: Gold Routes, Urbanism, and Textual Praxis in the Eighth to Thirteenth Centuries

Fernand Braudel coined the term Greater Mediterranean to describe an interdependent circulatory zone consisting of southern Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa. This paper examines the social dynamic of northern Africa, which comprised a range of social formations, from centralized empires to de-centralized city-states. Particular attention is paid to Christian and Muslim texts produced in the major urban centers of the Middle Niger basin (e.g., Kawkaw and Tadmakka), the Chad basin (e.g., Njimi) and the Middle Nile Valley (e.g., Faras, Old Dongola, and Qasr Ibrim) as forms of cultural capital. These texts include funerary and other inscriptions, manuscripts, letters, grants of privilege, graffiti, and so forth. The Muslim texts, written in Arabic, display connections to a wider world of Sunnis, Kharijis, and Shiites; the Christian texts, written primarily in Greek, Sahidic Coptic, Old Nubian, and occasionally in Arabic, show links with Byzantium and Christian communities in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Ethiopia as well as with Muslim authorities in Egypt and Baghdad. From the perspective of medieval Muslim geographers, Christian, Islamic, and “pagan” northern Africa constituted a “unity” defined as bilad al-sudan, or designated al-habasha in the thirteenth-century heroic epic, Sirat ‘Antar. Textual or cultural capital production was not an isolated process but occurred within a larger framework of long-distance exchange networks, urbanism, and changing relationships between local communities, on the one hand, and peer-polity and center-periphery interactions, on the other. The circulatory zone of the Greater Mediterranean was fuelled by the gold routes of West Africa and Nubia, which fed into western Asia and southern Europe.