Talk:Guinea (region)

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Some old books talk about the Angola and Congo kingdoms being in Lower Guinea. How does that fit in with the descriptions here? --moyogo 16:19, 26 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

"A competing theory, first forwarded by Leo Africanus (1526), claims that 'Guinea' is derived from Djenné, the great interior commercial city on the Upper Niger River.[4]."

Hunwick (2003:277-278) contains a modern translation into English of Leo's text: "This next kingdom is called Gheneoa by African merchants, by its people Genni, and by the Portuguese and those who know these lands in Europe, Ghinea.[31]"

Footnote (n31): "Ghinea (Guinea) is the name applied by early European sources to the coasts south of the River Senegal and is derived from the Berber root G-N – 'black' (see Basset (1909), 147), but it was never applied specifically to Jenne. Malfante (1447) knew of Jenne as Geni, while De Barros (active in West Africa 1522-32) calls it Genná; see Crone (1937), 87, 140. The name 'Gheneoua' is the Moroccan term gnawa (from the same Berber root G-N), used for West Africa and its people in general (see also the same usage by the 12th century Andalusian geographer al-Zuhrī, Corpus, 94 ff.)

Here are the refs:

• ISBN 9004112073
  .
• Levtzion, Nehemia; Hopkins, John F.P., eds. (2000), Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West Africa, New York, NY: Marcus Weiner Press,
  ISBN 0521224225
  .
• Crone, G.R., ed. (1937), The Voyages of Cadamosto and other documents on Western Africa in the second half of the fifteenth century, London: Hakluyt Society.
• Basset, René (1909), Mission au Sénégal. Tome 1. Étude sur le dialecte Zanaga, Notes sur le Hassania, Researches historiques sur les Maures, Paris: Ernest Leroux. Page 147 is here see Nègre.

"Djenné dominated the gold and salt trade across West Africa, from the 11th C. (fall of Ghana) until the 13th C." I don't believe there is a source for this. See my comments on the Djenné talk page Aa77zz (talk) 10:45, 28 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]