Sao

Sao is the name given to the language of the Sao civilization, which grew from local Iron Age cultures around Lake Chad and the Chari River in the second millennium BC, taking clear shape in the last centuries before Christ. No Sao inscription or text survives, so the language is known only through its Chadic-speaking descendants.

The Sao lived in walled city-states ruled by divine kings, leaving terracotta figures and funerary urns, and their cities long resisted the empires of Kanem and Bornu.

Between the ninth and fifteenth centuries these states were at their height, but in the sixteenth century Bornu expansion and conversion to Islam ended Sao as a separate culture. The Kotoko, who founded their own kingdom in about 1500 and speak the Lagwan and other Mandage languages, are regarded as the inheritors of the Sao city-states.