Timbuktu’s treasure trove of African history Published duration 29 January 2013

image caption Historic manuscripts which may have been destroyed by extremists in Timbuktu

As Islamist militants fled the historic Malian city of Timbuktu before it was recaptured by French-led troops, they set fire to a library containing thousands of priceless manuscripts. The BBC News website looks at what may have been lost.

Timbuktu was once a major intellectual centre and the manuscripts in its libraries today form "the single most important collection from pre-colonial West Africa", according to Bruce Hall, an American academic at Duke University who has researched the region's intellectual history.

Documents include the Tarikh al-Sudan (History of the Sudan), the most important primary source for the history of the Songhai Empire, one of the largest in Islamic history. It dominated much of the western Sahel during the 15th and 16th Centuries.

When South Africa's former President, Thabo Mbeki, visited Timbuktu in 2001, he declared the documents to be among the continents "most important cultural treasures", and promised to help conserve them as part of his vision of an "African Renaissance".

The new library within the state-of-the-art Ahmed Baba Institute was opened in 2009, funded by South Africa. It contains some 30,000 manuscripts.

According to Dr Shamiel Jeppie, the team leader of the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project at the University of Cape Town, their condition ranges from extremely fragile to excellent.

Initially, the manuscripts were collected from families in Timbuktu with the search then extending to surrounding areas. It now contains material sourced from all over Mali and as far as the borders of Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Guinea, Niger, Algeria and the Ivory Coast.

Most of the manuscripts are in Arabic and are from the 14th to 16th Centuries, but many are written in local languages, including Songhai, Tamashek and Bambara.

They provide unique insights into Timbuktu's emergence as a trading post, and by the 1500s, as a famous university town, full of students and scribes. They also help to rebut the notion that sub-Saharan Africa produced only oral histories, with little or no written records.

media caption Dr Shamil Jeppie, Timbuktu Manuscripts Project: "Rebels had occupied the buildings"

The manuscripts include Korans and other sacred texts, and also cover medicine, astronomy, poetry, literature and Islamic law. Some of the documents discuss social and political problems, usually in an Islamic context, while others offer medicinal advice, including instructions on how to make a 13th Century herbal remedy to help treat women in labour.

The Ahmed Baba Institute says much of its current research focus is on translating material related to "fatawa" (Islamic legal rulings), Sufi practices and women.