Timbuktu and the manuscript tradition
A desert city assembles libraries of hundreds of thousands of books.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 200 years
- Known to
- ± 30 years
- Era
- Post-Classical, Holocene
Timbuktu becomes a scholarly centre from the fourteenth century, with the Sankore mosque functioning as a university and a book trade said to be more profitable than any other. Private family libraries accumulated manuscripts on law, astronomy, medicine, mathematics and poetry — several hundred thousand survive, many hidden and preserved through centuries and evacuated again during the 2012 occupation of the city.