|
|
|
|
|
|
Timbuktu - World Wonders |
|
 Timbuktu is a city in Tombouctou Region, Mali. It is home to the prestigious Qur'anic Sankore University and other madrasas, and was an intellectual and spiritual capital and centre for the propagation of Islam throughout Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries. Its three great mosques, Djingareyber, Sankore and Sidi Yahya, recall Timbuktu's golden age. Although continuously restored, these monuments are today under threat from desertification.
Timbuktu is populated by Songhay, Tuareg, Fulani, and
Mande people, and is about 15 km north of the River Niger. It is also at the intersection of an east–west and a north–south Trans-Saharan trade across the Sahara to Araouane. It was important historically (and still is today) as an enter-pot for rock-salt from Taoudenni.
Its geographical setting made it a natural meeting point for nearby African populations and nomadic Berber and Arab peoples from the north. Its long history as a trading outpost that linked west Africa with Berber, Arab, and Jewish traders throughout north Africa, and thereby indirectly with traders from Europe, has given it a fabled status, and in the West it was for long a metaphor for exotic, distant lands: "from here to Timbuktu."
Timbuktu's long-lasting contribution to Islamic and world civilization is scholarship. By the fourteenth century, important books were written and copied in Timbuktu, establishing the city as the centre of a significant written tradition in Africa.
Origins
Timbuktu was established by the nomadic Tuareg perhaps as early as the 10th century. According to a popular etymology its name is made up of: tin which means « place » and buktu, the name of an old Malian woman known for her honesty and who once upon a time lived in the region. Tuareg and other travelers would entrust this woman with any belongings for which they had no use on their return trip to the north. Thus, when a Tuareg, upon returning to his home, was asked where he had left his belongings, he would answer:
"I left them at Tin Buktu", meaning the place where dame Buktu lived. The two terms ended up fusing into one word, thus giving the city the name of Tinbuktu which later became Timbuktu. However, the French orientalist Rene Basset forwarded a more plausible translation: in the Berber languages "buqt" means ","far away", so "Tin-Buqt(u)" means a place almost at the other end of the world, resp. the Sahara.
Like its predecessor, Tiraqqa, a neighboring trading city of the Wangara, Timbuktu grew to great wealth because of its key role in trans-Saharan trade in gold, ivory, slaves, salt and other goods by the Tuareg,
Mande and Fulani merchants, transferring goods from caravans coming from the Islamic north to boats on the Niger. Thus if the Sahara functioned as a sea, Timbuktu was a major port. It became a key city in several successive empires: the Ghana Empire, the Mali Empire from 1324, and the Songhai Empire from 1468, the second occupations beginning when the empires overthrew Tuareg leaders who had regained control. It reached its peak in the early 16th century, but its capture in 1591 by a band of Moroccan adventurers was not the start so much as a symptom of the crumbling of the ancient economy with Portuguese goods that came instead from the river's mouth (Braudel pp 434–35).
The leaders of the Songhai kingdom (also spelled Songhay) began expanding their domain along the Niger River. Like the kingdoms of Ghana and Mali that flourished in the region in earlier centuries, Songhai grew powerful because of its control of local trade routes. Timbuktu would soon become the heart of the mighty Songhai Empire. It became wealthy because many merchants traveled trade routes that went through it.
|
|
|
|
