Timbuktu

Timbuktu is a city in northern Mali, West Africa. It lies where the Sahara Desert meets the floodlands of the Niger River, a few kilometres from the river. It is the capital of the Tombouctou Region; in 2023 news reports described it as a remote city of some 35,000 people. Koyra Chiini, a Songhay language, is its lingua franca; in the 1980s, according to Jeffrey Heath, about 80 per cent of residents spoke it natively, alongside Hassaniya Arabic and Tamasheq.

From the 14th to the late 16th century Timbuktu was one of the most important cities in Africa; UNESCO places its economic and cultural peak in the 15th and 16th centuries. Caravans of camels crossed the desert to it, boats came up the river to its port, and scholars travelled there to teach, copy books and argue about law and faith. Its three historic mosques and sixteen mausoleums and holy places make up the site that UNESCO listed as World Heritage in 1988.

Timbuktu is also a word with a second life. In English and other European languages it came to stand for any unimaginably distant place. That image grew out of European legends and exploration rather than from the city itself, which for centuries was known among Muslim scholars as a city of learning.

The secret of Timbuktu’s importance was its location. The Niger River makes a great bend northwards into the Sahara, and Timbuktu sits near the top of that bend. It was the place where the camel, the animal of the desert, met the canoe, the vehicle of the river. Goods had to change hands there, and people who handle goods make money.

From the north came salt. People need salt to live, and in the forests and savannas of West Africa it was scarce, while in the Sahara there were mines of rock salt, such as Taghaza and later Taoudenni. Great caravans carried slabs of salt south. From the south, along the river, came gold, grain, cattle and other goods. Enslaved people were also traded: Leo Africanus reported in the early 16th century that captives taken in the king’s raids were sold to the merchants of Timbuktu, a painful part of this commerce that the sources make clear.

Salt caravans, known as azalai, have continued into modern times: in the late 1990s the linguist Jeffrey Heath described two annual caravan expeditions, each about two weeks long, from Timbuktu to the Taoudenni salt mines, a specialty of local Arabs and Tuareg.

Life by the river also depended on the yearly flood. The Niger rises with rains far to the south-west, and the flood reaches the Timbuktu area months later. When the water is high, boats can come close to the town; Kabara served as its river port. According to the Tarikh al-Sudan, Timbuktu began as a place where travellers “by land and by water” met and left their goods.

Timbuktu’s three great mosques, Djinguereber, Sankoré and Sidi Yahya, are built in what historians call the Sudano-Sahelian style. The name comes from the Sahel, the dry belt south of the Sahara, and the old Arabic name for the lands of Black Africa, Bilad al-Sudan. Earth is the main visible material — mud bricks laid with earth mortar and covered with a protective earth plaster mixed with plant fibres — but local limestone is used too: in Timbuktu stone gives strength while mud mortar and plaster hold the walls together, and the oldest part of Djinguereber has arches of dressed limestone. Timber is used for beams and roofs.

When you look at these buildings, notice three things. First, the walls slope and look soft and rounded, because mud is shaped by hand. Second, wooden sticks stick out of the walls in rows. They strengthen the walls and act as permanent scaffolding for people climbing up to repair them. Third, there are tall, cone-like towers. At Sankoré the minaret rises like a stepped pyramid.

Djinguereber, the oldest and largest, was first built under Mansa Musa and was rebuilt and enlarged between 1570 and 1583 by the qadi al-Aqib, who added the whole southern part; its central minaret is one of the town’s landmarks. Sankoré, built in the 14th century and the mosque most linked to teaching, was restored by al-Aqib between 1578 and 1582, when he had its sanctuary rebuilt to the dimensions of the Kaaba in Mecca. Sidi Yahya, according to UNESCO, was built around 1400 by the marabout Sheikh El Moktar Hamalla in expectation of a holy man who arrived forty years later in the person of Sharif Sidi Yahya, who became its imam; al-Aqib restored it in 1577–1578.

Mud buildings need care. Rain softens the protective earth plaster and wind brings sand. So the people of Timbuktu have long replastered their mosques together, a community event led by master masons. UNESCO counts these traditional maintenance techniques, which continue to the present, as part of what makes the site exceptional; after 2012 the town’s corporation of traditional masons rebuilt the destroyed mausoleums and trained about 40 younger masons.

The main local account of Timbuktu’s beginnings comes from the Tarikh al-Sudan, a chronicle written in Arabic around 1655 by the Timbuktu scholar and official ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Saʿdi. He dated the foundation to “the end of the fifth century of the hijra”, roughly 1100 CE, and named Maghsharan Tuareg as its founders. They grazed their herds by the Niger in summer and went north to Araouan in autumn; their camp became a store for travellers’ goods and grain and then a crossroads. He also connected the name with an enslaved woman who guarded the goods; Octave Houdas’s French translation renders her name as “the old woman”, though Houdas himself doubted the etymology. Early houses, he wrote, were thorn enclosures and straw huts, later replaced by clay huts.

Modern scholars treat this as tradition rather than a precise date. Archaeological research has examined settlement and urban development in Timbuktu’s hinterland before AD 1000: Douglas Park describes a prehistoric phase with varying urban traits and studies settlement patterns in the region and the effects of the Sahara’s changing climate. This regional evidence should be distinguished from the chronicle’s account of the later town’s foundation.

The meaning of the name is also debated. Besides al-Saʿdi’s story, scholars have proposed Songhay and Berber etymologies; Houdas, the chronicle’s French translator, noted that if al-Saʿdi’s explanation were right, the Tuareg founders would not have named the place in their own language. Which explanation is right depends partly on who founded the town, which is itself uncertain.

Timbuktu became part of the Mali Empire in the early 14th century. According to al-Saʿdi, the famous ruler Mansa Musa, returning from his pilgrimage to Mecca (dated 1324 by Ibn Khaldun), took the town — the first ruler to become its master — installed a representative and had a royal palace built. Al-Saʿdi adds, with a cautious “it is said”, that Mansa Musa had the minaret of the great mosque built, and in a later chapter states plainly that the great mosque itself was built by Mansa Musa when he took Timbuktu on his return from Mecca; UNESCO likewise traces the first construction of the Djinguereber Mosque to him.

A later tradition credits the design of the mosque to Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, a poet from Granada in al-Andalus who came to West Africa with Mansa Musa. Al-Saʿdi mentions al-Sahili, but neither of his passages on the mosque names him as its architect. Suzan B. Aradeon has called al-Sahili’s architectural role a “historian’s myth”, arguing that it rested on ignorance of the qualities of African traditional architecture.

Timbuktu’s rise was also linked to the decline of Walata (Biro), an older caravan town to the west in what is now Mauritania. Al-Saʿdi wrote that caravans and scholars, pious men and rich people from Egypt, the Fezzan, Ghadames, Tuat, Fez and elsewhere had once gathered at Biro, but gradually moved to Timbuktu: “the prosperity of Timbuktu was the ruin of Biro.” The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta visited Timbuktu around 1353. Under a later Malian ruler, al-Saʿdi adds, the king of the Mossi attacked and sacked the town.

As Mali weakened, the Maghsharan Tuareg took control of Timbuktu: al-Saʿdi dates their rule from 837 AH (1433–34) and says that under their chief Akil the town was governed by a local official, the Timbuktu-koy Muhammad Naddi. The Sidi Yahya Mosque was begun around 1400. In 873 AH (1468–69) the rising Songhai Empire, ruled from Gao by Sunni Ali, took the town. Sunni Ali was in serious conflict with Timbuktu’s scholars; before he arrived, many jurists of Sankoré, including members of the Aqit family, fled to Walata.

Under the Askia dynasty that followed (1493–1591) and especially under Askia Muhammad I, Timbuktu enjoyed its golden age. It was not the capital, which remained Gao, but it had considerable self-government through its judges (qadis) and scholarly families. Merchants from Ghadames, Awjila, Tuat and other North African towns lived there; when the Moroccans arrived in 1591, the Ghadamesi quarter was the most flourishing part of the town.

The chief judge al-Aqib rebuilt and enlarged the Djinguereber Mosque between 1570 and 1583 and restored Sankoré between 1578 and 1582. The Andalusi-born traveller known in Europe as Leo Africanus visited in the early 16th century and later wrote — in John Pory’s English translation — that there were “great store of doctors, judges, priests, and other learned men, that are bountifully maintained at the king’s cost”, and that manuscripts brought from North Africa “are sold for more money than any other merchandise”. His book, published in Italian in 1550, shaped European ideas of Timbuktu for centuries.

People sometimes speak of the “University of Timbuktu” or the “University of Sankoré”; even UNESCO’s summary uses the phrase. It is useful but can mislead. Teaching centred on individual scholars (ulama), who taught students in the mosques or in their homes and could issue licences (ijaza) to teach particular texts. As the historian Timothy Cleaveland puts it, these scholars did not acquire their skills in universities, on either the modern or the medieval European model, but through informal institutions — above all extended families and lineages.

Learning was organised by families. Lineages such as the Aqit, from whom many chief judges came, held scholarship across generations. UNESCO’s summary cites 180 Qur’anic schools and 25,000 students, but it does not explain how these figures were calculated, and they should be treated with great caution. Advanced study covered Arabic grammar, Maliki law, theology, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic and astronomy.

Books were central. Leo Africanus noted that manuscripts imported from North Africa fetched higher prices than any other goods, and scholars also had books copied locally. Local authors wrote their own works, and some circulated widely. The most famous Timbuktu scholar, Ahmad Baba (1556–1627), compiled a large biographical dictionary of Maliki scholars, the Nayl al-ibtihaj, which was well received in the Maghreb.

Ahmad Baba’s writings show how learned debate engaged hard questions of his time. In a legal treatise on slavery, the Miʿraj al-Suʿud, he criticised the association of Black Africans with slaves, especially through the racialised version of the “curse of Ham”, and set Islamic standards under which much of the trans-Saharan slave trade of his day was illicit. Yet, as the historian Timothy Cleaveland notes, the same treatise defined much of West Africa as non-Muslim or lightly Islamised and so sanctioned the enslavement of those peoples. His work is thus read both as a critique of racial slavery and as a defence of religiously defined slavery.

“Timbuktu manuscripts” is a blanket name for the huge number of handwritten documents kept for centuries in the town’s family houses and libraries. Most are written in Arabic, but some use the Arabic script to write African languages, a practice called Ajami, such as Fulfulde, Songhay and Tamasheq. The tradition centres on family libraries used, safeguarded and kept within learned families for generations.

The subjects are wide. There are copies of the Qur’an and works of law, theology and Sufism; grammars and dictionaries; history and poetry; astronomy for fixing prayer times and calendars; medicine; and everyday documents such as letters, contracts and legal rulings. Not everything is old or complete: in a study of 31 private libraries, Charles C. Stewart found that more than 90 per cent of the listed copies of classical works were fragments. He hypothesised that many were “study sheets” and inferred that these libraries, with few exceptions, are largely of 20th-century provenance rather than relics of the 16th-century golden age.

Estimates of their total number vary widely; an inventory of nearly 350,000 manuscripts in Timbuktu’s private libraries has been under way since 2012, and the University of Cape Town project estimates about 300,000 in Timbuktu and the surrounding area. The largest collections include the government’s Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Islamic Studies and Research (IHERI-ABT), the Mamma Haidara Library of Abdel Kader Haidara, and many other family libraries. The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, working with the Malian organisation SAVAMA-DCI, the University of Hamburg and the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, has digitised an estimated 308,000 manuscripts from Timbuktu, Djenné and other places — some 4.35 million images — and cataloguing will continue for many years.

Two famous chronicles, the Tarikh al-Sudan and the work long known as the Tarikh al-fattash, are the key written sources for the history of Songhai and Timbuktu. Octave Houdas published the Tarikh al-Sudan in Arabic and French (1898–1900), and Houdas and Maurice Delafosse published the Tarikh al-fattash in the early 20th century.

In 1591 an army sent by the Saadian sultan of Morocco, Ahmad al-Mansur, and led by Judar Pasha, crossed the Sahara with firearms and defeated the Songhai at the Battle of Tondibi. The Moroccans entered Timbuktu on 30 May 1591 and built a fortress (casbah) in the Ghadamesi quarter. On 20 October 1593 Pasha Mahmud had the jurists who had gathered in the mosque arrested; on 18 March 1594 they and their families were sent off to Marrakesh. Among the deportees was Ahmad Baba, who remained in exile until 1608.

The Moroccan soldiers and their descendants, called the Arma, became a local ruling class and in time shook off ties with Morocco. A weak state centred on Timbuktu survived along the Niger, and the city went through severe hardships in the following centuries; it came briefly under Fulani control in the first half of the 19th century. At the same time, Atlantic shipping drew trade toward the coast. Timbuktu’s commercial and intellectual importance declined, while families continued to preserve manuscripts.

In Europe, meanwhile, Leo Africanus’s descriptions of gold and learning turned Timbuktu into a legend, and explorers competed to reach it. The Scot Alexander Gordon Laing reached the city in 1826 but was killed soon after leaving. The Frenchman René Caillié, travelling in disguise, arrived in 1828 and returned safely. He wrote that he “had formed a totally different idea of the grandeur and wealth of Timbuctoo”: the city presented “at first view nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses, built of earth”, though he still found “something imposing” in a great city raised in the sands. European images of Timbuktu thus mixed reports of wealth and learning with speculation, exploration and later colonial ambitions; its reputation for remoteness grew out of this longer history.

French forces occupied Timbuktu in 1893–1894, and it became part of the colony of French Sudan. French rule lasted until Mali became independent in 1960.

In April 2012, during a rebellion and military crisis in Mali, armed groups occupied Timbuktu; the Islamist group Ansar Dine soon took control. Ansar Dine regarded the veneration of saints’ tombs as idolatry. In 2012, according to UNESCO, 14 of the 16 mausoleums that form part of the World Heritage site were destroyed, and the Al Farouk monument was demolished. The International Criminal Court’s case concerns attacks on religious and historic buildings carried out between about 30 June and 11 July 2012. UNESCO returned Timbuktu to the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2012.

UNESCO estimates that 4,203 manuscripts from the Ahmed Baba Institute were burnt or stolen by armed groups. But the great majority of the town’s manuscripts survived. Abdel Kader Haidara, founder of the organisation SAVAMA-DCI, led an effort with families and couriers to move hundreds of thousands of manuscripts in metal trunks to Bamako, where many were later digitised by HMML and its partners. After digitisation, most of the Ahmed Baba Institute’s evacuated manuscripts were brought back to Timbuktu in August 2025 at the request of local leaders; many other manuscripts remain in family libraries, and their preservation remains a continuing task.

Afterwards, Timbuktu’s corporation of traditional masons rebuilt the destroyed mausoleums with UNESCO and international support, using traditional methods; they were reopened to the public three years after their destruction. On 27 September 2016 the International Criminal Court found Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi guilty, as a co-perpetrator, of the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against religious and historic buildings in Timbuktu and sentenced him to nine years in prison. He had admitted his guilt; it was the first international trial focused on the destruction of historical and religious monuments, and the first ICC case with an admission of guilt. The court later issued a reparations order for the victims.

Insecurity has continued. On 28 August 2023 Reuters reported residents’ accounts that a local al-Qaeda affiliate known as JNIM had blocked the roads to Timbuktu since around 13 August, causing shortages of food and aid. For Timbuktu’s residents, the heritage question is inseparable from safety, food and livelihoods.

The history of Timbuktu rests on a small number of written sources, each with its own angle. External Arabic writers such as Ibn Battuta and Ibn Khaldun give brief glimpses. Leo Africanus, who visited in the early 16th century, wrote for an Italian audience decades later, and parts of his account are rhetorical; historians use him with caution. The most important internal sources are the 17th-century Timbuktu chronicles, written in Arabic by local scholars, and later works such as the 18th-century Tadhkirat al-nisyan on the Moroccan pashas.

The Tarikh al-Sudan of al-Saʿdi was written around 1655 — he counts sixty-five years since the Moroccan takeover — by a man who served the Arma administration. For earlier periods he relied largely on oral tradition and often hedged with phrases like “if I am not mistaken”. His perspective is that of Timbuktu’s scholarly elite, which shapes his portraits of rulers: Sunni Ali, who clashed with the scholars, appears as a tyrant, while Askia Muhammad appears as a pious ruler.

The so-called Tarikh al-fattash is more complicated still. Using manuscripts unknown or unavailable to earlier scholars, Mauro Nobili and Mohamed Shahid Mathee (2015) argued that the text edited by Houdas and Delafosse in fact conflates two texts: a 17th-century chronicle and a 19th-century one. The later layer, associated with the Fulani state of Massina, presented the chronicle as an older work. Using the edited text as a straightforward 16th-century source is therefore risky.

Archaeology challenges a purely trade-driven story. Research in Timbuktu’s hinterland points to a prehistoric phase before AD 1000 with urban traits, and archaeologists such as J. Cameron Monroe have emphasised that West African cities must be understood together with their hinterlands rather than as isolated caravan stops. How this earlier regional settlement relates to the town described in the chronicles remains an open question.

The word “university” is contested. Popular accounts — including UNESCO’s own summary, which mentions 180 Qur’anic schools and 25,000 students and a population of 100,000 in the 16th century — repeat large figures. The summary does not explain how these figures were reached, and there is no evidence of a central administration behind Timbuktu’s network of teachers and study circles. Comparing Sankoré with Bologna or Paris can honour Timbuktu’s achievement, but it can also impose a European model on a different, family-based and mosque-centred tradition.

The manuscripts raise questions of ownership and access. Many families prefer to keep their collections rather than hand them to state institutions, and digitisation projects, such as HMML’s work with SAVAMA-DCI and the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, have had to balance preservation, open access and the rights of private owners. The al-Mahdi case, meanwhile, prompted debate about whether international law should treat attacks on heritage as crimes against a local community, against humanity as a whole, or both; UNESCO and Mali later received a symbolic reparation on behalf of the international community.