User:MatBelio44/sandbox

Gao as West Africa's Starting Point:
Early West African hisory has come to represent a sort of time before time, when Africa was powerful and free of imperial imposition.... Within such a context, histories of early and medieval West African socieities tend to emphasize the urban-based, large-scale polity, majestic in scope and lavish in lifestyle, rolling out in linear and successive fashion, beginning with Ghana, thjen Mali, followed by Songhay..... And yet, though Gao's early incarnation is acknowledged, the chronicles are far more invested in connecting imperial Songhay with the earlier Mande states of Ghana and Mali. The reasons for this wil be explored, but as a consequence, the orientation of the chronicles has influenced various publics that include scholoars..... Refering to Gao as a "kingdom", al-Ya'qūbī makes it clear it was centered on a town, as do contemporary al-Khuwārizmī and al-Mas'ūdī and al-Bakrī in the following two centuries. In 548/1154 al-Idrisī wrote that Gao "is large and is widely famed" with "many servants and a large retinue, captains, soldiers, excellent apparel and beautiful ornaments", with warriors who "ride horses and camels"- an allusion to the cavalry as the basis for Gao's military power. While Confirming domestic slavery, consistent with al-Muhallabī's observation that the king "has a palace which nobody inhabits with him or has resort to except a eunuch slave, little else is recorded that concerns slavery. Gao emerges as a city-state projecting power and influence, an important model of state-craft in the early Middle Niger.

Gao, in turn, represents a crossroads to and through which migrated whole commuynities across an often artificial divide between Sahara and Savannah,