West Africa

The Sahel and the forest below it: states that lived on the crossing charge for gold going north and salt coming south, from Ghana on the upper Senegal to Asante on the Volta, over a thousand years of the same trade changing hands.

The line below is a time axis. Position on it is date, so concurrency is visible: concurrent polities sit side by side rather than in sequence.

1 sourced edge runs between this region and another, to Saadi Sultanate. Those are not drawn on this line — a thread that crossed regions would assert a sequence nobody cited — but they are on each polity’s own page.