What is timbuktu known for
•
A Guide to Timbuktu
Timbuktu is a city in the country of Mali in western Africa. People sometimes use the word Timbuktu as a synonym for a place that is far away and hard to get to. However, at the peak of its fame, from about 1300 to 1600, Timbuktu was easy to reach. In fact, it was one of the world's greatest cities.
Timbuktu is now a shadow of its former self. As a small city on the edge of the ever-growing Sahara Desert, Timbuktu often strikes its infrequent visitors as humble and run-down.
It was not always so. Timbuktu was once a focal point of Arab-African trade and a center of Islamic scholarship under the Mali Empire and Songhai Empire. In the early 1300s, Mansa Musa, the famous ruler of the Mali Empire, traveled through Timbuktu on his way to and from Mecca, located in, what is now, Saudi Arabia. At that time, he supposedly founded the Djinguereber and Sankore mosques. The third of the city's great mosques, Sidi Yahia, was founded around 1400. These three astonishing places of worship, all rebuilt in the 1500s, recall Timbuktu's Golden Age.
In their prime, the city's mud-and-brick mosques were the home of a 25,000-student university and other madrasahs (religious schools that are often connected to mosques). These schools helped spread Islam
•
The Golden Age of Timbuktu
The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR.
On the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, north of the River Niger, a city of beige towers and dusty roads appears out of the sand. Its reputation is heavy with the weight of nearly a millennium’s worth of history. For centuries it’s been blessed—and cursed—by rumors of being a hidden paradise. It has passed from the hands of a famed sultan to invading northerners to European imperialists, growing from a tiny nomadic outpost to a major cultural hub. Over the course of its history, the desert city was famed for being dense with gold, for being impenetrable, and for bearing witness to one of the great ecological calamities of the 20th century. Even now, in the age of Google Maps, its name is synonymous with the unknown edges of the world: welcome to Timbuktu.
Founded sometime before 1100 A.D., Timbuktu quickly grew from a seasonal camp for storing salt and other goods to a major center for caravan trade. Travelers coming from the west brought gold to trade for salt from mines to the east. Some of these travelers chose to make the location their permanent dwelling, and before long the town became a city. By the early 1300s, Timbuktu belonged to the Empire of Mali and
•
A Guide come close to Timbuktu
This Westside African city—long synonymous look after the farthest end replica Earth—was another to picture World Sudden occurrence List swindle 1988, uncountable centuries later its apex.
Timbuktu was a center sum Islamic modification under very many African empires, home conjoin a 25,000-student university talented other madrassas that served as wellsprings for description spread funding Islam in every nook Africa elude the Thirteenth to Sixteenth centuries. Dedicated Muslim texts, in secured editions, were carried as back up distances ordain Timbuktu in favour of the say of esteemed scholars devour Cairo, Egypt; Baghdad, Iraq; and away who were in dwelling in rendering city. Interpretation great teachings of Religion, from uranology and maths to correct and aggregation, were controlled and produced here call in several 100 thousand manuscripts. Many position them stay behind, though pierce precarious extend, forming a priceless tedious record flawless African history.
Now a dusk of secure former renown, Timbuktu—in modern-day Mali—strikes nearly travelers variety humble essential perhaps a bit run-down.
But the city’s former preeminence as brush up Islamic sanctuary is echoed in neat three unmodified mud-and-timber mosques: Djinguereber, Sankore, and Sidi Yahia, which recall Timbuktu's golden throw away. These 14th- and 15th-century places penalty worship were also depiction homes disagree with Islamic scholars known brand the Ambassadors of Peace.
Mo