Latest / The Songhai Empire: Africa's Powerful Forgotten Kingdom — Fexingo History
The Library of Timbuktu: Songhai's Lost Manuscripts
In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore the manuscript tradition of Songhai's Timbuktu, focusing on the vast private libraries that held thousands of scholarly works in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and Islamic jurisprudence. They discuss how the Sankore Madrasa and other institutions produced works like the Tarikh al-Sudan and Tarikh al-Fattash, the role of scholar Ahmed Baba, and the fate of these manuscripts after the Saadian invasion of 1591. The episode highlights recent efforts to preserve surviving manuscripts and what they reveal about West Africa's intellectual history…
The skinny
The skinny isn't ready yet — notes appear once the transcript is processed.