Latest / The Songhai Empire: Africa's Powerful Forgotten Kingdom — Fexingo History
Inside Songhai's Great Library of Timbuktu
Long before the fall of Gao, Timbuktu was a city of books. In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore the legendary libraries of Songhai — not the Sankore Madrasa, but the private book collections that turned Timbuktu into a center of global learning. They follow the story of a single manuscript: a 16th-century copy of al-Maghili's legal writings, annotated by the great scholar Ahmed Baba himself. Lucas explains how the trans-Saharan book trade brought works from as far as Baghdad and Andalusia, how Timbuktu's scholars built personal libraries of thousands of volumes, and how the…
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