Timbuktu: The Sahara's Fabled City of Gold | 
 enlarge | Authors: Marq De Villiers, Sheila Hirtle
Publisher: Walker & Company
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 655098
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 10 x 6.1 x 1.4
ISBN: 0802714978
Dewey Decimal Number: 966.23
EAN: 9780802714978
ASIN: 0802714978
Publication Date: August 21, 2007
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Product Description
Timbuktu—the name still evokes an exotic, faraway place even though its glory days are long gone. Unspooling its history and legends, resolving myth with reality, Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle have captured the splendor and decay of one of mankind’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 center 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, which began 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.
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Great overview of a fascinating and mythical city November 17, 2007
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
_Timbuktu_ by Marq De Villiers and Sheila Hirtle is an engaging history of that fabled Saharan city, its name once synonymous in the West with both remoteness and as a place of wealth beyond imagination, of golden spires and wise and tremendously rich kings, exerting a "hypnotic attraction on the Mediterranean world." It was similarly revered in the east as a major urban center in the Islamic world, for centuries a nexus of caravan trade in Saharan salt, gold from Ghana, and slaves as well as a center of learning and scholarship.
Surprisingly (at least for Western travelers past and present) for all its great fame Timbuktu has always been a city made largely of mud and unpaved streets of sand. Not a city made of gold, reflecting its local earthly origins, the city is "all beiges and dun, shading into the desert and scarcely distinguishable from it." Though there are a few mosques and houses made of brick and some stone, most buildings are mainly made of dried mud (pise or pounded clay, which the locals call banco). Even the newer parts of town, laid out in a grid, are made of mud brick. Sadly, a shrinking population in the city has no money or manpower to repair an entire city of mud, one that melts in the wet-season rains unless protected by fresh plaster. By the way the spines that appear on Timbuktu buildings "like porcupine quills" are actually stone beams which serve as in-place scaffolds to help repair buildings when the rains come.
Timbuktu is even today a multi-ethnic city, reflecting its cosmopolitan past. The authors provide a quick profile of many of the ethnic groups that make up the city, including the Tuareg ("the most recalcitrant and farthest-traveled of the Berbers"), the Mande people (the dominant black African people along the Niger, governed two of the most powerful ancient African empires, and are the dominant ethnic group in Mali today), the Fulani (their origins reflecting a mixture of incoming Berbers and native Wolof), as well as the Dogon and the Songhai.
I found the information provided on the landscape and surrounding region of Timbuktu - particularly prior to its foundation and in its earlier years - quite fascinating. The Niger River used to flow much closer to the city and with greater volume. Hippos once wallowed near the city. Even more astonishing, a sizable forest once grew near Timbuktu, with many travelers and residents reporting elephants. That forest is now long gone, to some degree caused by direct human activity - Sonni Ali, a ruler of Gao, hewn down entire forests to construct boats to strike at his upriver enemies - but quite possibly the forest was doomed in any event due to gradual human attrition and increasing desiccation. Sadly, though elephants appear to have been gone from the area for centuries, others, such as giraffes and lions, vanished as recently as the 20th century.
All too briefly the authors touch on the recent discoveries of settlements, including dozens of large cities, that were abandoned along the Niger seven or eight hundred years ago, part of a trend reversing thinking in academic circles that equatorial Africa never developed cities, major monuments, or was in any way independent of Mediterranean trade.
Along the way Villiers and Hirtle provided in-depth portraits of the nature of the three main types of trade that sustained the city. "White gold, yellow gold, and black gold" were the basis of all Saharan trade, as the demand for salt made trade initially possible, gold financed it, and the slaves made it work (being both a tool and a luxury item, as many rulers used gifts of slaves as incentives). The authors visit a salt mine working not unlike how it did in the days of Timbuktu's golden ages (the whole salt-mining town of Taoudenni is salt; the house are made of slabs of salt, the roofs reed mats supported by poles!).
While salt is still being mined and sold for local use, gold no longer passes through the city. Gold was "the engine of Timbuktu's expansion;" African gold (particularly alluvial gold from the Senegal and Niger Rivers) became the "essential lubricant" of Mediterranean commerce, as two-thirds of the world's gold supply in the late Middle Ages came from West Africa. While these areas still produce gold, they have much diminished in importance thanks to modern mining techniques and more productive gold fields elsewhere.
The city once had a rich scholastic tradition, the authors describing the staggering numbers of ancient texts (estimates range from 30,000 to 300,000) squirreled away in many areas of the city, on topics as diverse as law, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and religion, many only now coming to the attention of researchers, translators, and preservationists who are struggling with meager funds to save these priceless books for the future.
The heart of the book though is the epic history of the city, from its foundation in the early 11th century by Tuareg nomads (a number of debated legends surround the founding of the city, though the most common ones center around a well of Buktu, or Tin'buktu, an old Tuareg woman who set up a camp in the dunes a few miles north of the Niger River as a convenient pasturing place that eventually became permanent), through its rise in two golden ages as a wealthy and learned metropolis (the first golden age began when the great and wealthy sultan, Mansa Musa, came to town in the middle 1300s, and the second and more significant golden age was several centuries later under the rule of the askias of Gao, starting with Askia Mohammed in the 1490s). The authors also recount the various conquests it has suffered, how it was a destination during the great age of European exploration of Africa in the 19th century, and how today it is a dusty, decaying desert town, its "glorious past turned to dust by invasion, conquest, jihad, and the long, long debilitating passage of time."
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