DAKAR, (Reuters) – The majority of Timbuktu’s ancient manuscripts appear to be safe and undamaged after the Saharan city’s 10-month occupation by Islamist rebel fighters, experts said yesterday, rejecting some media reports of their widespread destruction.
Denying accounts that told of tens of thousands of priceless papers being burned or stolen by the fleeing rebels, they said the bulk of the Timbuktu texts had been safely hidden well before the city’s liberation by French forces on Sunday.
Brittle, written in ornate calligraphy, and ranging from scholarly treatises to old commercial invoices, the Timbuktu texts 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.
News that they were mostly safe, from people directly involved with conservation of the texts, was a relief to the world’s cultural community, which had been dismayed by the prospect of a large-scale loss.
A day after French and Malian troops retook Timbuktu, a UNESCO World Heritage site and ancient seat of Islamic learning, from Islamist insurgent occupiers, the city’s mayor reported the rebels had set fire to a major manuscript library.
But South African and Malian experts said that while up to 2,000 manuscripts may have been lost at the ransacked South African-funded Ahmed Baba Institute, most of some 300,000 texts existing in and around Timbuktu 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.
HIDDEN AWAY
A Malian scholar also responsible for the preservation of the manuscripts, who asked not to be named, told Reuters by phone from Bamako that 95 percent were “safe and sound”.
“The initial impression was tens of thousands of manuscripts had been destroyed, looted and in general disappeared for us as researchers and for humanity. The situation now is very different, so we’re very relieved,” Jeppie told Reuters.