Medieval Africans had a unique process for purifying gold with glass (2019)
107 comments
·June 6, 2025teleforce
opo
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?
teleforce
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?
bernds74
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.
jl6
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.
wqaatwt
> wealth indescribable
That’s kind of the problem.. even if we knew the amount of gold he actually had and multiplied it by its current market price the resulting figure would be entirely pointless. The question is how much stuff he could buy for it back in the 1300s. If there wasn’t enough stuff/people to buy having a massive hoard of illiquid gold doesn’t necessarily make you extremely wealthy.
Including absolute monarchs and dictators in the list is also semi meaningless.
Also the the way you chose to measure this wealth results in massive variance. E.g. Jacob Fugger was allegedly worth $400 billion if adjusted by inflation but he’s not even here.
aquova
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?
LunaSea
Aren't Bezos, Musk, Gates & co richer the first half of the people on the list?
saagarjha
fwiw Mughal≠Mongol
yieldcrv
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
wqaatwt
Presumably his wealth would go down massively in PPP terms since if gold was so abundant in Mali back then its buying power couldn’t be that high.
In a way it’s similar to the Spanish silver mines in the New World it resulted in a significant increase in prices and a lot of wealth shifting around.
romaaeterna
Document-only claim without any archeological support means that I'm highly skeptical.
dyauspitr
That’s the vast majority of antiquity unfortunately.
romaaeterna
In Classical history, we've got a number of competing historiographers that we can compare with each other, and a large about of archeological remains. Our estimates of how wealthy any given period of the Roman empire was are based on numismatics, built artifacts, etc. In comparison, this sort of thing is just a wild claim taken at face value (also something not done in Classics).
snthd
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...
latchkey
Cyanide usage is pretty bad too.
bcoates
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 ???
colechristensen
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.
gregschlom
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).
jihadjihad
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!
petepete
There are episodes of In Our Time on The Empire of Mali (incl Mansa Musa) and Ibn Khaldun
jorgen123
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...
ashoeafoot
[flagged]
vagrantJin
Lost history. You probably know the reasons. Many cultures within relied heavily on knowledge keepers, or griots, which was a perfectly fine system until it wasn't.
KolibriFly
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
ty6853
[flagged]
demosthanos
> 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.
colechristensen
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.
MangoToupe
Why do you consider this problematic? Especially if a "centralized democracy" undermines the social structures that are known to work
wtcactus
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.
KolibriFly
It makes you wonder how many other decentralized systems have existed or still exist under the radar, and what we might learn from them
protonfckff
Das rite. Whenever I think about individual and property rights, Somalia is always the country that first comes to mind.
https://theonion.com/nigeria-may-be-a-developing-nation-but-...
goodmunky
Africa is a such a vast and diverse region that “Africans” is nearly meaningless in this context. But you already know that.
kleton
This is called cupellation. Romans used clay crucibles
declan_roberts
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.
AlecSchueler
They had it in medieval Mali but it seems inaccurate to say "Africans" had it even though it might technically be true.
bargle0
How impure was the gold dust from the chemical supply company?
KolibriFly
Innovation doesn't just come from empire-scale institutions
ChuckMcM
Anyone have a link to the paper?
dondakirme
interesting
Duskgmxx
[dead]
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