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CAS Brown Bag: What’s in the Timbuktu Manuscripts?

Event Type
Lecture
Sponsor
Center for African Studies
Location
Room 200, ISB, 910 S. Fifth St., C
Date
Feb 28, 2020   12:00 pm  
Speaker
Charles Stewart, Professor Emeritus in the Department of History, UIUC
Cost
Free and open to the public.
Contact
Terri Gitler
E-Mail
tgitler@illinois.edu
Phone
217-265-5016
Views
80

No single body of primary sources in the literary heritage of sub-Saharan Africa has attracted as much attention or attained as much celebrity during the past 25 years as the fabled Arabic manuscripts of Timbuktu. Despite this, what is actually in the Timbuktu manuscripts remains a mystery. For the past five years an ambitious project by a consortium of 35 private libraries in Timbuktu, in collaboration with the Hamburg Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures and the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, has been inventorying and digitizing 300,000 manuscripts in Timbuktu. The inventories (and some images) are now accessible at the UC Berkeley site: https://waamd.lib.berkeley.edu/ and for the first time we can learn what the Timbuktu manuscripts are all about. Spoiler alert: there’s both much more and much less than we thought.

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