'Bulk of Timbuktu manuscripts safe'
2013-01-30 14:56
Dakar - The vast majority of Timbuktu's ancient manuscripts
in state and private collections appear to be unharmed after the Malian Saharan
city's 10-month occupation by Islamist rebel fighters, who burnt some of the
scripts, experts said on Wednesday.
The news, based on information from persons directly
involved with the conservation of the historic texts, came as a relief to the
world's cultural community which had been dismayed by varying media reports of
widespread destruction of the priceless manuscripts.
After French and Malian troops on Sunday retook Timbuktu, a
Unesco World Heritage site and ancient seat of Islamic learning, from Islamist
insurgent occupiers, the city's mayor reported the fleeing rebels had set fire
to a major manuscript library.
But experts said that while up to 2 000 manuscripts may have
been lost at the South African-funded Ahmed Baba Institute ransacked by the
rebels, the bulk of the around 300 000 texts existing in Timbuktu and its
surrounding region were believed to be safe.
"I can say that the vast majority of the collections
appear from our reports not to have been destroyed, damaged or harmed in any
way," Cape Town University's Professor Shamil Jeppie, an expert on the
Saharan city's manuscripts, told Reuters.
A Malian source also directly involved with the conservation
of the Timbuktu manuscripts told Reuters 95% of the total documents were
"safe and sound".
The two sources said that soon after Tuareg rebel fighters
swept into Timbuktu on 1 April in a rebellion later hijacked by
sharia-observing Islamist radicals, curators and collectors of the manuscripts
had hidden the texts away for safety.
Treasure of learning
"They had shipped them out and distributed them
around," Jeppie said. The Malian source, asking not to be named, said the
manuscripts had been concealed "a little bit everywhere".
Some of the manuscripts that constitute Timbuktu's
"treasure of learning" date back to the 13th century.
Brittle, written in ornate calligraphy, and ranging from
scholarly treatises to old commercial invoices, the documents represent a
compendium of human knowledge on everything from law, sciences and medicine to
history and politics. Some experts compare them in importance to the Dead Sea
Scrolls.
The Ahmed Baba Institute, a Malian state library, is named
after a Timbuktu-born contemporary of William Shakespeare and housed more than
20 000 ancient scholarly manuscripts.
Timbuktu was liberated by French and Malian forces as part
of a rapid French-led military offensive launched on 11 January that drove
fighters from the Islamist alliance occupying Mali's north back back into the
desert and mountains near the Algeria border.
French troops have taken control of the airport in the
northern Malian town of Kidal, the last rebel stronghold in the north.
