drink and with which they grow vegetables. The king's town is distant from this one and bears the name of Al-Ghāba. Between these two towns are continuous habitations. The houses of the inhabitants are of stone and acacia wood. The king has a palace and a number of domed dwellings all surrounded with an enclosure like a city wall. In the king's town, and not far from his courts of justice, is a mosque where Muslims who arrive in his court pray. Around the king's town are domed buildings and groves and thickets where the sorcerers of these people, men in charge of the religious cult, live. The descriptions provided by the early Arab authors lack sufficient detail to pinpoint the exact location of the town. In fact, the sources appear contradictory with al-Idrisi placing the town on both sides of the Niger River. This has led to the suggestion that at some point the capital may have been moved south to the Niger River. The much later 17th-century African chronicle, the Tarikh al-fattash, states that the Malian Empire was preceded by the Kayamagna dynasty which had a capital at a town called Koumbi. The chronicle does not use the word Ghana. The other important 17th-century chronicle, the Tarikh al-Sudan mentions that the Malian Empire came after the dynasty of Qayamagha which had its capital at the city of Ghana. It is assumed that the "Kayamagna" or "Qayamagha" dynasty ruled the empire of Ghana mentioned in the early Arabic sources. In the French translation of the Tarikh al-fattash published in 1913, Octave Houdas and Maurice Delafosse include a footnote in which they comment that local tradition also suggested that the first capital of Kayamagna was at Koumbi and that the town was in the Ouagadougou region, northeast of Goumbou on the road leading from Goumbou to Néma and Oualata. The Soninke Wangara exchanged salt for Bambuk gold, though they kept the source of the gold a secret from Muslim traders, with whom they exchanged the gold for clothing and other Maghrib goods. The king received one dinar of gold for each load of Saharn salt imported from the north, and two for each load exported to the south, keeping each gold nugget for himself. Muslim secretaries were employed to keep records of the taxable trade. Yet, in the 11th and 12th centuries, the Bure goldfields were developed, so that by