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| A market economy is economy based on the division of labor in which the prices of goods and services are determined in a free price system set by supply and demand. |
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| It is located on an island in Lake Texcoco, in the Valley of Mexico. Founded in 1325, it became the seat of the growing Aztec empire in the 15th Century, until captured by the Spanish in 1521. |
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| "Shore" - the northern and southern edges of the Sahara Desert. A semi-arid region of Africa, extending from senegal eastward to the Sudan. |
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| The Republic of Ghana, located in West Africa, borders to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south. The word Ghana means "Warrior King" and derives from the Ghana Empire. |
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| Mali is a landlocked nation in Western Africa. Mali is the seventh largest country in Africa. |
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| The Songhai Empire, also known as the Songhay Empire, was an African state of west Africa. From the early 15th to the late 16th century, Songhai was one of the largest African empires in history. This empire bore the same name as its leading ethnic group, the Songhai. Its capital was the city of Gao, where a small Songhai state had existed since the 11th century. Its base of power was on the bend of the Niger River in present day Niger and Burkina Faso. |
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| large biting flies inhabiting much of mid-continental Africa between the Sahara and the Kalahari deserts |
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| Axum or Aksum is a city in northern Ethiopia which was the original capital of the eponymous kingdom of Axum. Axum was a naval and trading power that ruled the region from ca. 400 BC into the 10th century. The kingdom was also arbitrarily identified as Abyssinia, Ethiopia, and India in medieval writings. |
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| The Great Zimbabwe, or "stone buildings", is the name given to the twelfth to fifteenth century stone ruins |
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| Chinese sailboat design dating from ancient times and still in use today. Junks were developed during the Han Dynasty (220 BC–200 AD) and were used as ocean-going vessels as early as the 2nd century AD. They evolved in the later dynasties, and were built and used throughout Asia for extensive ocean voyages. |
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| Hui Chinese mariner, explorer, diplomat and fleet admiral, who made the voyages along with Wang Jinghong to Southeast Asia, South Asia, and East Africa. |
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| Marco Polo was a merchant from the Venetian Republic who wrote Il Milione, which introduced Europeans to Central Asia and China. He learned about trading whilst his father and uncle, Niccolò and Maffeo, travelled through Asia and met Kublai Khan. In 1269, they returned to Venice to meet Marco for the first time. The three of them embarked on an epic journey to Asia, returning after 24 years to find Venice at war with Genoa; Marco was imprisoned, and dictated his stories to a cellmate. He was released in 1299, became a wealthy merchant, married and had 3 children. He died in 1324, and was buried in San Lorenzo. |
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| The Song dynasty was a ruling dynasty in China between 960 and 1279; it succeeded the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period, and was followed by the Yuan Dynasty. It was the first government in world history to issue banknotes or paper money, and the first Chinese government to establish a permanent standing navy. This dynasty also saw the first known use of gunpowder, as well as first discernment of true north using a compass. |
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| Pax Mongolica or "Mongol Peace" is a phrase coined by Western scholars to describe the stabilizing effects of the conquests of the Mongol Empire on the social, cultural and economic life of the inhabitants of the vast Eurasian territory that the Mongols conquered in the 13th and 14th centuries. The term is used to describe the eased communication and commerce the unified administration helped to create, and the period of relative peace that followed the Mongol's vast conquests. The term was coined in parallel to Pax Romana. |
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| The Ming dynasty was the ruling dynasty of China from 1368 to 1644, following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty. The Ming, "one of the greatest eras of orderly government and social stability in human history," was the last dynasty in China ruled by ethnic Hans. |
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Ibn Battuta was a Moroccan Berber Muslim scholar and traveller who is known for the account of his travels and excursions called the Rihla (Voyage) in Arabic. His journeys lasted for a period of nearly thirty years and covered almost the entirety of the known Islamic world and beyond, extending from North Africa, West Africa, Southern Europe and Eastern Europe in the West, to the Middle East, Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and China in the East, a distance readily surpassing that of his predecessors and his near-contemporary Marco Polo.
Just remember that he journeyed farther than Marco Polo. |
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| Genghis Khan before he became Genghis Khan. |
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| Genghis Khan or Chinggis Khan was the founder, Khan and Khagan of the Mongol Empire, the larges continuous empire in history. |
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| The Black Death was one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, peaking in Europe between 1348 and 1350. It is widely thought to have been an outbreak of bubonic plague caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, but this view has recently been challenged. |
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