the mediterranean and africa 431
second, a commercial-craft center occupied by merchants and artisans, by a few
kilometers. It emerged in the first millennium ce and endured until the end of the
nineteenth century. It can probably be linked to the intensification of Saharan trade
during the Garamantian and early Islamic periods. The third urban form, associated
with the Mali Empire, can be described as a market and political center with a
hinterland of farms of indebted peasants and plantations worked by servile labor
(fourteenth- through late-nineteenth centuries). In opposition were farming com-
munities where indebtedness to urban merchants and moneylenders was limited. Do
these urban forms replicate Mediterranean urban morphologies or are they specific
to the middle Niger basin?
Archaeological investigations show the urban cluster system dominated the 150
kilometer stretch of the Wadi al-Ahmar, a relict tributary of the River Niger east of
Timbuktu, with the earliest settlements dating from c. 600/500 bce. Population
densities have been estimated at a million or more inhabitants. Huge infrastructure
investments were required to maintain urbanism on this scale over more than 700
years (first- through seventh-centuries ce) and to enable agricultural production to
keep pace with population growth. Today, the Wadi’s urban remains appear as large
central tells or settlement mounds, averaging 38 hectares in size and over six meters
in height and surrounded by smaller mounds. Large settlement mounds exceed 100
hectares in area and with their satellite sites and rural hinterlands cover areas amounting
to a few dozen square kilometers. From c. 600/500 bce through the seventh century
ce, cities along the Wadi maintained long-distance contacts and exchanges with
Mediterranean and Saharan markets. In his Geography Claudius Ptolemy (c. 68–168
ce) names over 10 cities in “Interior Libya” that calculations based on modern
geographic information systems locate in different parts of the middle Niger basin,
including the Wadi al-Ahmar. Is this knowledge of the urban geography of “Interior
Libya” indicative of trans-societal interrelations across the desert?
West of the Wadi al-Ahmar, the inland Niger Delta is lined with hundreds of ancient
tells, clear evidence of past city life, as well as monumental tumuli richly endowed with
imported and luxury grave goods. Estimates suggest that population densities in the
Delta were 10 times greater from the mid-first to the early second millennium ce than
in the late twentieth century. By about 600 ce, the city of Jenne-jeno (dating from c.
250 bce) was surrounded by 300 satellite settlements; its culturally and linguistically-
mixed inhabitants were occupationally specialized, conducting an extensive local and
trans-local trade in a wide range of products. By the eighth century ce, the complex had
an estimated population of 50 000. Rock art, portraying dromedaries, ox-drawn carts,
and horsemen, with elaborate headdress, hunting ostriches, giraffes, and antelopes, cap-
tures aspects of quotidian life in the early first millennium ce. Would a comparative
study of the thousands of middle Niger rock art images and North African mosaics
prove useful from a historiographical point of view?
West of the Wadi al-Ahmar and 1–200 kilometers north of Jenne-Jeno, the Mema
district was densely populated after 500 ce with numerous clustered urban settle-
ments and huge iron-smelting sites, many of which had hundreds of furnaces. By the
eighth century, this well-watered and agriculturally-rich area was under the rule of an
expanding Ghana Empire; by the eleventh, it controlled much of the inland Niger
Delta up to the Wadi-al-Ahmar. Between the two, the middle Niger floodplain
represented an integrated productive system and an interactive urban network whose