the western Sudan. Already the town had a native and a Mussulman quarter,
and was built of wood and stone with surrounding gardens. The king had an
army of two hundred thousand and the wealth of the country was great. A
century later the king had become Mohammedan in faith and had a palace
with sculptures and glass windows. The great reason for this development
was the desert trade. Gold, skins, ivory, kola nuts, gums, honey, wheat,
and cotton were exported, and the whole Mediterranean coast traded in the
Sudan. Other and lesser black kingdoms like Tekrou, Silla, and Masina
surrounded Ghana.

In the early part of the thirteenth century the prestige of Ghana began to
fall before the rising Mandingan kingdom to the west. Melle, as it was
called, was founded in 1235 and formed an open door for Moslem and Moorish
traders. The new kingdom, helped by its expanding trade, began to grow,
and Islam slowly surrounded the older Negro culture west, north, and east.
However, a great mass of the older heathen culture, pushing itself upward
from the Guinea coast, stood firmly against Islam down to the nineteenth
century.

Steadily Mohammedanism triumphed in the growing states which almost
encircled the protagonists of ancient Atlantic culture. Mandingan Melle
eventually supplanted Ghana in prestige and power, after Ghana had been
overthrown by the heathen Su Su from the south.

The territory of Melle lay southeast of Ghana and some five hundred miles
north of the Gulf of Guinea. Its kings were known by the title of Mansa,
and from the middle of the thirteenth century to the middle of the
fourteenth the Mellestine, as its dominion was called, was the leading
power in the land of the blacks. Its greatest king, Mari Jalak (Mansa
Musa), made his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, with a caravan of sixty