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How Did an Unusual River Floodplain Sustain the Mali Empire? - The Niger River Inland Delta and the Foundation of Medieval Mali | Sleepy Facts About History
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When we think of the medieval Mali Empire, we usually picture camel caravans crossing the Sahara Desert, carrying gold and salt across golden dunes. But this familiar image, while not entirely wrong, overlooks the actual foundation of Mali's wealth and power. This episode explores the geographical oddity of the Niger River, which flows northeast into the Sahara and spreads into a vast inland floodplain larger than Belgium. It was this seasonal floodplain, not the desert edge, that fed the…
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