page_title: Senegal River
section_title: Arab sources
hierarchical_section_title: Senegal River / History / Arab sources
caption_attribution_description: English: Conjectural sketch of the Senegal River based on the descriptions of Arab geographer al-Bakri of Cordoba in 1068, as reconstructed by William Desborough Cooley in The Negroland of the Arabs examined and explained; or, An inquiry into the early history and geography of Central Africa London: Arrowsmith, 1841 p.53.
context_page_description: The Senegal River is a 1,086 km long river in West Africa that forms the border between Senegal and Mauritania. It has a drainage basin of 270,000 km², a mean flow of 680 m³/s, and an annual discharge of 21.5 km³. Important tributaries are the Falémé River, Karakoro River, and the Gorgol River. The river divides into two branches once it passes Kaédi The left branch, called the Doué, runs parallel to the main river to the north. After 200 km the two branches rejoin a few kilometers downstream of Pondor.
  In 1972 Mali, Mauritania and Senegal founded the Organisation pour la mise en valeur du fleuve Sénégal to manage the river basin. Guinea joined in 2005. At the present time, only very limited use is made of the river for the transportation of goods and passengers. The OMVS have looked at the feasibility of creating a navigable channel 55 m in width between the small town of Ambidédi in Mali and Saint-Louis, a distance of 905 km. It would give landlocked Mali a direct route to the Atlantic Ocean.
context_section_description: In the Early Middle Ages (c. 800 CE), the Senegal River restored contact with  the Mediterranean world with the establishment of the Trans-Saharan trade route between Morocco and the Ghana Empire.  Arab geographers, like al-Masudi of Baghdad (957), al-Bakri of Spain (1068) and al-Idrisi of Sicily (1154), provided some of the earliest descriptions of the Senegal River.  Early Arab geographers believed the upper Senegal River and the upper Niger River were connected to each other, and formed a single river flowing from east to west, which they called the "Western Nile". (In fact, some of the headwaters of the Senegal River are near the Niger River in Mali and Guinea.) It was believed to be either a western branch of the Egyptian Nile River or drawn from the same source (variously conjectured to some great internal lakes of the Mountains of the Moon, or Ptolemy's Gir (Γειρ) or the Biblical Gihon stream).
  Arab geographers  Abd al-Hassan Ali ibn Omar (1230), Ibn Said al-Maghribi (1274) and Abulfeda (1331), label the Senegal as the "Nile of Ghana" (Nil Gana or Nili Ganah).
  As the Senegal River reached into the heart of the gold-producing Ghana Empire and later the Mali Empire, Trans-Saharan traders gave the Senegal its famous nickname as the "River of Gold". The Trans-Saharan stories about the "River of Gold" reached the ears of Sub-Alpine European merchants that frequented the ports of Morocco and the lure proved irresistible. Arab historians report at least three separate Arab maritime expeditions - the last one organized by a group of eight mughrarin ("wanderers") of Lisbon (before 1147) -  that tried to sail down the  Atlantic coast, possibly in an effort find the mouth of the Senegal.
caption: Western Nile (Senegal-Niger River) according to al-Bakri (1068)
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