Timbuktu Manuscripts Timbuktu Manuscripts Timbuktu Manuscripts (or Tombouctou Manuscripts) is a blanket term for the large number of historically important manuscripts that have been preserved for centuries in private households in Timbuktu, Mali. The collections include manuscripts about art, medicine, philosophy, and science, as well as copies of the Quran. The number of manuscripts in the collections has been estimated as high as 700,000. The manuscripts were written in Arabic and local languages like Songhay and Tamasheq. The dates of the manuscripts ranged between the late 13th and the early 20th centuries (i.e., from the Islamisation of the Mali Empire until the
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