www.bookfish.co.za

Hidden Treasures of Timbuktu: Rediscovering Africa's Literary Culture by John O Hunwick and Alida Jay Boye shows the astonishing manuscripts of Timbuktu which form the lavish visual heart of this book. Beautifully graphic, occasionally decorated, these exquisite artefacts reveal great craftsmanship as well as learning. All were written in the Arabic script, but not all are in Arabic, for they also feature a range of local African languages. For centuries, trading caravans made epic journeys across the Saharan sands to reach the markets of the legendary city of Timbuktu, where they traded salt, gold, slaves, textiles and books. By the mid-fifteenth century, Timbuktu had become a major center of Islamic literary culture and scholarship. The city's libraries were repositories of all the world's learning, housing not only works by Arab and Islamic writers but also volumes from the classical Greek and Roman worlds and studies by contemporary scholars.