he rulers of the Arab domains may have been deeply religious, but they still took the Byzantine emperors as their role models when it came to the good things in life. One has only to read A Thousand and One Nights to capture the flavor of this society. Despite Mohammed's admonition that "He who drinks from gold or silver drinks the fire of Hell," the Caliphs had an immense appetite for gold and the romantic and bizarre types of display that gold could provide.' At the wedding of the son of Harun al-Rashid, who was the protagonist of the Arabian nights, the groom's father-in-law threw gold balls around for the pleasure and possession of the wedding guests. He bestowed five thousand gold pieces on a poet and paid four hundred thousand pieces for a robe of honor for a courtier.' Golden trees and singing golden birds in the palace at Baghdad were the inspiration for Theophilus's extravagant throne in Constantinople. One king's sister left 2.7 million dinars and twelve thousand robes woven in gold thread and jewelry. Cairo in the eleventh century had thousands of shops selling gold, jewelry, and luxurious textiles.'

The Arabs had no difficulty accumulating a massive golden treasure. Their creativity at the task was impressive. They ravaged their defeated enemies, outsmarted their competitors at trade, and opened up a major source of gold that had contributed a mere trickle over the centuries before their efforts came into play.

The piles of gold collected as the prize of warfare were enormous. The booty came from Persia, Syria, Egypt, Palestine, the great westward sweep across North Africa, Spain, and from as far away as Poitiers in France before the Arab armies were finally halted there by Charles Martel in 732. The Arab invaders of Egypt in particular amassed a huge heap of treasure from ravaging the agglomeration of gold that had lain for thousands of years in the tombs of the pharaohs. They also reopened old gold mines in Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia while they carried out exhaustive searches for new alluvial supplies in the mountain streams of those areas.4

The economic consequences of these conquests were profound. It was not just the booty and the reopened mines. The Arabs soon succeeded in eating deeply into the heart of Byzantine economic power by setting themselves up as traders of extraordinary acumen and persistence. In time, they dominated the major commercial contacts that had served the Byzantines so well for so long, throughout all of the Byzantine sphere of influence, even as they built new commercial relationships all along the southern Mediterranean. The Arab ships plied the seas down the east coast of Africa and across the oceans to India and China in search of profit. They even traveled northward, through the river highways of Russia, to the Scandinavian countries, trading merchandise acquired from across the seas for furs, amber, honey, and slaves.

Trade requires money. Money conveys power. Gold serves more purposes than conspicuous consumption. Less than fifty years after the death of Mohammed, the Arabs emulated the great rulers of the past with the debut of their own gold coinage-the dinar-issued by the Caliph Abd el-Melik at Damascus. These coins, 97 percent pure gold and minted in great quantity, gradually displaced the bezant as the major international currency, circulating throughout the Arab domains and everywhere in Christian Europe as well.

The first dinars were imitations of the Byzantine coins, which gave them immediate acceptance: people are always hesitant to accept money that looks funny, regardless of whatever other attributes it may have. As we have seen, however, the portraits and religious figures of the bezants were replaced by quotations from the Koran.'

The appetite of the Arabs for gold was so voracious that by the ninth century even the fruits of conquest, even the revitalization of the East African sources, and even the gains from trade were insufficient to meet their needs. There never seemed to be enough gold for the elaborate forms of luxury that the Arabs devised or to maintain the hectic pace of the mints that poured out the dinars in such volume.

Luck was with the Arabs. As a result of their conquest and settlement of the northern coast of Africa, they made contact with a source of gold that had fed the fortunes of Carthage more than one thousand years earlier. The Arabs never actually possessed the West African gold mines, but their genius for trade did the job for them. For several hundred years, they enjoyed a virtual buyers' monopoly over the gold that lay hidden far to the south, below the farthest reaches of the Sahara, in an area of approximately six hundred square miles, with its southern border defined by the east-west coastline that stretches from the Ivory Coast to Nigeria. This area has also been known as the Gold Coast, although the wealth it gained later from exporting slaves may have exceeded the gold that thousands of camels had hauled so faithfully over the vast Sahara for so many years.

Although the Romans and the Byzantines had both held sway on the Mediterranean coast of Africa at one time or another, their primary purpose in occupying the area was military. They hugged the coast and its seaports, ignoring the riches that lay to the south across great unmapped wastes of pure desert. The Arabs, however, meant business when they occupied North Africa. They set up trading posts such as Tunis on the sea; they also opened up centers such as Fez and Marrakesh at significant distances inland.6 Ultimately, their traders would appear in the heart of the Sahara itself.

Sijilmesa, where the road to Morocco crossed the main north-south route to the gold country, was the place where all the caravans met. It was described by one Arab trader as "the gateway to the Sahara.... One of the greatest cities of North Africa and the most famous of the whole universe ... whither traders take goods of no value and return with their camels laden with coarse gold."' The city grew rich simply by taxing the huge volume of traffic that passed across its borders. Deeper into the interior were towns with exotic names, for example, Taghaza, Taodeni, and Gadames, and, most famous, the major commercial center of Timbuktu. Timbuktu was located well over one thousand miles south of the Straits of Gibraltar, on the banks of the Niger River, which, together with the Senegal to the east, enclosed much of the gold mining area.

The great abundance of West African gold had been known to people around the Mediterranean for centuries. Around 500 BC, Herodotus himself provided a lively description of the territory, which subsequent visitors over the years never failed to confirm. Reaching the gold supplies across the great unmarked and and wastes of the desert involved a risky, complicated, and lengthy voyage, in which navigation by the stars was every bit as essential as for ships at sea. E. W. Bovill, the most authoritative contemporary historian of the Sahara, has observed that "Outside the polar regions there are few parts of the world less encouraging to human occupation."s Nevertheless, Herodotus provides sufficient information to tell us that active communication between the coasts and the interior Sahara existed even in his day. Ancient rock drawings reveal that the bullock was the primary means of transportation.

The camel first appeared in the Sahara some time around AD 100, perhaps introduced by the Roman legions involved in military campaigns that demanded speed. The camels probably came from Egypt, where the Persians had brought them about five hundred years earlier. This remarkable innovation in the art of transportation-equivalent in some ways to the introduction of the automobile or even the airplane in modern times-greatly shortened the time spent moving between watering points, thereby permitting a much wider range of travel. Bullocks can come close to matching camels in their ability to do without water-a maximum of about ten days-but most camels can carry two to three times as much load as a bullock. Furthermore, the best camels can cover twice as much mileage in a day as the typical bullock, which is no minor consideration when the time needed to reach the next watering hole is the difference between life and death.' The innovation of the camel was remarkable in another sense. The introduction of the camel, according to one authority, "contradicts the most basic Western metaphor of technological progress: here the wheel-present in North Africa and the Sahara from Phoenician times-had to be `disinvented' to make possible the linking of the Sudan and the Mediterranean."10

The impact of the camel on the potential volume of trade was revolutionary. As Bovill describes this development,

[The introduction of the camel] marked the dawn of a new era for the northern half of the continent.... The camel gave man freedom of movement he had never known before and brought within his reach the remotest pastures. The caravan routes lost half their terrors and new roads were opened for the flow of trade and culture."

The landscape that led to the gold fields was not the only feature of the region that people from Europe and the Near East would find strange. Herodotus cites the Carthaginians as the source for the following story. The Carthaginians described to him a place on the west coast where they would neatly arrange the merchandise they wanted to trade, return to their ships, and "raise a great smoke." At that point, the natives would come down to the shore carrying gold, would leave as much gold as they believed the Carth4ginian merchandise was worth, and then would withdraw from the scene. The Carthaginians, in turn, would come ashore and look the situation over. If they were satisfied, they would take the gold and sail away; if not, they would return to their ships and wait patiently. The process would continue until both sides were satisfied-but they would never see each other face-to-face or exchange a word. This "dumb barter" was characteristic of how business was transacted throughout much of the gold-bearing areas. It continues to exist in some parts of Africa to this day.

We can only speculate on why dumb barter as a method of doing business should have persisted for so long. Perhaps the natives insisted on these arrangements in order to protect themselves from traders tempted to capture them as slaves. Traders sufficiently eager to acquire what the Africans had to offer had no choice but to choose this curious arrangement.

Around 750, ravenous at the thought of all that gold down south, the Arabs launched an expedition from Morocco to conquer the goldbearing territories. This was one occasion when matters turned out badly for the Arabs. They failed completely in their objective, suffered serious casualties, and even failed to discover where the gold was coming from. Thereafter, they obtained their gold by means of trade instead of conquest.i2

Although the Arab and European traders in the Middle Ages occasionally offered the Africans merchandise or even the silver and copper coins that the Africans considered better money than gold, salt was the product most desperately in demand. Humans can never do without salt, but the people in the territories that produced the gold must have had an unusually intense and insatiable need for it. They were so unfortunate as to live in one of the few spots in the world where the nearest sources of salt were far distant in a land where nobody could travel faster than ten miles a day.

Substantial sources of salt did exist about one thousand miles to the north, where the salt miners, many of them black-skinned slaves, worked under extremely harsh conditions. They were nearly a twenty-day journey from the nearest towns, were often blinded by desert winds, and on occasion even starved to death because of delays in the arrival of the traders who would bring them food and fresh water to swap for the salt."

Most of the salt was transported south in camel-driven caravans. At many points, however, where pasturage was so scarce that the camels could proceed no further, the great slabs of salt had to be broken into small pieces that were then placed on men's heads for the rest of the trip. One fifteenth-century traveler from Portugal described what happened next:

Each man carries one piece, and thus they form a great army of men on foot, who transport it a great distance ... until they reach certain waters.... All those who have the salt pile it in rows, each marking his own. Having made these piles, the whole caravan retires half a day's journey. Then there come another race of blacks who do not wish to be seen or to speak.... Seeking the salt, they place a quantity of gold opposite each pile, and then turn back, leaving salt and gold."

This story is not just a matter of curiosity. It has a deeper meaning. Salt was so precious to the gold diggers that many of them would trade their gold only in return for salt. In many transactions, an ounce of gold exchanged for an ounce of salt. Bovill asserts that "Salt was so infinitely the more important [compared to gold], that it is no overstatement to say that gold was valued by the Sudanese almost entirely for its purchasing power in salt.... It was the basis of their domestic, as it was of their foreign, trade, neither of which can be comprehended without an understanding of how starved they were of this essential to the well-being of man."15 Look at it the other way, however. If an ounce of salt could acquire an ounce or more of gold, fetching the gold must have been an enormously profitable operation.

Thanks to the practice of dumb barter, the uncongenial geography of the gold fields, and the natural reticence of the natives, Europeans and Arabs were frustrated for centuries in their search for the source of the African gold. The whole area acquired a kind of mysterious glow among the peoples to the north.

During the fifteenth century, Europeans developed the custom of calling the gold-bearing areas Guinea (which the British persisted for a long time in spelling "Ginney"). Indeed, the Portuguese, who were the first to explore the territory, received permission from the pope in 1481 to call their king Lord of Guinea, a title that survived until the twentieth century. In 1662, the English began to use gold imported from West Africa by the African Company to mint a coin that they called the guinea, an interesting innovation in coinage that will soon occupy our attention.

Controversy persists over the source of the name of Guinea, because no such place existed in Africa at that time. No doubt the word is a corruption of something that sounded like Guinea. A likely candidate is Ghana, but Bovill insists, convincingly, that Guinea is derived from the name of the trading post of Jenne, situated on a tributary of the Niger River about three hundred miles southwest of Timbuktu, toward the gold-mining areas.'6

Although not well known, Jenne must have been a remarkable city. Founded in the thirteenth century, it was located in a populous region with a set of waterways that were rare for the African continent but that made Jenne easily accessible. The city was not only a commercial center of importance but a major attraction for men of letters as well. Unlike Timbuktu, where political tensions and turnover were frequent, Jenne was a peaceful place that spread the culture of the Mediterranean throughout western Africa. According to Es-Sadi, a distinguished seventeenth-century author who was born and raised in rival Timbuktu, Jenne was "a blessed town."17 Let us hope that Bovill had it right: such a place deserves to lend its name to a country.

As our story has wound its way from golden palaces and religious icons, from bezants to dinars, from golden balls to golden tribute, and finally to the dumb barter of gold for slabs of salt in darkest Africa, a disturbing question comes to the surface: Where is value? For the Europeans, the Byzantines, and the Arabs, gold was the magical focal point of their material desires. Not so for the Africans.

To the Africans toiling for gold but starving for salt, the salt standard was a force far more powerful and durable than anything that the gold standard stood for in the sophisticated civilizations everywhere else on the globe. What must those poor diggers have thought of the funny people from the north country who swapped inestimable salt for stuff whose only role on earth was to give men pride and pleasure by letting them see its lustre?

The question reverberates into our own time.