Marked Timbuktu

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The manuscripts of Timbuktu

Timbuktu became a city of scholars, and its families kept hundreds of thousands of manuscripts on law, astronomy, medicine and poetry. In 2012 and 2013 librarians smuggled most of them out to save them from destruction.

Place
Timbuktu · Sankore mosque · BamakoAfrica
Laid out as
A theme across timeOne idea followed through the eras it crosses.
Lessons
5 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IA city of scholars
  2. IISankore and its teachers
  3. IIIWhat the manuscripts say
  4. IVFamilies who kept them
  5. VThe rescue of 2013

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Ahmad Baba
  • Abdel Kader Haidara

Objects

  • The Ahmed Baba Institute manuscripts
  • The Mamma Haidara Library

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1300 to now. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?