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:
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?
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.
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
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...
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.
Africa is a such a vast and diverse region that “Africans” is nearly meaningless in this context. But you already know that.
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
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
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.
Innovation doesn't just come from empire-scale institutions
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.
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".