Timbuktu
The Sahara's Fabled City of Gold
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The first book for general readers about the storied past of one of the world’s most fabled cities.
Timbuktu — the name still evokes an exotic, faraway place, even though the city’s glory days are long gone. Unspooling its history and legends, resolving myth with reality, Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle have captured the splendour and decay of one of humankind’s treasures.
Founded in the early 1100s by Tuareg nomads who called their camp “Tin Buktu,” it became, within two centuries, a wealthy metropolis and a nexus of the trans-Saharan trade. Salt from the deep Sahara, gold from Ghana, and money from slave markets made it rich. In part because of its wealth, Timbuktu also became a centre of Islamic learning and religion, boasting impressive schools and libraries that attracted scholars from Alexandria, Baghdad, Mecca, and Marrakech. The arts flourished, and Timbuktu gained near-mythic stature around the world, capturing the imagination of outsiders and ultimately attracting the attention of hostile sovereigns who sacked the city three times and plundered it half a dozen more. The ancient city was invaded by a Moroccan army in 1600, beginning its long decline; since then, it has been seized by Tuareg nomads and a variety of jihadists, in addition to enduring a terrible earthquake, several epidemics, and numerous famines. Perhaps no other city in the world has been as golden — and as deeply tarnished — as Timbuktu.
Using sources dating deep into Timbuktu’s fabled past, alongside interviews with Tuareg nomads and city residents and officials today, de Villiers and Hirtle have produced a spectacular portrait that brings the city back to life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For the Victorians, Timbuktu, a town in central Mali, evoked visions of mysterious, faraway lands, but in fact it has been in a gradual decline since the Moroccan invasion more than 400 years ago. Although today it is rife with malaria, dengue fever, poverty and corruption, Timbuktu boasts an illustrious, lucrative past as a nexus for the gold and salt trades from the 14th through the 16th centuries. Timbuktu was also a center for Islamic scholarship, as evinced by the 14,000-manuscript Mamma Ha dara Library; its owner unlocks a storage closet in his home to reveal to one of the authors piles of priceless ancient manuscripts (one dating to 1204), some gathering dust on the floor. The nomadic Tuareg herdsmen, pegged by some legends as Timbuktu's 11th-century founders, practice an unorthodox brand of Islam in which the men are veiled and the women are not, and women can divorce their husbands. This history-cum-travelogue gives a legendary city its due with an abundance of cogent, rich anecdotes, but falls short with a lack of narrative tension as the authors (Sahara) remain remote from the action, never venturing on a daring quest of their own, as writers of the best books in the genre do. Illus., maps.
