Life in Timbuktu

It has a reputation for being remote and desolate, but what was it really like under Musa’s reign?

01 golden city

Timbuktu became a permanent settlement in the 10th century CE. Its purpose was a regional trade centre, where caravans met to exchange salt from the Sahara desert for gold, ivory, and slaves from what would become the Mali Empire. It was connected to trade routes via camel caravans and the Niger River.

02 Sankoré

Because Timbuktu was a crossroads between Sub-saharan African culture and Middle Eastern trade networks it became a centre of Islamic learning too. This is why Timbuktu was chosen as the site for Sankoré Madrasah, rather than Niani, which was too remote from the Middle East.

03 mosque school

The Sankoré site is a religious complex including multiple mosques and centres of learning. It was an Islamic university where the focal point was faith. It had approximately 25,000 students and over 180 Qur’anic schools.

04 built from mud

The Djinguereber Mosque is made from the local building materials of mudbricks and mud. However, unusually for the region it has a timber frame allowing it to be repaired and rebuilt during the rainy season. This makes it one of the oldest extant mud structures in the world.

05 the library

When studying in the madrasah, the first course is about Qur’anic and religious studies. However the second one can be on all kinds of topics from mathematics to the copy of texts. Today more than 700,000 texts can be found there, many dating back to the era of the Mali Empire.

06 at the market

The marketplace was where riches from distant parts of the Mali empire came to be exhibited. Manuscripts were traded outside the walls of the madrasah, but perhaps of greater interest to Timbuktu’s residents was the salt from the north, gold from the south, as well as agricultural produce such as cattle and grain.