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Comment by bnralt | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that the only king they can identify is Mansa Musa, and that he keeps popping up on the maps. Given how poorly documented Mansa Musa's reign was, and that the main sources are a small number of Muslim accounts of his Hajj written by people who weren't there when it happened, it seems that to Europeans he was a quasi-legendary and prototypical African king (perhaps similar to the completely legendary Prestor John).

Though I suppose Mansa Musa is held in similar regard today. He's usually the first medieval African ruler I see people bring up, and they often repeat the poorly sourced legend of him being the richest person in history as if it were fact (even this article repeats it).

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Less understood about west African history is the sheer volume of un-analysed ancient (mostly Islamic) manuscripts. They were deliberately hidden out of fear from the imperials, and even post-imperials until very recently.

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

Exceptions to the above, are the Tarikh Al Sudan and Tarikh Al Fattesh, they were first translated into the French 100 years ago but only recently into English (in 1999 by Professor John Hunwick). This is how Mansa Musa was introduced into American speaking world

These chronicles are 300 & 400 years old, substatial in size with many references to Mansa Musa as well as other notables and rulers of the Medieval Mali and Songhai Empire (which is basically the Mali Empire Part 3).

These cross reference whatever independant mentioning’s are found in other medieval sources, Spanish, Egyptian, other. Perhaps confirming Mansa Musa was indeed a corporeal entity!

What’s your issue with the “richest person in history” claim?

I was just reading “Fistful of Shells”, which is written by a reasonably serious historian. He repeats this claim, but sources it to this somewhat silly Time Magazine article: https://money.com/the-10-richest-people-of-all-time-2/. That article in turn puts forth a surprisingly thoughtful methodology: https://money.com/richest-people-of-all-time-methodology/.

Obviously these comparisons are of limited value, as the methodology link above bothers to point out, but I don’t think it’s crazy—insofar as even stating “wealthiest person of all time” is meaningful, Mansa Musa looks to be a credible candidate.

> insofar as even stating “wealthiest person of all time” is meaningful

Quite, how can you compare Alexander to Musa to Montezuma to Rockerfeller to Bezos to Putin?

Wealth itself is pretty meaningless once you get to a certain level of course. Who's wealthier, Bezos or Musk? Does it matter?

Would you rather be Mansa Musa or someone of median wealth and income in say New Zealand in the 21st century?

> Would you rather be Mansa Musa or someone of median wealth and income in say New Zealand in the 21st century?

This is probably a more interesting quest than you suspect. It turns on your preferences around material comforts vs. you love of control and power.

Depending on the specific locale and period in history, there's a lot of people who were likely happier and meaningfully freer than people in 21st century New Zealand and could have expected to live just as long.

Modern people are generally very physically and mentally unhealthy, and most of us work now work in conditions that older peoples would have considered unfree (ie my employment depends on the whims of someone else and my labor primarily benefits them.) I go back and forth as to whether having the Internet and air conditioning make up for it.

I don't think I'd want to be Mansa Musa personally, but I think it's pretty likely he enjoyed his life a lot more than the average person today.

> That article in turn puts forth a surprisingly thoughtful methodology: https://money.com/richest-people-of-all-time-methodology/.

Here's what this article says about Mansa Musa. First, very few reliable sources for how rich he was:

> Just how rich was Musa? There’s really no way to put an accurate number on his wealth. Records are scarce, if non-existent, and contemporary sources describe the king’s riches in terms that are impossible for the time.

It then quotes a professor who uses an image from a European map of Mansa Musa created 4 decades after he was born as evidence that he was the richest person of all time.

This is the issue. We have a few second hand accounts around the time of his Hajj saying the Hajj was immensely large and luxurious, and it appears that his reign appears to have coincided with a relative high point for the Mali Empire. That's about it, and it's not nearly enough to say he was the richest person in history, or even that he was the richest leader of the Mali Empire. It's worth noting how little we actually know of the Mali Empire - historians don't even agree about what it's capital was.

I looked into it a couple of years ago, and there was no evidence I could find that he was richer than, say, Mansa Sulayman who lead the empire a few years later. Many people seem to consider the Songhai Empire at its peak richer and stronger than the Malian Empire was. Even if we restrict ourselves to medieval West African polities, it's far from clear that he was the richest.

And considering we're looking at West Africa, another problem arises. A lot of people seem to imagine this wealth as being the amount of gold that gold rich Western African polities had times the value of gold if it suddenly all appeared in the gold poor Mediterranean. But this ignores the fact that getting gold there was a difficult task involving skilled intermediaries. Likewise, salt came down from the Mediterranean to the salt poor Mali Empire, where it fetched a large amount of gold. But I don't think anyone would claim that it would make sense to calculate wealth by seeing how much salt a Mediterranean polity had, and then multiplying that by how much gold you could get to it and the end of trade lines in Mali.

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