![]() ![]() With the demise of Arabic education in Mali under French colonial rule, appreciation for the medieval manuscripts declined in Timbuktu, and many were being sold off. In 2017, HMML and the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme launched the Endangered Libraries in Timbuktu (ELIT) project to digitize manuscripts that remained in Timbuktu with the three principal mosques. These are being made available through HMML's online Reading Room. This effort has been supported by the Arcadia Fund. Beginning in 2013, the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) at Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, partnered with SAVAMA-DCI for a large-scale digitization effort that has photographed more than 150,000 manuscripts. A selection of about 160 manuscripts from the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library in Timbuktu and the Ahmed Baba collection were digitized by the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project in the 2000s. Most of the manuscripts remain unstudied and uncatalogued, and their total number is unknown, affording only rough estimates. The manuscripts were passed down in Timbuktu families and were mostly in poor condition. "At a time when women’s sexuality was barely acknowledged in the West, the manuscript, a kind of Baedeker to orgasm, offered tips for maximizing sexual pleasure on both sides." : 27 It continued until after dawn.” : 26–27 Physicians documented instructions on nutrition and therapeutic properties of desert plants, and ethicists debated matters such as "polygamy, moneylending, and slavery." : 27 "There were catalogues of spells and incantations astrology fortune-telling black magic necromancy, or communication with the dead by summoning their spirits to discover hidden knowledge geomancy, or divining markings on the ground made from tossed rocks, dirt, or sand hydromancy, reading the future from the ripples made from a stone cast into a pool of water and other occult subjects." : 27 A volume titled Advising Men on Sexual Engagement with Their Women acted as a guide on aphrodasiacs and infertility remedies, as well as offering advice on "winning back" their wives. : 25–26 Astronomers studied the movement of stars and relation to seasons, crafting charts of the heavens and precise diagrams of orbits of the other planets based on complex mathematical calculations they even documented a meteor shower in 1593-"“In the year 991 in God’s month of Rajab the Godly, after half the night had passed stars flew around as if fire had been kindled in the whole sky-east, west, north and south.It became a nightly flame lighting up the earth, and people were extremely disturbed. Legal experts in the city gathered scholarship about Islamic jurisprudence, or fikh, as well as obligatory alms, or zakat. The manuscripts, and other cultural heritage in Mali, were imperilled during the Mali War, prompting an evacuation effort from Timbuktu to other locations.Įarly scribes translated works of numerous well-known individuals (such as Plato, Hippocrates, and Avicenna) as well as reproduced a "twenty-eight volume Arabic language dictionary called The Mukham, written by an Andalusian scholar in the mid-eleventh century." : 25 Original books from Timbuktu have been written by local scientists, historians, philosophers, and versemakers. Their subject matter ranges from scholarly works to short letters.Īfter the decline of the Mali Empire, the manuscripts were kept in the homes of Timbuktu locals, before research and digitisation efforts began in the 20th and 21st century. The dates of the manuscripts range between the late 13th and the early 20th centuries (i.e., from the Islamisation of the Mali Empire until the decline of traditional education in French Sudan). The manuscripts are written in Arabic and several African languages, in the Ajami script this includes, but is not limited to, Fula, Songhay, Tamasheq, Bambara, and Soninke. The number of manuscripts in the collections has been estimated as high as 700,000. The collections include manuscripts about art, medicine, philosophy, and science, as well as copies of the Quran. Timbuktu Manuscripts (or Tombouctou Manuscripts) is a blanket term for the large number of historically significant manuscripts that have been preserved for centuries in private households in Timbuktu, a city in northern Mali. A manuscript page from Timbuktu showing a table of astronomical information ![]() From the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library, Timbuktu. Manuscripts preserved in Timbuktu, Mali A manuscript page from Timbuktu Manuscript of Nasir al-Din Abu al-Abbas Ahmad ibn al-Hajj al-Amin al-Tawathi al-Ghalawi's Kashf al-Ghummah fi Nafa al-Ummah. ![]()
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