Good day everybody, hope you are doing well. Sorry that I'm out sick today. What I'm doing is just going to give a brief overview of the Trans-Saharan trade round so that we can keep analyzing and looking at the various trade rounds. Tomorrow we'll be looking at the Indian Ocean trade round before starting to kind of pull things together with how some of the major consequences of trade are happening throughout this time period.
So for today I'm just going to give a brief overview. a few minutes here, and then I would like you to read an excerpt from some of Ibn Battuta's travels, which we briefly touched on him yesterday, and some of you may have chosen to read his one specific source from the options that we were given, but we'll talk about him a little bit more in depth, and then also the reading that we'll be doing with there as well with this. So there's some interesting questions I've done before in class to think about.
When you travel somewhere, what are some times... interesting things that happen to you that kind of like culture shock things a bit when you travel somewhere even like within the United States if you just kind of go down south a little bit or go to the west or north you can encounter people who sometimes have just different ways of approaching things some funny things that always happen when the Danes when I've been involved the Danish exchange trip like the one year some of the students were just like amazed at the size of like a medium drink at like a McDonald's or a Burger King or fast food place and like just how excessively large it is, which is kind of a unique element. Whereas in a lot of European countries, soft drinks tend to be a lot smaller and more manageable in those ways. But I kind of compared this a little bit yesterday. And that second question here is a little facetious, is, you know, influencers kind of the thinking of even Batuta and Marco Polo as some of the first influencers in the world for their writings being very popular.
popularized and spreading and this also similar idea of like food and travel shows are really popular uh within the world i guess or at least the united states uh because it's really interesting to kind of see how different people leave that live and what their life is like and to be able to kind of experience that from the comforts of your own home so all these things are helpful when we think about like why do people like impetuity get so popular at this time. And so it helps kind of understand some of the culture shock he's going to be experiencing that we're looking into. So first and foremost, the Trans-Saharan trade, here's a very loose map of it.
So the Trans-Saharan trade refers to the trade that is going across the Sahara Desert. And this is a little bit more unique because the Sahara Desert is understandably very harsh in its climate. And despite this, there's still a very big and thriving trade that happens at this time. And so we'll kind of be analyzing these bits and pieces. As you can see, this is marked with gold and there's also salt.
Spoiler, these are going to be some of the major resources that are traded along this trade route. And you can see some of the significant cities that kind of pop up along these various routes. We'll spend a little bit of time looking at Timbuktu.
As mentioned, salt and gold is really significant as part of this trade. What happens is you start having a lot of gold mines and kind of deposits close to the western coast of Africa. But then there's a lot of salt flats to be harvested within the Sahara. And there's a very thriving trade that starts happening between here because salt is a really important item in order to survive.
A big reason for this especially is if you think of something like a Gatorade. There's actually a decent amount of like salt content in there because when you do a lot of physical, physically exerting exercise, your body kind of exudes salt and it needs salt in order to like maintain hydration. And it's a, it's a critical substance to live. And so the ability for, you know, the rulers of states within the Trans-Saharan trade, they're very tactfully managing the amount of gold. that is coming out and they're using to trade for salt as well as other goods with that.
The textbook mentions a silent trade a little bit. This doesn't pop up a lot, I think, in the AP exam, but it's somewhat... I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it, but it's something I don't think you need to know a ton about it.
It's a very interesting trade system that's almost like a silent auction to an extent that happens within the Trans-Saharan trade. That's a unique feature of it, but it's a lesser known thing. One of the big things is, again, the isolation that happens. It is very difficult to cross the Saharan Desert.
So guides and being in a caravan is only of more importance. One thing we'll come back to at the end, and we talked about this last unit, we looked at West Africa. As this trade continues to thrive and flourish, you see Islam begin to spread even deeper within West Africa and North Africa.
That's a big consequence of the trade routes. This is a really quick primary source that looks at the way in which this kind of salt and gold or just kind of gold exchange happens overall. I won't read it for you here because it's a video, so you can just pause the video, click and read through this. cool unpaused hopefully um but this is really significant because you can see them they're they're loving one gold dinar and two dinars when it's sent out like they're taxing the amount of gold that is coming or they're taxing goods within gold right um that's very simple but the second paragraph shows some of the more uh insignificance of this where like the the nuggets from all the mines in the country are reserved to the king only this gold dust being left to the people But for this, the people would accumulate gold until it lost its value. So what this is saying is they're aware of like concepts of inflation.
If you just let gold circulate like rapidly throughout the kingdom, it's going to lose its value. And I think we talked briefly about Mansa Munsa, and there's a video you can watch in a second where he does that. Like as he goes on his hajj, he just kind of like chucks gold out to people and it like crashes the economies of some places he encounters. And so, you know, you have these kings who are very... knowledgeably withholding and reserving gold, not only to increase their own power, but also to make sure that it doesn't lose its value in those ways.
So Timbuktu, I briefly mentioned it before, but Timbuktu is a very unique and strong trade city because it is located relatively like right at the cross-section of where you see mines for salt, as well as gold to be exchanged from the West Coast. And... Therefore, a lot of trade happened in the city of Timbuktu. So it's a very, very powerful trade city within the Trans-Saharan trade within West Africa. And then Mansa Munsa, when he starts rising to power for the Mali Empire, he captures the city of Timbuktu.
And it really significantly catapults the Mali Empire into a lot of success because of this. As a result of that as well, Mansa Munsa is a Muslim. he starts building mosques and schools and really helps solidify Islam within North Africa.
And this is a quick video, a TED video I would recommend watching that expands on some of that. All right, one of the big things that happens during this time period we're looking at around the 800s to 1200s is the reintroduction of camels into North Africa. And this is incredibly significant because they are like the buzz phrase for all AP World teachers about camels is they are the ships of the desert where they are able to handle a incredibly large quantity of trade goods.
Camels can on average carry about like 500 pounds of stuff and if not they can actually carry more than that for shorter distances like over a thousand pounds and they can go a very long time without drinking water. They're just very well built or developed, I guess you could say, in order to survive and thrive in the desert. And there are some accounts of like just absolutely massive camel caravans occurring throughout the Trans-Saharan trade of upwards, you know, of over 10,000 camels within a single caravan at a time.
So the unique thing is they actually, the type of camel that was indigenous to North Africa actually went extinct. And so it's not until they... 800s when this like Asian breed of camel gets reintroduced into the area and then begins thriving with this. So there's kind of this reinvigoration of trade around the 800s and thereafter because now there's a animal that can better sustain desert conditions and travel. And so what does this all do?
It grows trade, right? More trade goods are going at a given time. The trip, each trip tends to be more prosperous for merchants.
It's going to encourage more merchants to go out. And there's increased volume and quantity, as well as distance in some ways of trip. Other things they do, similar, we'll talk about this Indian Ocean, like just mitigating some of the unique environmental challenges, like primarily traveling during the winter, and it's just a little cooler.
And then also resting during midday and traveling a bit more kind of in the extremes of the, or like the... like early morning and evening, but kind of taking a rest at the midday when that's going to be the hottest. This is another just small quote that looks at the significance of the camel.
I will read this one, but the value of the camel is not only confined in its high adaptation to severe desert conditions and its regulation of heat and water via sweat glands, its ability for long distance travel of about 48 kilometers per day, and its high carrying capacity make it a ship of the desert. In comparison, the low capacity of horses and donkeys is only about 660 kilograms. Indeed, the camel's lifespan of 50 years surpasses that of the donkey and the horse so camels are like really a really good investment because it can carry like four times as much stuff as a horse or donkey it just thrives better in the desert because of its its um just physiological structure um like there's also neat things about like its its feet like it's uh the feet of the camel are like wider so that like it walks better on sand because it disperses more weight whereas you A horse hoof is like very narrow in a lot of ways, like small things like that. But also it's going to live a lot longer. It's going to live in some cases, potentially like twice as long as a horse, which is pretty cool.
So it's a good, good investment. All right. So now we're going to get to Ibn Battuta. So we mentioned briefly before, but Ibn Battuta is a Muslim traveler. He's a former Qadi.
So he knows like, so he's a Islamic judge, right? So he knows a lot about the Quran and he knows a lot about like what is mainstream Islam. And so he travels all throughout Dar al-Salam and just records like his thoughts and feelings and observations.
Importantly, he is going to have a much more like Arab kind of view as a Muslim. And so when we do the reading, that's going to be really interesting because he's going to see things that do not match up with Arab kind of cultural traits in those ways. What you can do is under Canvas, again, under the 2.4, there is this primary source. And I'd like you to read through it and just think about these questions.
You can add them to your notes and we'll talk about them at the start of class tomorrow. But what does he approve of? What does he disapprove of?
Why might this be? And also just generally, like, what kind of sense do we get of Mali as an empire and its economic activity based on his observations here? And so just like a small, like, helping to guide you.
he's going to see things that are like, that he's like, impressed of, like here, it's, it's, these, these children are like chained together, because they they have to learn the Quran. And, you know, he's like, approving of this. But then, you know, then there's some actions towards women that he's disapproving of, because remember, in mainstream Arab culture, women have to be veiled and they are scantily clad if clad with clothing in this depiction and he is rather frustrated and upset about that um so there's this interesting kind of like approval of some areas disapproval of other areas based on that kind of mainstream culture that we've looked at so um take a minute to read through this and answer those questions and then uh the rest of the class is yours to work on anything you need to do um some of the assignments we're working on but thank you very much i look forward to seeing you all tomorrow and hope you have a good day