Founding of Timbuktu

Date ca. 1000 BCE

Locale West Africa

Timbuktu was a major post for the lively trade in gold and salt between other regions in Africa and in Europe. Timbuktu benefited from being located among military, economic, and religious powers and was strategically situated within several African empires and is at the point at which the Niger River flows north toward the souther edge of the Sahara Desert. It was also a center of Islamic learning.

Key Figure

• Mansa Mūsā (ca. 1280–1337), emperor and leader of the Mali Empire from 1312–37

Summary of Event

One of the most mysterious cities in the world, Timbuktu has acquired a reputation as an exotic and ancient city in the southern edges of the Sahara Desert. Separating myth from reality about the city is difficult because Timbuktu has been idealized by visitors and by those who have never been there.

Timbuktu is located a few miles north of the Niger River and in the middle of the West African nation of Mali. Along the great bend of the river where it flows northward toward the Sahara Desert was a natural point of convergence for the Songhai, Wangara, Fulani, Tuareg, and Arab peoples who traded such commodities as salt and gold. The Songhai would come to rule Timbuktu in the fifteenth century after defeating the Mali Empire. The Songhai capital of Gao was a major trading rival of Timbuktu but also helped develop the city’s trade. Near the source of the Niger, as it curls toward the Atlantic Ocean but never quite reaches it, were the Mande people. Tribes within the Mande would challenge the ancient empire of Ghana and eventually become part of Mali. To the south near the Volta River were the Gurs, while to the immediate north of Timbuktu were the Berbers, a group of nomads who ranged from the Niger River to the Mediterranean Sea and what is now Morocco. Other tribes would compete for the lucrative trade routes, and from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, economic power would shift up and down the Niger.

The Niger River is an important trade route and source of water near one of the most desolate areas on the globe, the Sahara Desert. The river enabled trade from the eastern Sudan to the western Sudan, and from the Sahara and Europe to the gold mines of Ghana and West Africa.

Ghana was the dominant political and military force in West Africa from the sixth through the tenth centuries. It used trade to maintain its power, using taxes assessed on trade caravans for its army. As gold flowed into the capital of Kumbi, the Ghana kings expanded their empire from the Atlantic Ocean into what is now Nigeria. The kings exploited the notion of divine rule, that is, they promoted the idea that they were successors to gods. Yet divine rule led to the tradition of killing the kings when they became ill, for fear their illness would harm the kingdom.

The movement of Islamic armies into North Africa presented a challenge to Ghana, starting in the eleventh century. A nomadic tribe known as the Berbers swept south through the Sahara Desert in the last half of the eleventh century, captured the Ghana capital, and weakened the empire sufficiently to make it vulnerable to attacks from its West African neighbors. Still, the Berbers continued their extensive trade with the area, further enhancing the importance of Timbuktu.

The arrival of the Berber traders and the subsequent rise in the trading cities along the Niger River can be attributed partially to the fall of the Roman Empire during the fifth century. The Romans, suspicious of nomadic tribes crossing in and out of their well-defended borders in North Africa, forced the Berbers in that region to adopt an agricultural rather than trade-oriented way of life. Once Roman power was broken in the area, the Berbers returned to nomadism and moved south, transporting trade goods from Europe into West Africa and making the Niger River Valley a key component of that trade. With trade came the need to establish cities where goods could be exchanged. One of those cities was Timbuktu.

The exact year of the founding of Timbuktu is unknown, but most scholars place it some time during the eleventh century. Its creation came out of the trading practices of the Tuareg tribe, a group of fierce nomadic and independent tribesmen who traded goods along the Niger River. It is believed that the Tuareg created Timbuktu as a storage place for their goods while they roamed the surrounding desert. However, Timbuktu soon began to grow in population and size, and its central location along trade routes made it strategically important for the various empires jockeying for control of the area.

Timbuktu was one of the nearest overland points for trade routes north to Europe, which was desperate for new sources of gold as its own sources were being diminished. For this reason, traders used Timbuktu as a point of departure north into the Sahara Desert, bringing trade goods from Europe to exchange for Ghana’s gold. Trade with the Europeans marked Timbuktu—both in fact and as myth—as a place of extraordinary wealth. As Timbuktu's prosperity grew, the area began to also attract scholars and businesses, which served to add to knowledge and information to the city's growing wealth.

Some 500 miles (800 kilometers) north of the city sat the salt mines of Taghaza. The mines had existed since the founding of the city, and the salt trade was part of its commerce. The lack of salt in the Ghana region suddenly made it a valuable commodity, and it was traded for gold, which was plentiful. Another crop that was valuable to those in the north was the kola nut. Produced widely in the southern portion of West Africa, it was valued in Europe—and became the basis for cola drinks in the twentieth century. Ivory also was plentiful in West Africa, and it was valued all over the world. As the gold became depleted in Ghana, ivory was used as currency for those seeking to buy goods from the north.

As it developed, Timbuktu became the last overland leg for goods being brought in from the north. After reaching the city, the goods were transported to the Niger, where they were taken by canoe to the other major trading city of Jenne (Djenné).

Timbuktu, however, did not become known throughout much of the world until after the fall of the Ghana Empire. The empire of Mali, begun by a tribe of the Monde people, not only saw Timbuktu expand beyond a single point along a 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) trade route but as a major destination for political and religious figures. Timbuktu became a center of intellectual and religious life during the reign of the Malian king Mansa Mūsā.

Possibly one of the greatest kings in Mali and medieval West Africa, Mansa Mūsā had converted to the Muslim faith. As part of that faith, he began a journey to Mecca in 1324. Arriving in Egypt in 1325, the king, along with his entourage of approximately ten thousand people, began spending the gold in his possession so freely that the Egyptian price of the precious metal plummeted almost 10 percent because of the oversupply. His extraordinary wealth and willingness to spend it created much talk in the Muslim world about the riches to be found in West Africa and Mali. He returned to Mali in 1325 and visited Timbuktu. During that visit, he recruited an Egyptian to build one of the largest mosques in West Africa. It still stands today.

While the mosque might be the most visible result of the king’s journey to Timbuktu, his creation of a center of education at the Sankore mosque was his longest lasting, significant achievement. Sankore became a major focus of Islamic learning and scholarship in West Africa. Thousands of students went through this and other centers of learning (referred to as universities), and many remained to add to the interpretation of Islamic law and culture. By the beginning of the twelfth century, the wealth created by the city's robust trade was enhanced by its growing reputation as a center of Islamic teaching and learning. Tens of thousands of manuscripts were written and many survive today and shed light on West African ancient history and sociology.

Significance

The founding of Timbuktu saw the eventual creation of a multiethnic and multireligious city within the realms of three different empires. Timbuktu’s reputation as a major center of Islamic learning and teaching in Africa made it one of the most cosmopolitan cities on the continent and a center for knowledge, trade, and wealth. Despite being under the rule of the Ghana, Mali, and Songhai empires, it remained independent politically, which was a testament to its importance as a trading center on the southern fringes of the Sahara Desert. Timbuktu declined significantly in the sixteenth century following the Battle of Tondibi when the Songhai empire was overthrown by Moroccan forces who then plundered the city, burned the libraries and many of the scholarly buildings, and executed many scholars, especially those who resisted the new regime. Many other scholars were deported to the Moroccan cities of Fez and Marrakech, and hundreds of manuscripts left behind in Timbuktu eventually found their way to Morocco. Many more manuscripts wound up in France during that country's colonization of West Africa in the nineteenth century, with Timbuktu coming under French rule until 1960 when Mali gained its independence.

Approximately 700,000 ancient manuscripts still exist and are contained in private collections, museums, and public libraries. The manuscripts, many of which are over four hundred years old, are artifacts of ancient views on mathematics, chemistry, physics, medicine, conflict resolution, and Islamic law, to name a few. There is concern that the manuscripts will be destroyed and lost forever without out a concerted effort toward preservation and reconstruction.

Today, Timbuktu serves as an administrative center for the West African nation of Mali, and its population in 2009 was 54,453 people.

In 1988, Timbuktu was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site, and in the late 1990s, restoration efforts were launched in order to save the city's three mosques, which were deteriorating. In 2012, the city was designated a World Heritage Site in Danger due to the increased amount of criminal violence, terrorist attacks, and armed conflict in and around the city. In December 2016, the US Department of State issued a travel warning for all of Mali and advised US citizens against traveling to the country because of increased incidents of terrorism, kidnapping, and violence. In addition, no one twenty-one years old or younger could be employed by the US government in Mali nor could they travel to Mali with a US government employee.

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