teleforce a day ago

Fun facts, Mansa Musa (Musa Keita) who's king in Mali Empire in Western Africa is the richest person ever lived [1].

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19350951

  • opo 18 hours ago

    As your wikipedia link states:

    >...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?

    • teleforce 16 hours ago

      Nobody really know for sure to be honest but he's most probably one of the top ten.

      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?

      https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47379458

      • bernds74 11 hours ago

        Some guy once famously noted that wealth is not measured in gold or silver, but in goods and services. Mansa Musa didn't have a Ferrari F40, or an RTX4090, or air conditioning. He couldn't buy a trip to low earth orbit or get cancer treatment if he needed it. Many people in this day and age are vastly more wealthy than he was.

        • Winsaucerer 11 hours ago

          That's definitely a reasonable way to think about it. Another though is in terms of social status and ability to direct human labor, in which case most people are not more wealthy.

          • Retric 9 hours ago

            On that scale Xi Jinping is likely the richest person to ever live. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping

            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.

            • tonyhart7 22 minutes ago

              yeah but he is "only" leader, he don't own entire china economy

            • Winsaucerer 7 hours ago

              I actually do think of him as a candidate for wealthiest person to have ever lived.

        • rayiner 7 hours ago

          That one way to measure wealth. Another would be to measure it in terms of how much labor you can get from your fellow humans. Mana Musa was far more wealthy by that measure.

        • rcxdude 4 hours ago

          Indeed, it depends. I think the way this list works it's relative to the available resources at the time, i.e. what percentage of the available wealth did they control?

        • throw__away7391 an hour ago

          I visited the Biltmore Estate years ago, the home of the Vanderbilt family. It occurred to me during the tour that all the end result of all this wealth was approximately equivalent to having a 5 bedroom McMansion. A huge percentage of the sprawling property was dedicated to housing servants who performed tasks like laundry, changing the water in the (pre-chlorine) pool, taking care of the horses and carriages of visitors, or preparing meals that today are mostly completely automated or unnecessary. The end result was housing the owners and a few guests in conditions substantially worse than the average modern suburban home.

      • jl6 15 hours ago

        Mansa Musa’s headline story is that his spending caused inflation in Egypt. I understand that estimate of Augustus Caesar’s wealth is based in part on him considering Egypt, in its entirety, to be his personal possession. It feels like “owning the whole country” should probably outrank “causing inflation in that country”, it’s probably meaningless to try to compare across such vast gulfs of time and place.

        • notahacker 12 hours ago

          Musa had an empire too, one that possessed so much gold that his holiday tips devalued the principal store of wealth in foreign countries. Agree the comparisons aren't particularly meaningful; a lot depends on whether your consider having lots of gold to show off with to be more valuable than building an industrial empire, or even owning a bunch of now-common consumer goods and having access to healthcare more impressive than anything Augustus or Musa bought

      • aquova 10 hours ago

        Is there a reason this list wouldn't include any of their successors, who inherited the vast majority, if not all, of their holdings? Did Tiberius not inherit enough of Augustus's wealth to make this top 10 as well?

        • anton-c 8 hours ago

          Iirc he gave some to his wife(?)

          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.

      • LunaSea 14 hours ago

        Aren't Bezos, Musk, Gates & co richer the first half of the people on the list?

        • flohofwoe 13 hours ago

          Not until one of them buys the entire US armed forces, installs himself on the throne in Washington and declares all of California his own personal property - just to draw a parallel to the number 2 spot ;)

          • rayiner 7 hours ago

            The fact that none of them could come close to doing that aptly illustrates why they’re not nearly as wealthy as those in the past.

    • yieldcrv 5 hours ago

      Mansa Musa was illiquid and could not exchange much wealth for goods and services and had nothing to invest in during a time where the gini coefficient around him would have been 1.0

      It is marvelous he found gold and even then he could only give it away freely

  • romaaeterna 10 hours ago

    Document-only claim without any archeological support means that I'm highly skeptical.

    • dyauspitr 7 hours ago

      That’s the vast majority of antiquity unfortunately.

bcoates 19 hours ago

This article leaves me super unclear on the metallurgical process going on here--you fire gold ore on a bed of glass rubble and the impurities are adsorbed into the ceramic or ???

  • colechristensen 19 hours ago

    Yup.

    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.

gregschlom a day ago

This made me realize that I have absolutely no idea what was going on in Africa during medieval times (and only a sliver of an idea in Europe).

  • jihadjihad a day ago

    Mansa Musa is totally worth reading about, as are philosophers etc. like Ibn Khaldun and others (Ibn Khaldun wrote about Mansa Musa's pilgrimage, wealth, etc.).

    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!

    • AStonesThrow a day ago

      [flagged]

      • gwervc a day ago

        How is it even allowed given how hateful it is?

        Someday I'll create a crusadecrusade account to compare how long it stays unbanned.

        • crusadecrusade a day ago

          The name matters a lot less than what they say, and I assume that principal will hold.

        • pclmulqdq a day ago

          "Jihad" in Arabic just means "struggle." There is a large gap between what "jihad" means, even in a Muslim context, and what you think it means.

          • duskwuff 21 hours ago

            I am suddenly reminded of the fact that the most recent movie adaptation of Dune used the word "crusade" for what the book consistently, unflinchingly called a "jihad".

            https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/10/11/paul-atreides-...

            • saagarjha 12 hours ago

              Ew I didn't realize they ruined the movies like that

              • duskwuff 2 hours ago

                Honestly, I can understand the decision. "Jihad" is technically the correct term, but it carries so many negative connotations in the West that using it would be a distraction.

          • remarkEon 21 hours ago

            Surely someone who is signing up for an account on an American tech message board would understand the connotation that word carries in the West (and indeed in Islamic society as well, since contextual usage makes it quite obvious what's inferred and there are multiple words that could be used instead). An innocent excuse of "well in my language it just means struggle" is only going to fool the naïve.

            • defrost 21 hours ago

              "only" seems unlikely.

              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.

              • remarkEon 20 hours ago

                > 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?

                • defrost 18 hours ago

                  HN is a US tech forum, sure .. the US tech sector, of course, is composed of a wealth of people not born in the US, or born in the US to immigrant parents.

                  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".

                  • remarkEon 16 hours ago

                    No, I don't have to agree with this actually. My view of language isn't a keyhole because I refuse to play a game about the very obvious meaning of that word. The US tech sector is, first and foremost, the US tech sector. I am not required to adopt a watered down version of reality or supplant my own language because there's people from other countries who work here.

                    • defrost 16 hours ago

                      You're entitled to your singular opinion, no argument there.

                      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.

                      • remarkEon 15 hours ago

                        I'm not stating an opinion though. Only in the ivy towers of exceedingly diverse tech companies could one make the argument that there's some innocuous and reassuring meaning of that word that doesn't imply what it does, in fact, imply in any Western country. Everywhere else a Jihad is, ya know, a Jihad. I also never pretended to speak for everyone in the islamic world, which you are attempting to use as a cudgel here, as in I'm somehow "speaking for the Muslim world" by pointing out that normal people in America know what that word means.

        • krapp 21 hours ago

          Go ahead. Literally no one will care about it as much as you care about this.

          • AStonesThrow 21 hours ago

            Yarr, ye olde username be fittin' fer parley in thar virtual tavern

  • KolibriFly 12 hours ago

    Same here, most of what I learned growing up barely touched on African history beyond Egypt or colonialism. Stuff like this really highlights how much was going on

  • ty6853 a day ago

    [flagged]

    • demosthanos a day ago

      > It is so robust it outlasted the centralized government of Somalia and democracy, and even outperformed it.

      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.

      • MangoToupe 10 hours ago

        Why do you consider this problematic? Especially if a "centralized democracy" undermines the social structures that are known to work

        • demosthanos 9 hours ago

          This is what I said:

          > 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.

          • ty6853 8 hours ago

            [flagged]

            • nullc 8 hours ago

              An interesting demonstration of relativism is that we might use the same phrase, say "brutally killed", to describe a players dominance in a friendly game of monopoly as we would for a Somali warlord firing a round through the head of a rival.

              But, strangely, they are not the same thing at all.

              • demosthanos 7 hours ago

                Exactly. Also, OP pointedly avoided addressing the fact that the existing Somali institutions are responsible for the fact that their "democracy" devolved into warlords brutally shooting each other.

                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.

              • ty6853 3 hours ago

                I don't know of anyone or any form of relativism that thinks dominating a monopoly game is relatively 'the same' as a round to the head, and it's hilarious seeing the 'yass queen' response sister comment had to that absurdity.

                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.

            • vkou 7 hours ago

              Remember when the other faction in the US was declaring fake emergencies, brutalizing their political opponents, kidnapping them without trial, ignoring lawful court orders to release them, and imprisoning people for political speech after seizing power?

              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.

      • colechristensen 19 hours ago

        shrug clans are small states (or whatever label you want to put on the organization that starts with small family tribes and scales to multi-continent empires), that kind of society organization was more or less everywhere in the history of every human society. There is a tendency everywhere towards larger, more complex states and a path up and down the scale locally as the bigger ones are created and fall.

        • demosthanos 18 hours ago

          > clans are small states

          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.

    • wtcactus 14 hours ago

      What you are describing is a clan system. Something that could be found all over the world and something most cultures replaced by more advanced and fairer systems of governance centuries ago.

      In fact, most of present day problems in Africa are still connected to the continued usage of that system.

    • KolibriFly 12 hours ago

      It makes you wonder how many other decentralized systems have existed or still exist under the radar, and what we might learn from them

goodmunky 12 hours ago

Africa is a such a vast and diverse region that “Africans” is nearly meaningless in this context. But you already know that.

AlecSchueler 6 hours ago

They had it in medieval Mali but it seems inaccurate to say "Africans" had it even though it might technically be true.

kleton a day ago

This is called cupellation. Romans used clay crucibles

  • declan_roberts 19 hours ago

    Cupellation is considerably earlier than this method. Some 2,000 years earlier. Cupellation is also very effective at removing base metals.

    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.

bargle0 4 hours ago

How impure was the gold dust from the chemical supply company?

ChuckMcM 5 hours ago

Anyone have a link to the paper?

KolibriFly 13 hours ago

Innovation doesn't just come from empire-scale institutions

detourdog a day ago

What I love about the process is that it seems to have developed by playing with fire.

  • motorest 16 hours ago

    > What I love about the process is that it seems to have developed by playing with fire.

    Also known as experimentation, which is the whole basis of the scientific process.

    • detourdog 15 hours ago

      What is the difference between the two? No where else did the scientific method develop this process. Play can produce surprising results and methodologies stagnates development.

      • motorest 14 hours ago

        > What is the difference between the two?

        There isn't.

        Referring to experimentation as "playing with" feels like a attempt to demean the output.

        • rdlw 7 hours ago

          Only if you think there's something wrong with play.

        • detourdog 9 hours ago

          Sometimes it's best to interpret things in a neutral way. A negative point of view hampers insight. I think the output speaks for itself and doesn't need a defense.

        • euroderf 13 hours ago

          "playing around with" sounds more dignified.

          • detourdog 9 hours ago

            I don't perceive the difference. "working with fire" maybe different but I'm still fine with my word choice.

  • rsynnott 16 hours ago

    I mean, you could say that of basically all metallurgy prior to the 19th century.

  • JumpCrisscross a day ago

    > it seems to have developed by playing with fire

    Or someone melted down a glass and gold object and noticed the gold that floated (precipitated?) out was purer than that which went in.

    • defrost 21 hours ago

      Which is literally playing with fire.

      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".