The Trans-Saharan Trade

The Sahara covers about 9 million square kilometers, roughly the size of the United States. Most people, hearing that figure, picture an obstacle — a dead zone between civilizations, the reason sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean world developed separately. That picture is wrong.

For over a thousand years, the Sahara was one of the most commercially active corridors on earth. Merchants crossed it regularly. Cities grew rich from it. Empires rose on the strength of what moved through it. The The network of overland trade routes crossing the Sahara Desert that linked West African kingdoms to North Africa, the Mediterranean, and ultimately to the Middle East and Europe. Active from roughly the 3rd century CE through the 16th century, this trade system carried gold, salt, enslaved people, ivory, and copper across thousands of kilometers of desert. was not marginal geography. It was the economic backbone of medieval West Africa.

Understanding it means correcting a deep assumption: that deserts stop movement. Deserts do stop certain kinds of movement. Armies find them difficult. Empires rarely project power across them. But merchants — patient, organized, working with the right animals and the right knowledge of wells and seasonal winds — can cross them profitably. The proof is everywhere in the archaeological and documentary record. Roman coins found in Mali. Cowrie shells from the Indian Ocean found in Saharan graves. West African gold in medieval Egyptian treasuries.