Fun facts, Mansa Musa (Musa Keita) who's king in Mali Empire in Western Africa is the richest person ever lived [1].
It's reported that he unintentionally disrupted Eqyption economy for at least ten years. He did that by spending and giving charity in gold enroute to pilgrimage or Hajj in Mecca while staying about 3 months in Egypt. Allegedly he had hundred camels in towing, each camel carrying hundreds of pounds of pure gold. Pilgrimage to Mecca is the journey that every Muslim has to make once in a lifetime if they can afford it.
[1] Mansa Musa: The richest man who ever lived (105 comments):
>...While online articles in the 21st century have claimed that Mansa Musa was the richest person of all time,[91] historians such as Hadrien Collet have argued that Musa's wealth is impossible to calculate accurately.
We don't know the exact wealth of Manda Musa and there really isn't a good way to compare wealth between different eras. Even in the same general timeframe, wouldn't the khanates of the mongol empire be considered more wealthy?
teleforce · 3h ago
Nobody really know for sure to be honest but he's most probably one of the top ten.
The linked BBC article in the HN post has the list for top 10 richest man in history with Mansa Musa at the very top but Shah Jahan the Mughal Emperor who's the owner of Taj Mahal is not even in the list [1].
The 10 richest men of all time:
1) Mansa Musa (1280-1337, king of the Mali empire) wealth indescribable
2) Augustus Caesar (63 BC-14 AD, Roman emperor) $4.6tn (£3.5tn)
3) Zhao Xu (1048-1085, emperor Shenzong of Song in China) wealth incalculable
4) Akbar I (1542-1605, emperor of India's Mughal dynasty) wealth incalculable
5) Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919, Scottish-American industrialist) $372bn
6) John D Rockefeller (1839-1937) American business magnate) $341bn
7) Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov (1868-1918, Tsar of Russia) $300bn
8) Mir Osman Ali Khan (1886-1967, Indian royal) $230bn
9) William The Conqueror (1028-1087) $229.5bn
10) Muammar Gaddafi (1942-2011, long-time ruler of Libya) $200bn
Mansa Musa’s headline story is that his spending caused inflation in Egypt. I understand that estimate of Augustus Caesar’s wealth is based in part on him considering Egypt, in its entirety, to be his personal possession. It feels like “owning the whole country” should probably outrank “causing inflation in that country”, it’s probably meaningless to try to compare across such vast gulfs of time and place.
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LunaSea · 1h ago
Aren't Bezos, Musk, Gates & co richer the first half of the people on the list?
flohofwoe · 45m ago
Not until one of them buys the entire US armed forces, installs himself on the throne in Washington and declares all of California his own personal property - just to draw a parallel to the number 2 spot ;)
euroderf · 35m ago
Soon.
saagarjha · 22m ago
fwiw Mughal≠Mongol
goodmunky · 7m ago
Africa is a such a vast and diverse region that “Africans” is nearly meaningless in this context. But you already know that.
bcoates · 6h ago
This article leaves me super unclear on the metallurgical process going on here--you fire gold ore on a bed of glass rubble and the impurities are adsorbed into the ceramic or ???
colechristensen · 6h ago
Yup.
A whole lot of chemistry process is just X dissolves in Y but not in Z, and using that in order to separate and purify.
In this case metal oxides dissolve in glass (sand, which is a silicon oxide, mostly) but gold doesn't A) oxidize under reasonable conditions or B) dissolve in the glass. Sand or glass waste is melted, the not gold dissolves into the molten glass.
KolibriFly · 24m ago
Innovation doesn't just come from empire-scale institutions
gregschlom · 11h ago
This made me realize that I have absolutely no idea what was going on in Africa during medieval times (and only a sliver of an idea in Europe).
KolibriFly · 18m ago
Same here, most of what I learned growing up barely touched on African history beyond Egypt or colonialism. Stuff like this really highlights how much was going on
jihadjihad · 10h ago
Mansa Musa is totally worth reading about, as are philosophers etc. like Ibn Khaldun and others (Ibn Khaldun wrote about Mansa Musa's pilgrimage, wealth, etc.).
There was a lot going on in medieval Africa, I wish I had some good sources, if anyone knows any I'd be interested in expanding my knowledge as well!
petepete · 1h ago
There are episodes of In Our Time on The Empire of Mali (incl Mansa Musa) and Ibn Khaldun
The Africans also beat the mainland europeans by a long long shot in inventing a legal system that repels a lot of the centralized authoritarian elements found in european and american legal systems to this day, and did a relatively good job to many systems of enforcing the individual and property rights of even the common tribesman.
The somalis had 'xeer', which was basically peer-to-peer legal system where every man could enforce property and individual rights himself, but checked by a decentralized court system that was appealable up the chain between families/tribes.
It is so robust it outlasted the centralized government of Somalia and democracy, and even outperformed it.
demosthanos · 9h ago
> It is so robust it outlasted the centralized government of Somalia and democracy, and even outperformed it.
This is a pretty rose-colored way of putting it. Put another way: Somali society has a long and deep history of decentralized clan-based organization which, for better or worse, was deep-rooted enough that replacement with a centralized democratic government failed.
The system you describe didn't merely survive the failure of centralization, it was one of the existing Somali institutions that resisted centralization and won out in the end. Which depending on one's perspective on Somalia's current state could make it deeply problematic as a local maximum that makes the current status quo unassailable.
colechristensen · 6h ago
shrug clans are small states (or whatever label you want to put on the organization that starts with small family tribes and scales to multi-continent empires), that kind of society organization was more or less everywhere in the history of every human society. There is a tendency everywhere towards larger, more complex states and a path up and down the scale locally as the bigger ones are created and fall.
demosthanos · 6h ago
> clans are small states
Nope, clans are definitionally not states for several reasons. A state has definite territory, whereas clan-type structures have tended to overlap with each other geographically because they're usually embedded in some larger society. A state by definition has centralized authority whereas clans may not.
> or whatever label you want to put on the organization that starts with small family tribes and scales to multi-continent empires
There is no such label because these organizations are not just shades on the same theme at different sizes, they're fundamentally different in character.
> that kind of society organization was more or less everywhere in the history of every human society
True, but there are wide variances in how long in the past that form of organization was dominant.
You won't see Egypt reverting to decentralized non-state clan-oriented governance any time soon because they've been ruled by one state or another for 5000 years.
KolibriFly · 11m ago
It makes you wonder how many other decentralized systems have existed or still exist under the radar, and what we might learn from them
wtcactus · 2h ago
What you are describing is a clan system. Something that could be found all over the world and something most cultures replaced by more advanced and fairer systems of governance centuries ago.
In fact, most of present day problems in Africa are still connected to the continued usage of that system.
kleton · 9h ago
This is called cupellation. Romans used clay crucibles
declan_roberts · 7h ago
Cupellation is considerably earlier than this method. Some 2,000 years earlier. Cupellation is also very effective at removing base metals.
I'm curious how pure they get gold with this glass method. If it's not as pure as Cupellation then that would explain why it wasn't widely used outside of west Africa.
detourdog · 10h ago
What I love about the process is that it seems to have developed by playing with fire.
motorest · 4h ago
> What I love about the process is that it seems to have developed by playing with fire.
Also known as experimentation, which is the whole basis of the scientific process.
detourdog · 2h ago
What is the difference between the two? No where else did the scientific method develop this process. Play can produce surprising results and methodologies stagnates development.
motorest · 1h ago
> What is the difference between the two?
There isn't.
Referring to experimentation as "playing with" feels like a attempt to demean the output.
euroderf · 34m ago
"playing around with" sounds more dignified.
rsynnott · 3h ago
I mean, you could say that of basically all metallurgy prior to the 19th century.
detourdog · 2h ago
Ok lets say that.
JumpCrisscross · 10h ago
> it seems to have developed by playing with fire
Or someone melted down a glass and gold object and noticed the gold that floated (precipitated?) out was purer than that which went in.
defrost · 9h ago
Which is literally playing with fire.
Even today various artists playing with fire rediscover that while gold doesn't naturally work into or onto glass it's still possible to adhere gold to glass if the timings and tempreptures are "just right".
It's reported that he unintentionally disrupted Eqyption economy for at least ten years. He did that by spending and giving charity in gold enroute to pilgrimage or Hajj in Mecca while staying about 3 months in Egypt. Allegedly he had hundred camels in towing, each camel carrying hundreds of pounds of pure gold. Pilgrimage to Mecca is the journey that every Muslim has to make once in a lifetime if they can afford it.
[1] Mansa Musa: The richest man who ever lived (105 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19350951
[2] Mansa Musa:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19350951
>...While online articles in the 21st century have claimed that Mansa Musa was the richest person of all time,[91] historians such as Hadrien Collet have argued that Musa's wealth is impossible to calculate accurately.
We don't know the exact wealth of Manda Musa and there really isn't a good way to compare wealth between different eras. Even in the same general timeframe, wouldn't the khanates of the mongol empire be considered more wealthy?
The linked BBC article in the HN post has the list for top 10 richest man in history with Mansa Musa at the very top but Shah Jahan the Mughal Emperor who's the owner of Taj Mahal is not even in the list [1].
The 10 richest men of all time:
1) Mansa Musa (1280-1337, king of the Mali empire) wealth indescribable
2) Augustus Caesar (63 BC-14 AD, Roman emperor) $4.6tn (£3.5tn)
3) Zhao Xu (1048-1085, emperor Shenzong of Song in China) wealth incalculable
4) Akbar I (1542-1605, emperor of India's Mughal dynasty) wealth incalculable
5) Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919, Scottish-American industrialist) $372bn
6) John D Rockefeller (1839-1937) American business magnate) $341bn
7) Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov (1868-1918, Tsar of Russia) $300bn
8) Mir Osman Ali Khan (1886-1967, Indian royal) $230bn
9) William The Conqueror (1028-1087) $229.5bn
10) Muammar Gaddafi (1942-2011, long-time ruler of Libya) $200bn
[1] Is Mansa Musa the richest man who ever lived?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47379458
No comments yet
A whole lot of chemistry process is just X dissolves in Y but not in Z, and using that in order to separate and purify.
In this case metal oxides dissolve in glass (sand, which is a silicon oxide, mostly) but gold doesn't A) oxidize under reasonable conditions or B) dissolve in the glass. Sand or glass waste is melted, the not gold dissolves into the molten glass.
There was a lot going on in medieval Africa, I wish I had some good sources, if anyone knows any I'd be interested in expanding my knowledge as well!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06kgggv
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qckbw
The somalis had 'xeer', which was basically peer-to-peer legal system where every man could enforce property and individual rights himself, but checked by a decentralized court system that was appealable up the chain between families/tribes.
It is so robust it outlasted the centralized government of Somalia and democracy, and even outperformed it.
This is a pretty rose-colored way of putting it. Put another way: Somali society has a long and deep history of decentralized clan-based organization which, for better or worse, was deep-rooted enough that replacement with a centralized democratic government failed.
The system you describe didn't merely survive the failure of centralization, it was one of the existing Somali institutions that resisted centralization and won out in the end. Which depending on one's perspective on Somalia's current state could make it deeply problematic as a local maximum that makes the current status quo unassailable.
Nope, clans are definitionally not states for several reasons. A state has definite territory, whereas clan-type structures have tended to overlap with each other geographically because they're usually embedded in some larger society. A state by definition has centralized authority whereas clans may not.
> or whatever label you want to put on the organization that starts with small family tribes and scales to multi-continent empires
There is no such label because these organizations are not just shades on the same theme at different sizes, they're fundamentally different in character.
> that kind of society organization was more or less everywhere in the history of every human society
True, but there are wide variances in how long in the past that form of organization was dominant.
You won't see Egypt reverting to decentralized non-state clan-oriented governance any time soon because they've been ruled by one state or another for 5000 years.
In fact, most of present day problems in Africa are still connected to the continued usage of that system.
I'm curious how pure they get gold with this glass method. If it's not as pure as Cupellation then that would explain why it wasn't widely used outside of west Africa.
Also known as experimentation, which is the whole basis of the scientific process.
There isn't.
Referring to experimentation as "playing with" feels like a attempt to demean the output.
Or someone melted down a glass and gold object and noticed the gold that floated (precipitated?) out was purer than that which went in.
Even today various artists playing with fire rediscover that while gold doesn't naturally work into or onto glass it's still possible to adhere gold to glass if the timings and tempreptures are "just right".