It's reported that he unintentionally disrupted Eqyption economy for at least ten years. He did that by spending and giving charity in gold enroute to pilgrimage or Hajj in Mecca while staying about 3 months in Egypt. Allegedly he had hundred camels in towing, each camel carrying hundreds of pounds of pure gold. Pilgrimage to Mecca is the journey that every Muslim has to make once in a lifetime if they can afford it.
[1] Mansa Musa: The richest man who ever lived (105 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19350951
[2] Mansa Musa:
>...While online articles in the 21st century have claimed that Mansa Musa was the richest person of all time,[91] historians such as Hadrien Collet have argued that Musa's wealth is impossible to calculate accurately.
We don't know the exact wealth of Manda Musa and there really isn't a good way to compare wealth between different eras. Even in the same general timeframe, wouldn't the khanates of the mongol empire be considered more wealthy?
The linked BBC article in the HN post has the list for top 10 richest man in history with Mansa Musa at the very top but Shah Jahan the Mughal Emperor who's the owner of Taj Mahal is not even in the list [1].
The 10 richest men of all time:
1) Mansa Musa (1280-1337, king of the Mali empire) wealth indescribable
2) Augustus Caesar (63 BC-14 AD, Roman emperor) $4.6tn (£3.5tn)
3) Zhao Xu (1048-1085, emperor Shenzong of Song in China) wealth incalculable
4) Akbar I (1542-1605, emperor of India's Mughal dynasty) wealth incalculable
5) Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919, Scottish-American industrialist) $372bn
6) John D Rockefeller (1839-1937) American business magnate) $341bn
7) Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov (1868-1918, Tsar of Russia) $300bn
8) Mir Osman Ali Khan (1886-1967, Indian royal) $230bn
9) William The Conqueror (1028-1087) $229.5bn
10) Muammar Gaddafi (1942-2011, long-time ruler of Libya) $200bn
[1] Is Mansa Musa the richest man who ever lived?
You rarely see modern dictators on these lists but populations and economic prosperity have exploded to the point where historic kings can’t really compete.
Anyone who had multiple people in their will diluted it. Though I feel Augustus got all of Julius' will which goes against this, I imagine powerful people might have a few people they want to leave something for when they die.
It is marvelous he found gold and even then he could only give it away freely
Reuters - Insight: Amazon rainforest gold mining is poisoning scores of threatened species https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/amazon-rainfore...
A whole lot of chemistry process is just X dissolves in Y but not in Z, and using that in order to separate and purify.
In this case metal oxides dissolve in glass (sand, which is a silicon oxide, mostly) but gold doesn't A) oxidize under reasonable conditions or B) dissolve in the glass. Sand or glass waste is melted, the not gold dissolves into the molten glass.
There was a lot going on in medieval Africa, I wish I had some good sources, if anyone knows any I'd be interested in expanding my knowledge as well!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_Empire
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34928286-african-dominio...
Someday I'll create a crusadecrusade account to compare how long it stays unbanned.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/10/11/paul-atreides-...
There are many words aquired across cultures and given meanings that differ from their original context. Using such words can prompt discussion and leave some better informed about original meaning in original contexts in populations that dwarf the US population.
Why should I care about this? Is your point that the population of Islamic societies it greater than the US population, and thus they get to dictate how that word is used in this country, in its own cultural context?
You are welcome to maintain your keyhole view of language and the world, others see a bigger picture .. which runs contrary to your assertion about "only".
You don't, of course, universally speak for all or what all draw from reading a word.
But do feel free to hold your opinions.
This is a pretty rose-colored way of putting it. Put another way: Somali society has a long and deep history of decentralized clan-based organization which, for better or worse, was deep-rooted enough that replacement with a centralized democratic government failed.
The system you describe didn't merely survive the failure of centralization, it was one of the existing Somali institutions that resisted centralization and won out in the end. Which depending on one's perspective on Somalia's current state could make it deeply problematic as a local maximum that makes the current status quo unassailable.
> Which depending on one's perspective on Somalia's current state could make it deeply problematic
It's pretty hard to look at Somalia's current state and say that their current social structures are "known to work" by essentially any metric.
But, strangely, they are not the same thing at all.
OP is saying that the old system is clearly better because when they tried the new system the old system fought back and killed people, so they shouldn't have tried to replace the old system in the first place. It's democracy's fault that Somali warlords had to be brutal to keep democracy from working. Everyone would have been better off if they had just continued to put up with the warlords' old way of working.
This logic isn't comparable to the logic of Western democracies, it's comparable to the logic of criminal mobs everywhere. Play along and no one has to get hurt.
Interestingly, when the quote 'democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others' comes up this sham form of relativism you present vanishes from comments. And that is because democracy objectively is severely flawed, and only justified because it produces relatively better outcomes than many of the other systems that it replaced.
Me neither, because it didn't happen, and any attempts to both-sides this are dishonestly partisan.
Neither has a problem brutalizing foreigners in other countries, of course.
Nope, clans are definitionally not states for several reasons. A state has definite territory, whereas clan-type structures have tended to overlap with each other geographically because they're usually embedded in some larger society. A state by definition has centralized authority whereas clans may not.
> or whatever label you want to put on the organization that starts with small family tribes and scales to multi-continent empires
There is no such label because these organizations are not just shades on the same theme at different sizes, they're fundamentally different in character.
> that kind of society organization was more or less everywhere in the history of every human society
True, but there are wide variances in how long in the past that form of organization was dominant.
You won't see Egypt reverting to decentralized non-state clan-oriented governance any time soon because they've been ruled by one state or another for 5000 years.
In fact, most of present day problems in Africa are still connected to the continued usage of that system.
I'm curious how pure they get gold with this glass method. If it's not as pure as Cupellation then that would explain why it wasn't widely used outside of west Africa.
Also known as experimentation, which is the whole basis of the scientific process.
There isn't.
Referring to experimentation as "playing with" feels like a attempt to demean the output.
Or someone melted down a glass and gold object and noticed the gold that floated (precipitated?) out was purer than that which went in.
Even today various artists playing with fire rediscover that while gold doesn't naturally work into or onto glass it's still possible to adhere gold to glass if the timings and tempreptures are "just right".