Aoudaghost
Coordinates: 17 ° 25 ′ N , 10 ° 25 ′ W
Aoudaghost ( Arabic أوداغوست, DMG Audaġust , French Aoudaghost, also Awdaghost, today Tegdaoust, Tiġdaust ) was an important trading town in medieval West Africa. It is located in the western Sahara in what is now southeastern Mauritania . Rock paintings speak for a first settlement in pre-Christian times, the heyday of the oasis city was between the 9th and 11th centuries.
location
After the itineraries of Arab geographers such as Ibn Hauqal in the 10th and al-Bakri in the 11th century, Aoudaghost is to be found in southeast Mauritania. In 1927, the French Lieutenant Boëry localized the place with Tiġdaust in the Tagant administrative region , which was later confirmed by Théodore Monod . The ruins are located halfway between Kiffa and Tichitt on an unpaved road. It is located about 200 kilometers northwest of Koumbi Saleh , the alleged capital of the Ghana Empire .
history
Aoudaghost may have been founded around the 5th or 7th century by a prince of the Lamtuna , a tribal group of the Berber Sanhajah . The trading center, which flourished in the 11th century, was located on the westernmost route for the Trans-Saharan trade between the black African Sudan in the south and the Maghreb . The route led via Koumbi Saleh to the Bouré gold field on the upper reaches of the Niger in present-day Guinea . The earliest finds showing trade contacts with the Islamic north ( Ifrīqiya ) are glazed pottery and semi-precious stones from the 9th century.
Together with the capital of Ghana, Aoudaghost was the most important trading center in the region in the south in the 10th and 11th centuries; north of the Sahara, Sigilmasa (Siğilmāsa) in the area of Tafilet in southeast Morocco was the starting point of the trade route. The distance was 60 days. What exactly was done is not entirely clear from the accounts of contemporary historians. Ibn Hauqal reports of Arab traders in Sigilmasa who originally came from Iraq (from Baghdad , Basra and Kufa ), who traveled to Aoudaghost themselves and who may have lived here for at least a while. There was a trading upper class of Arabs and Berbers in the place, as well as a far larger number of servant slaves.
Gold came from the south and certainly also slaves who were transported to the Maghreb and from there further east. Other chroniclers describe a flourishing city with several mosques, but do not name the goods that were brought to the south in exchange for gold. Al-Biruni (973-1048) mentions trading gold for materials from the north, but not salt. Al-Bakri is the first to describe in detail the mining and trade of salt in the Sahara. The generally little information about the salt trade in Arab sources suggests that salt was traded more regionally and was of little importance for the Arab long-distance traders; in any case, salt was not exchanged for gold.
According to al-Bakri's description, the most beautiful and largest date palms and fig trees grew in the oasis, and sheep and cattle were raised. Wheat fields have been watered with leather buckets, and cucumbers, figs and grapes have been grown. The goods in the lively market, which included agricultural products as well as salt, were paid for with gold dust, according to al-Bakri. His description of lush oasis gardens would have been exaggerated when he mentions wheat, dates and raisins elsewhere as imports from the north. Other sources also mention the transport of dates from the north to Sudan. It is possible that at this time the culture of date palms in the Sahara oases was just enough to cover their own needs and only later achieved the great importance that went into the 20th century.
Aoudaghost was the northernmost trading center of the Ghana Empire until it was conquered and sacked by the Almoravids in 1054/55 . Political unrest and periods of drought later slowed development. In the middle of the 12th century, Aouaghost was described by al-Idrisi as a small settlement without traders whose inhabitants were breeding camels. Aoudaghost had become part of the Mali Empire , agricultural production probably came to a standstill in the 15th century due to lack of rainfall, and in the 17th century the place was finally abandoned.
Cityscape
From 1960 to 1976 excavations took place under the direction of the French archaeologists Jean Devisse and Denise Robert , during which several settlement phases from the end of the 8th to the 14th century could be distinguished. The exposed house floor plans are similar in all phases. In the middle was an inner courtyard with a fountain, which was entered through an anteroom and a hallway. Up to three living rooms were accessible through doors from the courtyard, which was partly in the shadow of a column-supported roof. The ruins of the house in the later phase are limited to a small part of the original city complex.
From the oldest known mosque in Mauritania, massive square pillars , smaller column bases and the mihrab in the southeast wall have been preserved in the prayer room . Adjacent was a courtyard with a fountain for ritual washing ( wudu ' ) and another mihrab.
In the north of the city, beneath a cliff, lie the remains of a necropolis with a tumulus from pre-Islamic times piled up from stone blocks . The burial ground is about 700 meters long in north-south direction. The skeletons in the graves, which are oriented differently in two areas, can be interpreted as different degrees of Islamization in chronological order or as the existence of different religious traditions at the same time. The residential town and necropolis together extend over an area of twelve hectares.
400 meters south of the excavation site there are rock carvings from pre-Christian times in a rock grotto showing hunting scenes and horse-drawn chariots .
On June 14, 2001, Aoudaghost was added to the tentative list of UNESCO World Heritage .
Others
Science fiction author Bruce Sterling has dedicated a story to the city in his Crystal Express collection that plays with the fact that the once flourishing metropolis is now only a marginal note in history.
See also
literature
- Jean Devisse (Ed.): Tegdaoust III: Recherches sur Aoudaghost. Campagnes 1960-1965. Enquêtes générales . Éditions Researches sur les Civilization, Paris 1983, ISBN 2-86538-031-9 .
- Thomas Krings: Sahel. Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Niger . Islamic and traditional black African culture between the Atlantic and Lake Chad. duMont, Cologne 1982, ISBN 3-7701-1202-4 , p. 242-244 .
- Rainer Oßwald : The trading cities of the Western Sahara. The development of the Arab-Moorish culture of Šinqīt, Wādān, Tīšīt and Walāta (= Marburg studies on Africa and Asia . Volume 39 ). Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-496-00853-9 , pp. 60-66 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Timothy Insoll: Islamic Archeology and the Sahara . In: David Mattingly, Sue McLaren, Elizabeth Savage (Eds.): Libyan Desert. Natural Resources and Cultural Heritage . The Society for Libyan Studies, London 2006, ISBN 1-900971-04-6 , pp. 232 ( insoll.org [PDF; 840 kB ]).
- ↑ Oßwald, pp. 63-66
- ↑ a b Oßwald, p. 117
- ↑ Insoll, p 232
- ^ Site archéologique de Tegdaoust. UNESCO.org