The Forgotten Empire That Was Larger Than Rome and Nobody Taught You About It

 In 1324 the Emperor of Mali set out on a pilgrimage to Mecca.

His name was Mansa Musa. He traveled with a caravan of approximately 60,000 people. He brought 12,000 personal servants. He brought 500 heralds each carrying a golden staff. He brought 80 to 100 camels each loaded with between 300 and 400 pounds of gold dust.

Along the way he gave away so much gold to people he met, to cities he passed through, to mosques and shrines, that he crashed the gold economies of Egypt and the entire Mediterranean region. The price of gold fell so dramatically that it took more than a decade for the markets to recover.

This is documented history recorded by contemporaries in Egypt and the Arab world who witnessed it firsthand.

Mansa Musa is widely considered the wealthiest individual in human history.

Most American students have never heard his name.

What the Mali Empire Was

The Mali Empire rose to prominence in West Africa in the 13th century and reached its peak in the early 14th century under Mansa Musa's reign from 1312 to 1337.

At its peak the Mali Empire covered roughly 1.26 million square kilometers. It was one of the largest empires in the world at that time. It controlled the most important gold and salt trade routes in West Africa. The gold fields of the Mali Empire supplied a significant portion of the gold in circulation across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

The empire's capital Niani was a major city. Timbuktu, a city in the Mali Empire, was one of the most important centers of Islamic scholarship in the world at the time. The Sankore mosque in Timbuktu functioned as a university with an estimated 25,000 students and a library holding hundreds of thousands of manuscripts.

When Mansa Musa returned from his pilgrimage he brought architects from across the Islamic world who built new mosques and buildings throughout his empire. He commissioned a mosque in every city he passed through.

Why This Is Not Taught

The Mali Empire and Mansa Musa's extraordinary wealth are not part of the standard curriculum in most American schools. African history south of Egypt is largely absent from standard history education.

The reasons for that absence reflect the same biases that shaped most western historical education. The civilizations that got attention were the ones that colonizers encountered and wrote about or the ones that were part of the European and Mediterranean world. African empires that were not part of those stories were treated as though they did not exist or were not significant.

Mansa Musa was one of the most powerful rulers of his era. His empire was larger than most European kingdoms of the time. His wealth was genuinely without historical parallel. And he is still largely unknown to most people in the western world.

That is not a gap in the history. That is a choice about whose history gets taught.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Woman Who Discovered the Structure of DNA Got Almost None of the Credit for It

 In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick published a landmark paper describing the double helix structure of DNA. It is one of the most important scientific discoveries in history. Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize in 1962.

Rosalind Franklin did not win a Nobel Prize. She died of cancer in 1958 at age 37. The Nobel is not awarded posthumously.

But without Rosalind Franklin's work Watson and Crick might not have cracked the structure of DNA when they did. Or possibly at all.

What Franklin Did

Rosalind Franklin was a chemist and X-ray crystallographer working at King's College London in the early 1950s. She was applying X-ray diffraction techniques to study the structure of DNA molecules.

X-ray crystallography works by firing X-rays at a crystallized substance and analyzing the pattern of how the rays scatter. By analyzing those patterns an expert can determine the arrangement of atoms in the molecule.

Franklin was exceptionally skilled at this technique. In May of 1952 she produced an X-ray diffraction image of DNA that has since become one of the most famous photographs in the history of science. It is called Photo 51.

Photo 51 clearly showed the helical structure of DNA. It provided crucial data about the dimensions and structure of the molecule.

What Happened to Photo 51

Without Franklin's knowledge or permission her colleague Maurice Wilkins showed Photo 51 to James Watson in January of 1953.

Watson has described in his own memoir seeing the photo and immediately recognizing its significance. He and Crick used the data from that image, along with data from Franklin's unpublished reports that had also been shared without her knowledge, to build their model of the DNA double helix.

Franklin was not told that her work had been used. She was not consulted or credited in the Watson and Crick paper beyond a footnote acknowledging that her work had stimulated them. The footnote significantly understated her contribution.

Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize. Wilkins shared it with them. Franklin was not eligible because she had died. Whether she would have been included if she had lived is something historians still debate. The Nobel committee's record of crediting women for scientific work was not strong.

Why This Pattern Kept Happening

The story of Rosalind Franklin is not unique. It is one of dozens of cases in the history of science where women did foundational work that men received primary credit for.

Lise Meitner did the theoretical work that explained nuclear fission. Her male collaborator won the Nobel. Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars as a graduate student. Her advisor won the Nobel. Chien-Shiung Wu conducted a groundbreaking physics experiment that disproved a fundamental law. The men who proposed the experiment won the Nobel.

The pattern reflects something about who the scientific establishment recognized and rewarded. The work got done. The recognition went somewhere else.

Franklin's contribution is now widely acknowledged in the history of science. She has a research institute named after her. Photo 51 is famous. But for decades her role was minimized in the standard telling of one of the 20th century's greatest scientific achievements.

Her name belongs in that story. It always did.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Irish Monks Who Saved Western Civilization While Europe Burned Around Them

 When the Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century AD most of western Europe went through a period of chaos that historians used to call the Dark Ages.

Cities shrank. Trade networks broke down. Literacy declined. The institutional structures that had maintained and copied ancient texts fell apart. Libraries that had existed for centuries were abandoned or destroyed.

The works of ancient Greece and Rome, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the histories of Tacitus and Livy, the poetry of Virgil, the mathematics of Euclid, were in serious danger of being lost entirely.

They survived. And a significant part of the reason they survived is that Irish monks on the far edge of the known world kept copying them.

What the Irish Monks Did

Christianity spread to Ireland in the 5th century, famously associated with Saint Patrick. The Irish church developed differently from the Roman church because Ireland had never been part of the Roman Empire and had its own existing culture and intellectual traditions.

Irish monasteries became centers of scholarship. Monks learned Latin and Greek, studied ancient texts, and copied them by hand in the scriptorium, the monastery's writing room. This was painstaking work done by candlelight on vellum using quill pens, producing one page at a time.

Irish monks were not just copying religious texts. They were copying everything they could get their hands on. Ancient Roman poetry. Greek philosophy. Historical accounts. Scientific texts. They valued the preservation of knowledge as a religious and scholarly duty.

Monasteries on remote islands off the Irish coast like Skellig Michael, a nearly inaccessible rock in the Atlantic Ocean, became places where monks could work in isolation far from the violence that continued to sweep through continental Europe.

Irish monks also became missionaries. They went back to continental Europe and established monasteries there, bringing their copies of ancient texts with them. Monasteries like Bobbio in Italy and St. Gallen in Switzerland were founded by Irish missionaries and became major centers of manuscript preservation.

What Would Have Been Lost

Many of the ancient texts we have today exist in only a few copies, sometimes only one. The line of transmission from antiquity to the present runs through medieval monastery scriptoria. And a significant portion of that transmission runs through Irish monks working in the 6th, 7th, and 8th centuries.

Without that effort the intellectual tradition of ancient Greece and Rome would be far more fragmentary than it is. The Renaissance, which was driven by the rediscovery of ancient texts, would have had far less to rediscover.

The monks who did this work are largely anonymous. They left their names in some cases in the margins of manuscripts they copied. Occasional personal notes survive telling us something about the person who sat at a desk for hours moving a quill across vellum in the service of preserving something they thought mattered.

They were right. And what they did is one of the most important preservation efforts in human history.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.