On buildings:
The oldest stone building in sub-saharan west africa I can find refrence to are the buildings in Dhar Tichitt. Sure, it's further to the west and north than the centre of *Mali, but with earlier agricultural and urban societies in the region, perhaps the some of the western most rice cities would adopt imported stone as a building material for some highly prestigious structures around 1500 to 1000 BC.
Interesting. That area would still be inhabited when the *Malians start building cities, and it's close enough to be on their trade routes. Maybe stone would be seen somewhat like wood - not an ordinary building material, but something to incorporate in gates, inner sanctums, statues etc. of monumental structures to show how important they are. This probably means that the *Malians wouldn't develop very advanced stone construction techniques, but small structures would certainly be possible.
Tile, too. The *Malians would have that, and it would be a lot more common than wood or stone. Their temples might have very colorful tile floors or walls.
I don't know if it's likely to happen with a local bacteria. However, conditions are ripe for the disease, so even if that doesn't happen water-spreading bacteria from other locations will establish themselves quite quickly once they arrive. Different types of dysentery-causing bacterium and polio-like illnesses could do quite well for themselves. Schistosomiasis too.
Probably not cholera, then - it was confined to India at the time, AFAIK - but different strains of dysentery from up and down the Niger, with varying degrees of virulence. Still not fun.
One interesting way to combat these illnesses could be to create brackish paddies using salt brought in from the desert and brackish-tolerant rice (which some modern strains of African rice are!) At the cost of lowering the harvest (and using a huge amount of salt), paddies could be cleared of freshwater parasites and salt-intolerant aquatic bacteria. This is the sort of project you'd need a strongly-functioning government to pull off, however, and it would take a lot of scientific development before people have the knowledge that this could be done, let alone the will.
This doesn't seem like something a Bronze or Iron Age society would be able to do, and would they even want to do it if it meant they couldn't feed their people? The city will survive plagues, after all, but not persistent starvation.
I wonder, though - would soil salinization result in this happening to some degree, albeit by accident?
Why don't' they go directly to iron, like in OTL?
Ironworking's a lot harder - you need hotter fires and more advanced smelting and forging techniques. It's not impossible to imagine a third-millennium culture having the tech, but it's not the way to be - and if such a culture has copper, gold and tin in easy reach, they probably won't wait until they're up to blacksmithing to start working the other metals.
I'm figuring copper around 2500-2700 BC, bronze around 2300-2200, and then iron between 1500 and 1000.
I'm still very interested in this but the problem is I don't have the knolledge necessary to really comment on the culture of the *Mali ITTL.
Thanks. I'm just being childish - I like world-building, but I like it more when it's a conversation.
Anyway, back to law and justice. The following comment was made to me off-list:
Chuck Häberl said:In a verbomoteur environment like your *Malians, things like law, justice, and commerce would depend more upon the skillful deployment of language than an established code of ethics (think of the difference between purchasing something at Whole Foods and purchasing it at a Bazaar). As I understand it, traditional West African law entails the skillful use of traditional proverbs in a trial situation, the outcome of the trial dependent upon the appropriateness of the proverbs cited. I have a couple of articles about it somewhere here.
Obviously, oral proverbs, which are anonymously authored and known to everyone (kind of "up in the cloud" culture-wise), have a greater authority to oral folk leading a verbomoteur lifestyle than laws written on paper do.
That sounds about right, and would sill allow for lawgiver-kings and prophets: they'd announce new proverbs rather than promulgating law codes as such. On the other hand, what happens after the rise of literacy, and later, after the rise of empires? This would be a society in which eloquence and oral advocacy would still be important even after the development of writing, so I don't think literacy would necessarily spell the end of trial by proverb, but there might be a tendency to write the proverbs down Code of Leke-style, which could lead over time to them solidifying into a law code. The empires of he late second millennium might encourage this: they'd want the legal system to reflect their dictates, not a communal sense of fair play (which is what trial by proverb would amount to in most situations).
I get the idea that justice and famous trials during the city-state period might have a profound influence on *Malian theater - and vice versa. It might also point to a judicial role for *griots. This tendency would be muted during the imperial period, but it would still be there under the surface, and might manifest from time to time in prophecies and uprisings.
Also the following on the *Malian pantheon:
Mitya Dobrovolsky said:A weaver goddess could be reminiscent of Neith in the Egyptian pantheon. Perhaps she is also a primordial creation goddess who "weaves" (literally or metaphorically, depending on one's interpretation) the cosmos into existence, and weaving the symbolism of the cloth patterns (and the associated writing) into the fiber of creation in the process...
... sounds just about perfect.