CHAPTER XI THE TRADE OF GHANA The constant allusions made by early writers to the trade of Ghana leave no doubt that its commercial relations with the outside world had already become very important during the period in which the Ommeyades ruled in Spain. Gold, slaves, skins, ivory, kola-nuts, gums, honey, corn, and cotton, are among the articles of export which are most frequently named. Hardly a town is mentioned in the states of Northern and North- Western Africa of which it is not said that it carried on trade with the Soudan. Augila, in the back country of Tripoli, Wargelan or Wargla, in the back country of Algiers, with Sidjilmessa in the back country of Morocco, were all known by the name of ** Gates of the Desert." Augila was the special entrance of the trade with Egypt and the East ; Sidjilmessa, which was the entrance for the trade of the West, has already been described ; Wargelan, which lies on the parallel of Bugia, is specially mentioned as being inhabited by very rich merchants, who made their fortunes from the gold of the Soudan, brought to Wargelan in the form of gold dust, and ** coined" there for export. From Wargelan to Ghana was, we are told, a journey of thirty days.

At a somewhat later date, towards the end of the period of the Ommeyades, we have a circumstantial account of how the ancestors of the historian Al Makkari carried on a trade between Europe and the Soudan, by which the fortunes of the house of Makkari were laid. An ancestor of his, writing in the fourteenth century, says : " From time immemorial my family had exercised the prolOO