Sahara is probably the harshest and most desolate spot on the planet, a seemingly boundless sea of sand and rock blanketing North Africa. Its immense size, its ferocity—the scorching heat of the burning sun, the icy cold of the nights, and an almost killer shortage of water—created a de facto natural border, a blank on the map between Mediterranean civilization and the rest of humanity, sub-Saharan Africa. But to old men, though, this polarity was no obstacle; it was an ocean. And as with all seas, it was not empty; it was traversed by intrepid merchants on the searoads that were nautical highways, linking remote worlds and charting the fate of continents. The Sahara did not suppress trade; it regulated it, and it built a sophisticated and lethal trade system upon one of the world's most legendary commodities: gold. It was geography that governed all.
It was no level plain but an irregular landscape of varied perils. There were huge sand seas, ergs, which could swallow entire caravans. There were huge, rocky plateaus referred to as regs, and threatening mountain ranges such as the Hoggar and Tibesti, which provided refuge and sometimes water but were hard to cross. The true builders of the trans-Saharan trade routes were not emperors or kings, but the function of oases. These isolated oases of life, along with their natural spring and patches of arable land, were the only likely stopping points for human beings. The trade routes were thus a series of such pockets. Caravans had to travel from one to another, the exact distance between watering holes. This rendered the roads highly specialized and narrow, like phantom roads drawn upon the earth. Escape was impossible; to deviate from the ordained route was to die. The most renowned of these roads ran from Morocco's Sijilmasa to Timbuktu, the legendary city on the Niger, a months-long trek that pushed human endurance to the breaking point. The animal behind this commerce was the camel.
Brought to the Middle East from the Middle East at some point in the early centuries AD, the camel was the beast of the desert. It could endure for ten days without water, haul loads of 500 pounds, and move across soft sand on its broad, padded feet. The Sahara was passable. The camel opened up the Sahara, and it became an uncontrollable but passable commercial route. Trade distribution was monopolized by the North African Berbers, such as the Tuareg groups, the lords of the desert. They also knew where the hidden oases were, the optimum paths through mountains, and survival strategies. They organized the enormous caravans, the thousands of camels and hundreds of folk, in creeping, deliberate cities on the sand. The driving force behind this commerce was a commerce of commodities between two other biological realms.
Commodities of the Mediterranean and European realms came from the north: salt, cloth, glass, arms, and horses. From the south came the wealth of sub-Saharan Africa: ivory, kola nuts, slaves, and above all, gold. The most important trade was of gold and salt, two commodities that literally their weight in each other. Gold was fairly ubiquitous in the rainforests of West Africa, but salt was not, and was an essential nutrient for the preservation of food and the replacement of lost electrolytes in sweating. Sahara, especially in such locations as mines in Taghaza town, featured salt, which was mined in huge plates from desert soil. Gold, though, in the desert was an illusion. It was this fluctuation in value that gave birth to one of the world's most renowned systems of trade ever. It was indirect and long.
Gold was extracted from forest kingdoms to the south of the Sahara, such as the Ghana empire, followed by Mali and Songhai. It was then carried north as far as desert towns in the south, such as Timbuktu and Gao. It was there, at least supposedly sometimes, that the silent trade mythology supposedly occurred. Northern traders would come and leave their wares, especially salt, on the ground, by accounts. They would then beat drums to indicate that they were there and then depart. They would be visited by local gold traders, who would put a lump of gold dust beside the goods and depart. The northern merchants would come back; if they were satisfied with the quantity of the gold, they would collect it and depart, beating again to seal the transaction. Otherwise, they would ask for more gold to be added. This amiable conversation, if entirely literal or somewhat mythical, serves to remind us of the vast discretion and cultural distance that characterized the initial stages of this trade. After selling these goods in these south entrepôts, the Berber traders ventured across the Sahara on the perilous, treacherous return trip.
Gold wound up in North African ports and thus poured into Middle Eastern and European economies. West African gold struck the dinars of Islamic caliphates and medieval European kingdom coins subsequently. This movement of gold effectively redistributed wealth and concentration of power throughout the entire known world, funding empires and spreading economic growth away from its source. The effects of desert trade were gargantuan.
The most obvious one was the establishment of powerful and wealthy empires in West Africa. Ghana, Mali, and Songhai empires not only possessed gold but controlled its access as well. They charged taxes on caravans entering and exiting their lands, acquiring enormous wealth. Timbuktu and the other towns grew from a temporary camp into illustrious centers of commerce, scholarship, and Islam, having world-renowned universities and libraries that drew scholars from throughout Africa and the Middle East. The Sahara, rather than separating sub-Saharan Africa, linked it to an international exchange network. Furthermore, the routes also served as conduits for commodities aside from merchandise.
They carried technology, religions, and ideas. Islam spread south along the caravan routes, carried by Berber and Arab traders. It was adopted by the West African empires' ruling classes, who in their turn integrated it into the respective societies, generating a unique synthesis that characterized the region's art, architecture, and law. The native languages were adapted to writing using the Arabic alphabet, and mathematics, astronomy, and medicine trailed the traders. The Sahara Desert itself was a successful great shaper of history for North and West Africa.
Its overwhelming presence pushed human ingenuity to its limits, producing the camel caravan, the oasis city, and the specialist desert expertise of the desert nations. By making it so hard to trade, it made the goods that passed through it—particularly gold and salt—radically costly, creating vast fortunes for the empires that dominated the routes. It functioned not as a vacuum, but as an arena of transformation, a crucible that reshaped economic and cultural connections between worlds. The history of trans-Saharan commerce is a certain indicator that human commerce and communication will prevail, no matter what the most challenging and inhospitable land on the planet.