
These manuscripts are the records of a highly developed African civilization in the middle of the last millennium. There's a tendency to see Africa as a backwards Dark Continent where everything has remained primitive to this day. The records of Timbuktu challenge this view and stand against racist views about the abilities of Africans to build a flourishing and sophisticated society. It would be a tragedy if they were destroyed, and human memory of the details of this civilization was lost. I hope the endangerment of the manuscripts will get more scholars to visit Timbuktu and digitize them.
There's more information on this at the Timbuktu Manuscripts Project page.
2 comments:
Good news indeed. Thanks, Neil!
When I as in Beirut in 2006, I was proudly shown the national antiquity collection that had been cased in concrete during the Israeli attack on that city in 1982. The items survived. They also survived the July 2006 Israeli bombings of Beirut, a more precision affair.
How long this can last, I don't know. And it's hard to have much hope for the treasures of Damascus these days.
Post a Comment