Timbuktu Manuscripts appeal to preserve the Timbuktu Manuscripts. A former Malian presidential aide, as well as several other people involved with preserving the manuscripts, said that the documents had been evacuated into a safe location in 2012 before the fighters invaded Timbuktu. U.S. based book preservation expert Stephanie Diakité and Dr. Abdel Kader Haidara, curator of one of the most important libraries of Timbuktu, a position handed down in his family for generations, organized the evacuation of the manuscripts to Bamako in the south of Mali. Timbuktu has a long tradition of celebrating and honoring family manuscript collections. It is traditional for
Timbuktu built of earth". Now opened up, many travellers acknowledged the unfitting description of an "African El Dorado". This development shifted the city's reputation – from being fabled because of its gold to fabled because of its location and mystery: Being used in this sense since at least 1863, English dictionaries now cite Timbuktu as a metaphor for any faraway place. In "Scales of Gold" (1991), the fourth book in Dorothy Dunnett’s House of Niccolo series, key characters go to Africa in 1464-1467 searching for gold. They find in Timbuktu intellectual and spiritual wealth that transforms them. In the original 1932