Timbuktu's Sankore circle copies and writes

At Saharan trade crossroads, Timbuktu's mosques and the Sankore circle sustained a book trade and scholarship in law, astronomy and medicine; hundreds of thousands of manuscripts survive.

Why it matters

A West African center of the book in the age when books were wealth. The manuscripts — family-copied, smuggled to safety in recent wars — show African intellectual history in its own handwriting.

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Sources

• UNESCO — Timbuktu manuscripts