Medieval African history – Timbuktu and Great Zimbabwe
Mansa Musa of Mali After the 400s AD, the Bantu expansion slowed down. They had already settled most of the good farmland in southern Africa. What was left was mainly desert [...]
Mansa Musa of Mali After the 400s AD, the Bantu expansion slowed down. They had already settled most of the good farmland in southern Africa. What was left was mainly desert [...]
A salt caravan across the Sahara Desert By 252 BC, a Chinese governor named Li Bing also figured out how to mine salt. People dug deep pits down to where [...]
Rice paddy with a Chinese man planting rice The Medieval Warm period During the later Middle Ages, the climate, at least in some parts of the world, was a little [...]
Silk Road trade: Chinese coin of the Han Empress Kuo Empires and the Silk Road Starting in the 500s BC, governments started to come together into empires. Travel got safer. [...]
Han Dynasty Chinese tile showing people mining salt underground and then processing it. See the bamboo pipe? Mining salt in antiquity The salt trade, already important in the Bronze Age, [...]
Medieval African architecture: Al-Azhar Mosque, Cairo (Egypt, 900s AD) Africa gets richer The Middle Ages saw a tremendous explosion of architecture all over Africa as Africans became richer than they had ever [...]