434 ray a. kea
different social strata. Noble and warrior families presumably appropriated surpluses
from various production activities and exercised control over the acquisition, use, and
distribution of valued imports such as salt from the Fazzan and manufactured goods
from Mediterranean emporia. Upper-class graves display a rich funerary assemblage of
goods like jewelry (iron, copper, bronze, and brass), weapons (swords, javelins, and
daggers), ceramics, cowry shells, ritual objects, and ornaments, woolen textiles, and
beads of different materials (glass, crystal, carnelian, bone, terracotta, and iron).
Copper and copper alloy artifacts came from different Mediterranean and extra-
Mediterranean sources, including the southern-Arabian Peninsula. These objects
entered Saharan trade networks almost exclusively through Roman and Byzantine
Carthage. Apart from glass beads of west-African origin, the thousands of glass beads
found in elite graves were produced in workshops located east of the Euphrates River.
Upper-class grave goods would seem to register two distinct funerary practices. In
one, goods represented the life possessions of the deceased, indicating personal
wealth; in the other, goods were the community’s gifts to the deceased, serving as
indicators of communal wealth. On the other hand, the graves of commoners, who
lacked both personal wealth and the social status that would give them access to
communal wealth, contained no burial goods or only a few utilitarian items. High
value items destined for upper-class Kissi families would have been acquired in various
ways: through gift-exchange relations with the Kawkaw/Gao ruling dynasty, trading
initiatives, or alliance and prestige-goods networks. Exotic and luxury imports
signified wealth and high status, or were deployed as payments to allies and depend-
ents, as symbols of spheres of influence, and as signs of inter-polity or inter-societal
solidarity. Such practices and relationships were not uncommon. In the tenth century,
for example, the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad sent a signet ring, a sword, and a copy of
the Koran as insignia of office whenever a Kawkaw/Gao ruler ascended the throne;
Kawkaw/Gao belonged to dar al-Islam even though its rural population was largely
non-Muslim. Towards the end of the eleventh century the kingdom became an inte-
gral part of the Almoravid imperial orbit and this relationship marked the start of
social and cultural changes in the Kawkaw/Gao countryside—centered in part on
fluctuating and contested relations of hierarchy (stratification) and heterarchy
( egality). What is the larger picture in this social struggle—the Islamic world or the
Mediterranean world of Greek and Latin Christendom?
Reference has been made to Islam in the central Sahara and the middle Niger, spe-
cifically Kharijism and Sunni Malikism. Through the metaphor of routes, UNESCO’s
“Routes of al-Andalus” historical and literary project presents a complex account of
these Islamic orthodoxies in the context of relations between the middle Niger basin,
on the one hand, and North Africa and al-Andalus, on the other (www.unesco.org/
new/en/culture/themes/dialogue/routes-of-dialogue/ (last accessed September
28, 2013)). The first metaphorical route was realized through the agency of Kharijite
merchant-scholars and clerics, famously known as “bearers of knowledge” (hamalat
al-‘ilm). This upheaval in thought originated in west and North Africa following the
establishment of Kharijite communities in North Africa and the middle Niger basin in
the eighth and ninth centuries and entailed the creation of a knowledge structure
based on human reason (rationalism) and not on divine revelation (scripturalism).
The road of rationality was configured in North Africa–middle Niger distribution and
exchange circuits and mercantile forms of accumulation, particularly in the inland