Upper Senegal and Niger, Vol. 2

might survive of a Sudanese city; at most, one might recognize the location of a vanished village by the presence of certain trees, and even then, it would be impossible to assign a date to the village's disappearance, because the current trees could have grown from the seeds of those planted by man. The most important Sudanese cities mentioned by medieval Arab authors consisted, according to those very authors, only of cylindrical huts with clay walls topped by straw roofs, with the exception of the houses of Ghana, which sometimes had stone walls. It seems, as I stated previously, that the first terrace-roofed houses did not appear in the Sudan until the 14th century. There is a high probability that dwellings dating to before our era were not constructed differently and that, consequently, it is absolutely impossible today to recover their remains.

True, there are fragments of pottery and various utensils that can be unearthed from tumuli burial mounds or the sites of vanished cities. But what do these fragments prove? All those found thus far do not distinguish themselves from the pottery and utensils manufactured in the Sudan today. At most, one has found in this or that region debris that does not match the type currently in use in that region, but instead matches a type still in use in a neighboring territory. Since exchanges have always existed between the various countries of the Sudan and even between the Sudan and Mediterranean countries, this alone cannot provide the basis for any certain deduction (1).

There remain the famous ruins of Lobi. Near Gaoua, as well as between Gagouli or Galgouli and Lorhosso, one finds ruins of constructions made of masonry stone whose origin is unknown. What characterizes them above all is the straightness and the

(1) I was once given, in the lower Ivory Coast, as a sample of the ancient industry of the country, a sort of stylus handle made of copper that represented a musketeer and a lady from the time of Richelieu. If this object was of relatively ancient manufacture, it was even more clearly of European manufacture.