History of Timbuktu returning from a stay in the capital of the Mali Empire. Timbuktu was still relatively unimportant and Battuta quickly moved on to Gao. At the time both Timbuktu and Gao formed part of the Mali Empire. A century and a half later, in around 1510, Leo Africanus visited Timbuktu. He gave a description of the town in his "Descrittione dell'Africa" which was published in 1550. The original Italian was translated into a number of other languages and the book became widely known in Europe. The earliest surviving local documents are the 17th century chronicles, al-Sadi's "Tarikh al-Sudan" and Ibn al-Mukhtar's
Timbuktu Manuscripts receiving no more funds from the South African government. A book about Timbuktu, published in 2008, contains a chapter with some discussions of a few of the texts. Digital images of thirty-two manuscripts from the private Mamma Haïdara Library are available from the United States Library of Congress; a subset of these are also accessible from the United Nations' World Digital Library website. A movie about the Timbuktu Manuscript Project, "The Ancient Astronomers of Timbuktu", was released in 2009, with funding from the Ford Foundation and Oppenheimer Memorial Trust. Also in 2009, the French/German cultural TV channel ARTE produced a