Koumbi Saleh

Koumbi Saleh was a substantial town in the Sahel of southern Mauritania. Its dense stone-built quarter, narrow streets and congregational mosque belonged to a Muslim community that traded across the Sahara, and some houses probably rose above a single storey. People had lived here since about the fifth century, and the town proper flourished from about the eleventh to the fourteenth, so it was in its last years when this period opens.

The site is often taken for the capital of the Ghana Empire, whose wealth came from the gold trade. Al-Bakri in the eleventh century described the capital as two towns ten kilometres apart, one inhabited by Muslim merchants and the other by the king, and a seventeenth-century African chronicle gives the name of the capital as Koumbi. The stone town probably corresponds to the Muslim merchants' half of that double capital. In the thirteenth century Walata replaced Awdaghust as the southern end of the caravan road, and the urban life of Koumbi Saleh ended in the fourteenth.