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

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?

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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 ;)

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.

Soon.

Democracy Dies in Richness.

Only for 50% of the population

fwiw Mughal≠Mongol

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

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

That’s the vast majority of antiquity unfortunately.

Can this displace the mercury process used by illegal miners?

Reuters - Insight: Amazon rainforest gold mining is poisoning scores of threatened species https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/amazon-rainfore...

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

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 ???

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.

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).

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!

The wikipedia page about the Mali Empire [1] has a few books in the Further Reading section. This one looks promising: African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_Empire

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34928286-african-dominio...

There are episodes of In Our Time on The Empire of Mali (incl Mansa Musa) and Ibn Khaldun

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06kgggv

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qckbw

How is it even allowed given how hateful it is?

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

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

"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.

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-...

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

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.

> 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?

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".

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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

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

This is called cupellation. Romans used clay crucibles

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.

Anyone have a link to the paper?

Innovation doesn't just come from empire-scale institutions

interesting

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

> 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.

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.

> What is the difference between the two?

There isn't.

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

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

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.

"playing around with" sounds more dignified.

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

Same for Vulcanization.

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

Ok lets say that.

> 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.

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".