Levtzion and Hopkins bequeathed an excellent gift for the world in their collection of translated Arabic texts or extracts pertinent to the "Western Sudan" in the Middle Ages. Yes, the sources are limited and can be limiting without requisite attention to oral history, traditions, ethnographic research, and later historical sources produced from within West Africa. However, without geographers, travelers, writers, and chroniclers like al-Bakri, Ibn Battuta, Ibn Khaldun, and al-Yaqubi, we would know far less about Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Kanem, Takrur, and various towns, peoples, and kingdoms in the "Western Sudan."
For this blog's current obsession with Songhay peoples and their history, particularly their deeply ancient "pre-imperial" past, the collected translated Arabic texts have proven to be essential for the ways in which archaeological finds, oral traditions, and the internal written texts (Gao and Kukiya epitaphs) can be fit together, like a puzzle, to complete the image of ancient Gao. These sources also, despite the sometimes ethnocentric or occasionally irrational nature of many of the writings, point to relations between different West African peoples and West African relations with Saharan Berbers.
It requires a careful reading to see the nuances and "intra-Sudanic" connections, but it is there. It may appear randomly in references to Nubians and Egyptians traveling on an ancient route through the oases west of Upper Egypt to get to the "Sudan" and Maghrib. Or it may be an occasionally inaccurate or misleading representation of inter-state warfare or conflict that sheds light on the dynamic nature of trans-Saharan and trans-Sudanic interactions, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. If one can use these sources while understanding their limitations, the Western Sudan and the question of its own uniqueness as a world-historical region becomes apparent.
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