IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 237

Of all the states of medieval Africa, few impressed contemporaries as much as Mali. At its height in the fourteenth century the empire stretched from the Atlantic coast eastwards to the great bend of the Niger and northwards into the Sahara. Its southern provinces contained the goldfields of Bambuk and Bure, while salt, indispensable for preserving food in a hot climate, was mined at places such as Taghaza, deep in the desert. The ruler bore the title Mansa, usually translated as king. He governed through provincial officials and a court whose ceremonial astonished visitors from the Mediterranean.

Mali's rise followed the decline of the empire of Ghana, whose capital had been sacked in the early thirteenth century. According to traditions preserved by griots, the hereditary storytellers of the region, a young prince named Sundiata Keita defeated a rival king, Sumanguru, at the battle of Kirina and went on to unite the Mandinka peoples. Historians date the battle to about 1235, although the epic that celebrates it was not written down until the twentieth century. What the traditions describe as a single decisive victory was probably a longer process of alliance-building among clans.

Musa took the throne around 1312. Arabic writers later recorded an extraordinary story about his predecessor, who is said to have abdicated in order to lead a fleet of canoes westwards across the Atlantic and never to have returned. No trace of such a voyage has been found, and many historians treat the account as legend; it is nonetheless a reminder that Mali's rulers commanded resources on a scale that made distant adventures conceivable. Musa's own commitment to Islam was noted by contemporaries, and it shaped both his building programme and his decision to travel to Arabia.

The wealth of Mali rested less on mining than on taxation and trade. Arabic writers reported that the finest gold nuggets belonged to the ruler and that ordinary people used only gold dust, which was weighed whenever goods were bought or sold; how strictly this monopoly was enforced is unclear. Caravans carried salt from the Saharan mines southward and returned with gold, ivory and enslaved people. Ibn Battuta, crossing the desert a generation later, noted that bars of copper also served as a form of payment in the northern provinces.

In 1324 Musa set out on the pilgrimage to Mecca, a journey that transformed his reputation. He travelled with a large caravan, first across the desert and then through Egypt, distributing gold along the way. The Arabic writer al-Umari gathered testimony from people who had seen the caravan in Cairo. He reported that it included thousands of followers and a hundred camels each carrying many pounds of the metal. Such figures cannot be checked and were probably exaggerated, but the impression the procession made on witnesses is not in doubt. In Cairo, Musa was received by the Mamluk sultan, al-Nasir Muhammad.

The generosity of the visitors had unexpected consequences. Musa and his companions gave away and spent so much gold in the markets of Cairo that its value fell, and al-Umari noted that the price of gold had still not recovered more than a decade later. Having exhausted his supplies, Musa was obliged to borrow money at high rates of interest from Cairo merchants in order to pay for his journey home. The episode is one of the earliest recorded examples of inflation caused by a sudden influx of bullion.

Musa returned to Mali in 1325, and he did not come back empty-handed. He brought with him scholars, jurists and books, and he employed a poet and architect from al-Andalus, known in the Arabic sources as Abu Ishaq al-Saheli, to build mosques and palaces. The most celebrated of these is the Djinguereber mosque in Timbuktu, said to have been completed in 1327. The building has been repaired and rebuilt many times since, so little of the original fabric survives, but its plan is attributed to al-Saheli.

Timbuktu, annexed during Musa's reign, became the commercial heart of the empire, where salt from the north was exchanged for gold and grain from the south. Under Musa's successors it also became a centre of learning, attracting scholars of law, theology and astronomy. The city's reputation for scholarship rested on its mosques and on private libraries, some of whose manuscripts have survived and are now held in collections in Bamako and elsewhere. Manuscripts were copied and sold there, and scholars travelled to the city from other parts of the Islamic world.

The most detailed description of Mali comes from Ibn Battuta, the traveller from Tangier who crossed the Sahara in 1352, during the reign of Musa's brother Suleiman. He admired the punctuality of the Friday prayers, the respect shown to scholars and the security of the roads. He was less impressed by customs he considered improper, and he recorded with disapproval a ceremony in which supplicants sprinkled dust and ashes over themselves before the king. His account, like al-Umari's, tells us as much about the expectations of its author as about the country he visited.

Musa died around 1337. His fame long outlived him: an atlas produced in 1375, probably in Majorca, shows a crowned African king holding a gold nugget, with a caravan approaching across the desert. By then Mali's authority was already being contested, and in the following century the rising empire of Songhai took control of Timbuktu and Gao. Yet the wealth that Musa displayed on his pilgrimage continued to shape how Europeans pictured Africa for generations.

Wine is simply the juice of grapes that has been allowed to ferment, and it has accompanied Mediterranean societies for so long that its origins are easily forgotten. The earliest chemical evidence comes from the northern Zagros mountains of what is now Iran. There, in a village occupied around 5400 BC, archaeologists found a jar containing residues of tartaric acid, a substance characteristic of grapes, together with resin from a tree that grows locally. Similar traces have since been reported from a cave in Armenia, occupied more than a thousand years later, where excavators uncovered a shallow basin, fermentation jars and a press. Whether these early drinks were grape wine or mixtures of fruit, honey and herbs is disputed, but the association of the grape with ceremony is very old.

Wine reached Egypt from the Levant. A royal tomb at Abydos, dating from about 3150 BC, contained imported jars whose residue has been identified as wine, and vineyards were later established in the Nile Delta. The Egyptians were careful record-keepers. Jars buried with Tutankhamun in the fourteenth century BC carry painted labels recording the year of the vintage, the estate that produced the wine and, in some cases, the name of the winemaker. These are among the earliest known wine labels, and they show that particular estates supplied the court over many years, a pattern that historians associate with an organised, tax-paying economy rather than with occasional gifts.

For the Greeks, wine was a social institution as much as a drink. It was normally mixed with water in a large bowl called a krater, and the proportion of water was a matter of etiquette: drinking wine undiluted was considered the habit of barbarians. At the symposium, a gathering of men of the same social class, poetry was recited, riddles were posed and the conversation was expected to be clever. Wine also had a place in religion, since Dionysus, its patron, was honoured at festivals that included dramatic performances. Cups painted with scenes of these gatherings are among the most informative sources for Greek social life, although they show an idealised world rather than an ordinary evening.

Almost everything historians know about the wine trade comes from the containers in which the wine travelled. In the Greek and Roman world, from about the eighth century BC onwards, wine was shipped in amphorae, tall clay jars with two handles, whose changing shapes allow archaeologists to date a deposit with some confidence. Many were stamped with the name of the producer or the potter, and some carried painted inscriptions giving the weight or the quality of the contents. When a ship sank, its cargo preserved the moment of departure. A wreck off the southern coast of France, dating from the first century BC, held several thousand amphorae, and the analysis of such cargoes has allowed scholars to estimate the volume of wine moving between regions.

In Italy, wine production moved from a household activity to an industry. Wealthy Romans invested in vineyards in Latium and Campania, where the soil was suitable and the proximity of the sea made transport cheap, and they pressed their grapes in stone rooms whose floors sloped towards collecting vats. The wine was stored in dolia, enormous clay jars sunk into the ground, and later transferred to amphorae for sale. Roman writers on farming, among them Columella, described in detail how a vineyard should be planted, pruned and manured, and Pliny the Elder listed dozens of named wines and discussed their merits. Some of these wines were famous far beyond Italy and changed hands at prices that only the rich could pay.

North of the Alps, wine had to be imported until vineyards were established in southern Gaul. Some archaeologists argue that the initiative came from Roman traders and settlers who arrived after the conquest of Gaul in the first century BC; others point to the remains of Etruscan amphorae at sites in southern France, and to locally made copies of Italian jars, as evidence that local elites were already cultivating vines and copying Mediterranean drinking habits before the legions arrived. Further north, where the climate was less suitable, wine remained an expensive import. Roman authors noted that the peoples of Gaul and the Alps kept their drink in wooden barrels, and by late antiquity barrels had largely replaced the amphora, since they were lighter and did not break.

The evidence, rich as it is, has limits. Tartaric acid in a jar shows that grapes were present, not that the contents had fermented into wine, and molecules from other fruits can leave similar traces. Written sources, meanwhile, were produced by the literate minority and describe what interested them: the symposium of the Greek city, the estate of the Roman senator. Whether wine was an everyday drink for ordinary people or a luxury for the few is debated, as is the suggestion that the Romans poisoned themselves with lead, used in vessels for boiling down grape syrup; the hypothesis has been widely publicised and as widely questioned. What is not in doubt is that wine became one of the most traded commodities of the ancient world.

In most countries the history taught in schools is settled by a ministry, a curriculum committee or an examination board, and the resulting textbook is a national document. It tells pupils where their country came from and, implicitly, who its friends and enemies have been. When neighbouring states tell the story differently, the classroom becomes a diplomatic problem. A sentence that seems unremarkable in one capital may be read as an insult in another, and history textbooks have been the subject of formal complaints between governments, recalled editions and, in a few cases, the suspension of a cooperation agreement.

The case for cooperating across borders rests on a simple observation: many of the images pupils form of their neighbours are the product not of evidence but of inherited caricature. Historians meeting one another can usually agree on a great deal of factual ground — dates, treaties, the outcome of battles — and can identify statements in each other's books that are simply wrong. Where they disagree, the disagreement itself can become the subject of a lesson. The best-known attempt to put this into practice is the Franco-German history book, whose first volume appeared in 2006 and which was written for pupils in the final years of secondary school in both countries.

That project grew out of a suggestion made by young people at a Franco-German youth parliament, and it was endorsed by both governments. Similar commissions have existed for longer elsewhere: German and Polish historians have been discussing each other's textbooks since the early 1970s, and a German-Czech commission was set up after 1989. In the Balkans, historians from states that had recently fought one another produced a series of supplementary books of documents and exercises rather than a single common textbook. What these projects share is a method: scholars read the other side's books, list their objections and, more often than not, discover that the other side has objections of its own.

The crucial point, often lost in the enthusiasm of ministers, is that a joint book does not produce one agreed narrative. The Franco-German volume presents both national interpretations side by side, with documents from each tradition, and invites pupils to notice the differences. This is deliberately unsettling for a reader who expects school history to deliver conclusions. Its defenders argue that it teaches something more valuable than a settled story: that accounts of the past are made, argued over and revised, and that a citizen who understands this is better equipped to judge the claims made in public life.

Against such arguments stands the practical reality of national education systems. Textbooks are written for syllabuses and examinations, which remain national, so a book that ignores the examination is unlikely to be adopted however excellent it may be. There is also the question of ownership: taxpayers expect schools to teach the national story, and a text signed off by a foreign partner invites suspicion at home. Nor are governments disinterested. Ministers have repeatedly intervened in disputes about textbook content, and a bilateral agreement gives them a new instrument for pressuring authors and publishers. Where two states have unresolved disputes — over a border, a massacre, the number of victims — an agreed sentence may suit both governments and be untrue to the evidence.

There is a further risk, quieter but corrosive: blandness. Committees tend to remove anything that might give offence, and what is left can be a text so cautious that it explains nothing. A book that gives offence to nobody will seldom give anybody much to think about. Good history is full of judgement, and judgement is exactly what a committee drawn from two governments finds hardest to produce. Translation costs, differing school hours and the sheer weight of teachers' existing habits all raise the cost of a shared book.

None of this means that cooperation is worthless; it means that the product has been mistaken for the purpose. What teachers need is not a single authorised version but materials that let pupils compare: two accounts of the same event, a speech and a cartoon, a treaty and a memoir. The commissions that have worked best have concentrated on correcting factual errors, exchanging perspectives and training teachers, and have left the national textbook where it belongs, so long as it meets a standard of accuracy. Teachers who have met their counterparts across the border are less likely to repeat the caricatures they were taught.

My conclusion, then, is that neighbouring countries should agree on procedures, not on a text. They should agree to read each other's books, to publish their objections, to insist on accuracy and to make space in the curriculum for evidence of how the same events looked from the other side of a frontier. A textbook that is identical in two capitals is not a sign of reconciliation but of a negotiation. What matters is not whether pupils read the same sentences, but whether they learn that sentences can be argued with.