Mansa Musa's Lost Gold: The Mystery of the Missing Mines

Mansa Musa: The Richest Man Who Ever Lived — Fexingo History · Jul 2, 2026 · 5m · transcript

This episode dives into one of the great unsolved puzzles of the Mali Empire: what happened to the gold mines that made Mansa Musa the richest man in history? We trace the known sources — Bambuk and Bure — and examine the evidence from al-Umari and Ibn Battuta about the secretive Wangara goldfields. But by the late 1300s, production plummeted. Was it resource depletion, political turmoil, or deliberate concealment? Lucas and Luna explore the geological and historical clues, including the role of the dyula traders, the silent barter system, and the possibility that the mines were never truly…