Africa in the medieval world (500 – 1500). A thousand years of kingdoms, caliphates, steppe empires and trading cities between the fall of Rome and the voyages that joined the hemispheres.
Aksum, in northern Ethiopia, struck gold, silver and bronze coins from the third century AD and raised granite grave markers more than 23 meters tall.
· AD 350Francisco Álvares measured Lalibela's rock-hewn churches twice in the 1520s, giving names, spans and a tradition of who built them.
· 1200The University of Pretoria Museums calls its gold rhinoceros the only artwork of its kind, found in a royal grave on Mapungubwe Hill in the 1930s.
· 1250Ancestors of the Shona built Great Zimbabwe between about 1100 and 1450, a city that lived on cattle, grain and gold. Rhodesia censored the finding until 1980.
· 1300No record gives a weight; the 100 camels and 12,000 slaves are report, not record. Al-Umari, 12 years on, wrote that the gold mithqal fell from 25 dirhams to 22.
· 1324Ibn Battuta reached Kilwa in 1331. Excavations in the 1960s and 2016 and a 2023 DNA study date its origins differently; five of its coins turned up in Australia.
· 1331Morocco took Timbuktu in 1591 and exiled its scholars in 1594. In 2016 the ICC sentenced Al Mahdi for ten sites wrecked in 2012. The books are online.
· 1591
