Tombouctou Manuscripts Project
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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. The collections include manuscripts about art, medicine, philosophy, and science, as well as copies of the Quran. The number of manuscripts in the collections has been estimated as high as 700,000. The manuscripts are written in Arabic and local languages like Songhay and Tamasheq. The dates of the manuscripts range between the late 13th and the early 20th centuries (i.e., from the Islamisation of the
Mali Empire The Mali Empire ( Manding: ''Mandé''Ki-Zerbo, Joseph: ''UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol. IV, Abridged Edition: Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century'', p. 57. University of California Press, 1997. or Manden; ar, مالي, Māl ...
until the decline of traditional education in
French Sudan French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with France ...
). Their subject matter ranges from scholarly works to short letters. After 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 manuscripts, and other cultural heritage in Mali, were imperilled during the Mali War, prompting an evacuation effort from Timbuktu to other locations.


History

Early scribes translated works of numerous well-known individuals (such as Plato, Hippocrates, and
Avicenna Ibn Sina ( fa, ابن سینا; 980 – June 1037 CE), commonly known in the West as Avicenna (), was a Persian polymath who is regarded as one of the most significant physicians, astronomers, philosophers, and writers of the Islamic G ...
) as well as reproduced a "twenty-eight volume Arabic language dictionary called ''The Mukham'', written by an Andalusian scholar in the mid-eleventh century." Original books from Timbuktu have been written by local scientists, historians, philosophers, and versemakers. Legal experts in the city gathered numerous amounts of scholarship about Islamic jurisprudence, or '' fikh'', as well as obligatory alms, or '' zakat.'' 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. It continued until after dawn.” Physicians documented instructions on nutrition and therapeutic properties of desert plants, and ethicists debated matters such as "polygamy, moneylending, and slavery." "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..." 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. "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." The manuscripts were passed down in Timbuktu families and were mostly in poor condition. Most of the manuscripts remain unstudied and uncatalogued, and their total number is unknown, affording only rough estimates. A selection of about 160 manuscripts from the
Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library The Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library is a private manuscript library in Timbuktu, Mali. Founded by Abdel Kader Haidara in 2000 and named in honor of his father, the library preserves one of the oldest and largest private manuscript collections ...
in Timbuktu and the Ahmed Baba collection were digitized by the ''Tombouctou Manuscripts Project'' in the 2000s. Beginning in 2013, the
Hill Museum & Manuscript Library The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) is a nonprofit organization that photographs, catalogs, and provides free access to collections of manuscripts located in libraries around the world. HMML prioritizes manuscripts located in regions en ...
(HMML) at
Saint John's University St John's University may refer to: *St. John's University (New York City) ** St. John's University School of Law **St. John's University (Italy) - Overseas Campus * College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University, St. Joseph, Minnesota and C ...
in Collegeville, Minnesota, partnered with SAVAMA-DCI for a large-scale digitization effort that has photographed more than 150,000 manuscripts. This effort has been supported by the Arcadia Fund. These are being made available through HMML's online Reading Room. 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. With the demise of Arabic education in Mali under
French colonial rule The French colonial empire () comprised the overseas colonies, protectorates and mandate territories that came under French rule from the 16th century onward. A distinction is generally made between the "First French Colonial Empire", that exist ...
, appreciation for the medieval manuscripts declined in Timbuktu, and many were being sold off. ''Time'' magazine related the account of an
imam Imam (; ar, إمام '; plural: ') is an Islamic leadership position. For Sunni Muslims, Imam is most commonly used as the title of a worship leader of a mosque. In this context, imams may lead Islamic worship services, lead prayers, ser ...
who picked up four of them for $50 each. In October 2008 one of the households was flooded, destroying 700 manuscripts.


Research

In 1970, UNESCO founded an organization which included among its tasks preservation of the manuscripts, but it went unfunded until 1977. In 1998, Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates visited Timbuktu for his PBS series ''Wonders of the African World''. The series raised public and academic awareness of the manuscripts, which led to a pool of funding opening up. The ''Timbuktu Manuscripts Project'' was a project of the University of Oslo running from 1999 - 2007, the goal of which was to assist in physically preserving the manuscripts, digitize them and building an electronic catalogue, and making them accessible for research. It was funded by the government of Luxembourg along with the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), the Ford Foundation, the Norwegian Council for Higher Education's Programme for Development Research and Education (NUFU), and the United States'
Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation The Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation is one of many programs run by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs as part of its mission of public diplomacy through educational and cultural programming and ...
. Among the results of the project are: reviving the ancient art of
bookbinding Bookbinding is the process of physically assembling a book of codex format from an ordered stack of ''signatures'', sheets of paper folded together into sections that are bound, along one edge, with a thick needle and strong thread. Cheaper, b ...
and training a solid number of local specialists; devising and setting up an electronic database to catalogue the manuscripts held at the Institut des Hautes Études et de Recherche Islamique – Ahmad Baba (IHERI-AB); digitizing a large number of manuscripts held at the IHERIAB; facilitating scholarly and technical exchange with manuscript experts in Morocco and other countries; reviving IHERI-AB's journal ''Sankoré''; and publishing the illustrated book, ''The Hidden Treasures of Timbuktu: Rediscovering Africa's Literary Culture''. Since the end of this project, the cooperation of Grand-Duché de Luxembourg has funded a new project called ''Timbuktu Manuscripts''. This project aims at protecting and promoting Timbuktu Manuscripts, for economic, social and cultural development of the area. It is implemented by the
Lux-Development Lux-Development S.A., better known as LuxDev, is the aid and development agency of the government of Luxembourg. It was created in 1978 as an agency to support small and medium enterprises in Luxembourg and only became an agency for development ...
agency and the goals are: # a better conservation of the manuscripts (100 listed manuscripts, 10 described manuscripts, 2 digitalized manuscripts, 10 restored and protected manuscripts) # a better scientific utilisation of the manuscripts # use of manuscripts to promote economic, social and cultural development of the area Since the events in the North of Mali in 2012, the project MLI/015 works with its main partners in Bamako on result 1. These key partners are the IHERI-AB ( Institut des Hautes Etudes et de Recherche Islamique Ahmed Baba) and the SAVAMA DCI ( Association de Sauvegarde et de Mise en Valeur des Manuscrits et de Défense de la Culture Islamique). Beginning of 2013, they had completed an important work of describing 10,000 manuscripts through standardized registration forms. The ''Timbuktu Manuscripts Project'' is a separate project run by the University of Cape Town. In a partnership with the government of South Africa, which contributed to the Timbuktu trust fund, this project is the first official cultural project of the New Partnership for Africa's Development. It was founded in 2003 and is ongoing. They released a report on the project in 2008. As well as preserving the manuscripts, the Cape Town project also aims to make access to public and private libraries around Timbuktu more widely available. The project's online database is accessible to researchers only. In 2015, it was announced that the Timbuktu trust fund would close after receiving no more funds from the South African government. Another project was seeded in 2005, when Aluka (which later integrated with
JSTOR JSTOR (; short for ''Journal Storage'') is a digital library founded in 1995 in New York City. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of j ...
) began a dialogue with members of library and scholarly communities, expressing its interest in helping to solve some of the challenges faced by libraries in Timbuktu. In January 2007, after a series of meetings and discussions in Cape Town, New York, and Timbuktu, Aluka entered into a formal partnership wit
SAVAMA-DCI
(L’organisation Non Gouvernmentale pour la Sauvegarde et la Valorisation des Manuscrits pour la Defense de la Culture Islamique), a Timbuktu-based NGO whose mission is to help private manuscript libraries in Mali safeguard, preserve, and understand their intellectual treasures. As part of this project, Aluka also partnered with two academic groups, Northwestern University’s Advanced Media Production Studio (NUAMPS), led by Mr. Harlan Wallach, and the Tombouctou Mss Project at the University of Cape Town’s Department of Historical Studies. Some of the images are published in a project report from Aluka. Over 300 digitized manuscripts are available to researchers and were featured in Aluka’s online archive as part of its African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes digital library, which was later integrated with JSTOR. A book about Timbuktu, published in 2008, contains a chapter with some discussions of a few of the texts. Digital images of thirty-two manuscripts from the private Mamma Haïdara Library are available from the United States Library of Congress; a subset of these are also accessible from the United Nations' World Digital Library website. Th
Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures
(CSMC) at the University of Hamburg has supported conservation and inventorying efforts at SAVAMA-DCI since 2013, coordinated with HMML's digitization efforts. HMML is now leading a major cataloguing project based on the CSMC's initial metadata, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.


Destruction and evacuation

Following the fall of Timbuktu in the
Northern Mali conflict {{Infobox military conflict , conflict = Mali War , partof = the Islamist insurgency in the Sahel and the War on terror , image = MaliWar.svg , image_size = 380 , caption = Military situation ...
, many of the manuscripts were reported destroyed in January 2013, along with many other monuments of medieval Islamic culture in Timbuktu, by the Islamist rebels of Ansar Dine. The Ahmed Baba Institute and a library, both containing thousands of manuscripts, were said to have been burnt as the Islamists retreated from Timbuktu. Journalists, however, found that at least one of the libraries was largely undamaged, and that only a few small piles of ash were present, suggesting that at least some of the documents survived. Aboubacry Moussa Lam was a signatory to an appeal to preserve the Timbuktu Manuscripts. A former Malian presidential aide, as well as several other people involved with preserving the manuscripts, said that the documents had been evacuated into a safe location in 2012 before the fighters invaded Timbuktu. U.S. based book preservation expert Stephanie Diakité and Dr. Abdel Kader Haidara, curator of one of the most important libraries of Timbuktu, a position handed down in his family for generations, organized the evacuation of the manuscripts to Bamako in the south of Mali. Timbuktu has a long tradition of celebrating and honoring family manuscript collections. It is traditional for a family member to “swear publicly that he will protect the library for as long as he lives.” Yochi Dreazen, “The Brazen Bibliophiles of Timbuktu: How a Team of Sneaky Librarians Duped Al Qaeda and Saved Some of the Ancient World’s Greatest Artifacts,” The New Republic (April 2013), 34. During the evacuation process, Haidara relied on local families to hide the Ahmed Baba Institute's manuscript collection in their homes before the texts were ultimately transported to Bamako. The evacuation was supported by international organizations, such as the
Prince Claus Fund The Prince Claus Fund was established in 1996, named in honor of Prince Claus of the Netherlands. It receives an annual subsidy from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Fund has presented the international Prince Claus Awards annually si ...
for Culture and Development, whose initial commitment was followed by financial support from other organisations such as the Doen Foundation and Ford Foundation. Abdel Kader thanked SAVAMA-DCI and their partners in a letter for enabling the evacuation of the manuscripts to the cities in the south of the country and supporting their storage. However, once in the south the manuscripts faced new dangers: mold and humidity. Stephanie Diakité and Dr. Abdel Kader Haidara began a campaign to raise money for the preservation of the books including a
crowd-funding Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and alternative finance. In 2015, over was raised worldwide by crow ...
campaign called "Timbuktu Libraries in Exile". Whereas many institutions have provided funding, equipment and/or training, the leading role in all the proceedings is played by the local people.


Media coverage

A movie about the Timbuktu Manuscript Project, ''The Ancient Astronomers of Timbuktu'', was released in 2009 with funding from the Ford Foundation and Oppenheimer Memorial Trust. The French/German cultural TV channel ARTE produced a feature-length film about Timbuktu's manuscript heritage in 2009 entitled "''Tombouctou: les manuscrits sauvés des sables''" or "''Timbuktus verschollenes Erbe: vom Sande verweht''"''. Another film on the subject entitled "Manuscripts of Timbuktu" was also released in 2009. The film was made by South African director
Zola Maseko Zola Maseko (born 1967) is a Swazi film director and screenwriter. He is noted for his documentary films related to xenophobia. Biography Maseko was born in exile in 1967 and educated in Swaziland (now Eswatini) and Tanzania. After moving to the ...
, executive produced by the South African Broadcasting Corporation and distributed by
California Newsreel California Newsreel, was founded in 1968 as the San Francisco branch of the national film making collective Newsreel. It is an American non-profit, social justice film distribution and production company still based in San Francisco, California. Th ...
.' In 2013,
BBC Four BBC Four is a British free-to-air public broadcast television channel owned and operated by the BBC. It was launched on 2 March 2002
produced a documentary called "The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu." In 2016, a book about the manuscripts and the efforts to save them in the midst of the assault and occupation of northern Mali by Islamists jihadis was published. The book, ''The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu'' by
Joshua Hammer Joshua Ives Hammer is an American content creator and foreign freelance correspondent and bureau chief for ''Newsweek'' and in Europe. He has also written several books, including the best-selling ''The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu'' in 2016. ...
, provides vivid details about the collection of the manuscripts into libraries, and subsequent efforts to remove them to safety during the dangerous conflict, in which the Islamist jihadis threatened to destroy them. In 2017, journalist Charlie English published ''The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu'' (also published as ''The Storied City: The Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save Its Past'') which tells in alternating chapters the history of European expeditions to Timbuktu (1795 – 1860) and the rescue efforts undertaken by Haidara and others to save the manuscripts from destruction by jihadists in 2012.


See also

*
Sankore Madrasah Sankoré Madrasa (also called the University of Sankoré, or Sankore Masjid) is one of three ancient centers of learning located in Timbuktu, Mali. It is believed to be established by Mansa Musa, who was the ruler of the Mali Empire, though the S ...
*
Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library The Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library is a private manuscript library in Timbuktu, Mali. Founded by Abdel Kader Haidara in 2000 and named in honor of his father, the library preserves one of the oldest and largest private manuscript collections ...
* Timbuktu Chronicles *
History of Timbuktu Starting out as a seasonal settlement, Timbuktu was in the kingdom of Mali when it became a permanent settlement early in the 12th century. After a shift in trading routes, the town flourished from the trade in salt, gold, ivory and slaves from ...


References


External links

*
Online Exhibition: Ancient Manuscripts from the Desert Libraries of Timbuktu
{{University of Timbuktu History of Mali Science in the medieval Islamic world Malian culture Manuscripts New Partnership for Africa's Development Preservation (library and archival science) Timbuktu Arabic manuscripts Mali Empire Islamic manuscripts