Founded around 1100 by Tuareg as a seasonal camp, near the northernmost bend of West Africa's great river (c. 1100)
About 15 km north of the Niger, in present-day Mali
Geography · Cities
Timbuktu
founded c. 1100
Mali — near the Niger, on the southern edge of the Sahara
A mud-brick trading town where the Niger bends closest to the Sahara, founded by Tuareg around 1100. Under the Mali and Songhai empires it grew rich on the exchange of Saharan salt for West African gold, and its three great mosques and scholarly households made it a byword for learning. In Europe its very remoteness turned its name into shorthand for the ends of the earth.
How to spot them
- ▸A mud-brick city on the edge of the Sahara whose name is English shorthand for the middle of nowhere
- ▸Quiz clue: 'salt for gold', 'Mansa Musa', 'Songhai', 'Sankore', 'the manuscripts'
- ▸The first European to reach it and return alive won a French prize in 1828
- ▸Its libraries of medieval manuscripts were smuggled out for safety in 2012–13
Key facts
Its wealth came from trading Saharan salt slabs, mined at Taoudenni, for West African gold
The northern terminus of the trans-Saharan caravan routes
Its Djinguereber Mosque was built in 1327 for the Malian ruler whose Cairo gold-spending crashed the local currency (1327)
Mansa Musa, returning from his hajj, employed the Andalusian architect Abu Ishaq al-Sahili
Its Sankore mosque was the centre of a scholarly tradition often called a medieval university
Teaching was organised around individual scholars rather than faculties
A Scot reached it in 1826 and was murdered; a Frenchman disguised as a Muslim got there in 1828 and lived to collect the prize (1826, 1828)
Alexander Gordon Laing and Rene Caillie; the Societe de Geographie of Paris had offered the reward
In 2012 jihadists destroyed several of its saint's mausoleums, and librarians smuggled thousands of manuscripts to Bamako (2012)
Ansar Dine; an ICC conviction for the destruction followed in 2016
Its name became an English byword for anywhere impossibly far away
Often spelled Timbuctoo in 19th-century English; Tennyson won the Chancellor's Gold Medal with a poem on it in 1829
Quick-fire facts
- •It lies in Mali, about 15 km north of the River Niger, on the Sahara's southern edge
- •Its three great mosques are the Djinguereber, the Sankore and the Sidi Yahya
- •Modern population is small — roughly 30,000–35,000
- •Inscribed by UNESCO in 1988 and placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 1990 and again in 2012
- •Leo Africanus described its wealth and its book trade in his Description of Africa, published in 1550
- •It was successively part of the Mali Empire, the Songhai Empire, and after 1591 under Moroccan control
- •Its mud-brick mosques are re-plastered by the community each year before the rains
- •Ahmed Baba, the most celebrated of its scholars, was deported to Morocco in 1594; the manuscript institute there bears his name
- •In 2016 the ICC convicted Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi of the war crime of destroying cultural heritage there
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Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Timbuktu
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Timbuktu