Here we may notice that Edrisi takes a point called Ulil as his starting-place in reckoning measurements, and especially longitudes, in the Sudan. This Ulil is fixed by all our authorities as close to the sea, in the centre of a salt-producing district; and it may be supposed to have been in the neighbourhood of the Senegal estuary.[87] To the east, Ulil bordered on Gana, Ghanah, Guinoa, Geneoa, or "Guinea," which, at least in name, was the first objective of Prince Henry's expeditions, and was famous for its slave export, and its money of "uncoined gold."[88] The name of the country was probably derived from its chief city of Jenné, variously described by Leo Africanus, in the sixteenth century, as a large village; by the earlier geographers--especially Edrisi in the twelfth century, and Ibn-Batuta in the fourteenth--as a spacious and well-built city on an island in the Niger, lying west from Timbuktu. [Footnote 87: See Edrisi, Climate I, § i; Wappaüs, _Heinrich der Seefahrer_, pp. 65, etc.] [Footnote 88: Similar language is used by Abulfeda, who calls it the seat of the King of Gana (whither come the western merchants of Segelmesa), situate on a Nile, twin-brother of the Egyptian, which flows into the Ocean; also by Ibn-al-Wardi, who calls Ghanah city one of the greatest in the land of the Blacks, placed on both sides of the Negro Nile, and resorted to for gold by merchants, twelve days' journey from Segelmesa. Edrisi (Climate I, section ii; ed. Jaubert, i, 16-18; also see i, 11, 13, 15, 19-20, 23, 106, 109, 173-4, 206, 272) is the most specific of all. "Ghanah the Great, made up of two towns on the banks of a sweet-water river ... the most populous and commercial city in Negroland. Merchants come there from all surrounding countries, and from the extremities of the West ... it was built in A.H. 510" (= A.D. 1116) (see also Leo Africanus, Hakluyt Soc. ed., pp. 124, 128, 822, 840).] Between Ghanah or Jenné, and Ulil, according to some writers, lay the kingdom of Tokrur, while Andagost was on the northern boundary of Ghanah close to the Sahara. All these were Moslem states like Melli or Malli (W.S.W. from Timbuktu), and carried on trade with Barbary across the desert long before the days of Prince Henry. One of the earliest important converts to Islam in the Sudan was Sa-Ka-ssi, of the dynasty of Sa in the Songhay country on the Middle Niger (_c._ A.D. 1009-1010). From this time the states on the Middle Niger became a centre of Mohammedan influence, especially after the foundation of Timbuktu about 1077. When Ibn-Batuta visited these parts in 1330, he found the negroes of the Niger full of Moslem devotion, enjoying a commerce with Mediterranean Africa, and mostly acknowledging the lead of Melli, which kingdom, according to him, had been founded in the early thirteenth century by the Mandingo.[89]