Pre-Imperial Mali

There are a few sketchy references to pre-Imperial Mali in written sources. The oldest reference comes from al-Bakri's account of the Western Sudan written in 1068. In this section, he names two countries "Daw" and "Malal" located near the Niger and close to gold-fields, which are likely to be the core of the eventual Empire of Mali. Al-Bakri goes on to describe how the unnamed ruler of the kingdom was converted to Islam by a merchant when he witnessed the miraculous shower of rain that ended a drought. This event occurred at least one generation preceding 1068, since al-Bakri noted that the ruler's descendants and his nobles kept Islam, even though the common people were not converted.Ibn Khaldun, a North African historian living in Egypt interviewed shaykh Uthman, who was the faqih of Ghana and described as wide and learned. Uthman provided information on the past kings, presumably from oral tradition current in his day (1394), and named the first Muslim king Barmandana. In al-Idrisi's account of 1154, he noted that the two towns of Daw and Malal had four days' travel between them, located in a river valley that joins the Nile (by which he meant the Niger). Malal was described as a "small town, like a large village without a surrounding wall, built on an unassailable hill of red earth."

In 1965 and beyond a Polish archaeological team excavated at Niani, reputed to be the ancient capital of Mali. They discovered remains of buildings and other artifacts that showed a fairly intensive occupation of the site since the sixth century CE, though the site could not be classified as urban until much later, perhaps the fourteenth century. At its height, Niani comprised a number of densely occupied clusters scattered over the countryside, including a remarkable number of iron-producing sites, pointing to the town as a major industrial center. There are also evidences of an Islamic presence, supporting the idea that there was a Muslim or commercial town and a royal town, as well as other sites. These excavations provided the strongest support for the traditional claim that a state of some complexity pre-existed the imperial period in Mali's history.

Some of what historians have written about pre-Imperial Mali is based on oral tradition collected since the late nineteenth century. Much of the tradition focuses on the "Epic of Sunjata" a series of tales about early Mali that griots assemble into longer versions. There are several of these versions in print, the most famous of which is that of D. T. Niane, thanks to its lively narrative style and early translation into other languages. Niane's work, however, is not a literal translation of an original oral discourse, though it is surely largely based on tales told by a certain Mamadou Kouyate of Keyla. Rather, it is a reworking in literary form of Kouyate's tales. More literal versions of the tradition have since been published in French, English and Mandinka versions.

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