Three mosques, of which the two oldest original buildings go back to the early 14th century, the Djingareyber Mosque and the Sankore Mosque that included a university, and the Sidi Yahia Mosque (from 1400), together with sixteen mausoleums and holy public places make up the most important heritage spaces in Timbuktu. Source: Mittheilungen aus Justus Perthes’ Geographischer Anstalt über Wichtige Neue Erforschungen auf dem Gesammtgebiete der Geographie von Dr. In addition, Timbuktu, bordering the desert, suffers from the danger of desertification.įigure 3: Location of the three mosques in the city centre: Plan of Timbuktu, made by the Africa explorer Dr. 182 in 2017 on the Human Development Index. Today, Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world, it ranks no.
In 1960, the independent Republic of Mali was established. Many legends about Timbuktu were brought to Europe, and the 19th century saw the French colonization of the region in 1893. The city's time of greatest affluence and learning was in the 15th and 16th centuries. Many of them brought manuscripts with them and copied other manuscripts while in Timbuktu. The city attracted Muslim scholars and scribes from different Islamic beliefs and different geographical regions. It was at the cross-roads of trans-Saharan trade routes and became famous for its supply of gold. Timbuktu's rich history of learning had to do with its situation as a commercial hub from the 12th century. According to the Hamburg Centre for the Study of Manuscript culture, about 95% of the manuscripts from Ahmad-Baba-Library and many private libraries in Timbuktu were rehoused in the State Capital Bamako, and the Hamburg Centre gives their count in 2015 as 285.000 individual items.įigure 2: Niger-Saharan Medieval Trade Routes around 1400: Timbuktu is Located on the crossroads between North, South, East and West. But the Islamists had destroyed 14 centuries-old shrines of local Sufi saints of the 16 that UNESCO had put under their protection, and they had set fire to the Ahmad-Baba-Library, the then home of thousands of invaluable Islamic manuscripts from medieval times and later. The political situation stabilized again, when on April 1, 2013, French warplanes helped Malian ground forces chase the remaining rebels out of the city center. The causes of this diminution are mostly to do with terror attacks in 20 by Islamist groups that declared the region around Timbuktu an independent state, which led to people fleeing the region. While the population in Mali steadily increased around 3% per year, the population level in Timbuktu shrunk from the above mentioned 54,453 inhabitants in 2009 to 32,460 inhabitants by 2018. In addition, Timbuktu was until 2012 the storing place of many thousand invaluable manuscripts. Timbuktu is today the site of medieval mosques, shrines, a university (madrasa), and UNESCO made it a cultural heritage site in 1988. In 2009, Timbuktu as a city had a population of 54,453, about the same as it had in the 16th century, a time of great prosperity. Its capital is Bamako, a city roughly 1000 miles in the south-west of Timbuktu. Mali is a landlocked country with today roughly 18.5 million inhabitants. In Mali's North, Timbuktu is on the south end of the desert Tanezrouft, one of the most desolate parts of the Sahara.
Timbuktu is today the administrative headquarters of the sixth region (of eight) of the Republic Mali in West Africa. Figure 1: Timbuktu (the red flag) in Mali, Africa: google maps, April 5, 2019.
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