Horse and Rider

Seated on a bridled horse, this bearded equestrian has an elaborate hairstyle, facial scarifications, and jewelry that reflect wealth and status. The rider’s sheathed knife further indicates the key role that warriors on horseback played in expanding West Africa’s great empires from the 1100s to the early 1600s: Quick-moving cavalry could maintain control over vast territories. Traveling merchants who served these powerful states traded goods and ideas with the Mediterranean world, the Middle East, and Asia. Figures in this style (see 1987.314.1-5) have been unearthed in Bankoni, a village near Mali’s capital, since the 1950s.