A reasonable body of sources for the writing of western African history begins to be available about 1000 ce. Three centuries earlier the Arabs had completed their conquest of Africa north of the Sahara and so came into possession of the northern termini of trade routes reaching across the desert to western Africa. The lively school of geographers and historians that flourished in the Muslim world from about the 9th to the 14th century thus secured access to growing amounts of information about what they called the bilād al-sūdān, the territory of the Black peoples south of the Sahara. This ...(100 of 31209 words)