Timbuktu

I am a mad cool city in Mali and yet nobody is willing to give me even the most basic of blurbs. My mosque is made outof mud-brick and should really serve as a Hollywood movie set in the way that the temples at Tikkal were in Empire Strikes Back (or was it Return of the Jedi?).

Well if you all want to ignore me then you do so at your peril.

Bobby: from wikipedia yo: Timbuktu was established by the nomadic Tuareg perhaps as early as the 10th century. Its name is made up of: tin which means « place » and buktu, the name of an old Malian woman known for her honesty and who once upon a time lived in the region. Tuareg and other travellers would entrust this woman with any belongings for which they had no use on their return trip to the north. Thus, when a Tuareg, upon returning to his home, was asked where he had left his belongings, he would answer: «I left them at Tin Buktu », meaning the place where dame Buktu lived. The two terms ended up fusing into one word, thus giving the city the name of Tinbuktu which later became Timbuktu. [1]

Like its predecessor, Tiraqqa, a neighboring trading city of the Wangara, Timbuktu grew to great wealth because of its key role in trans-Saharan trade in gold, ivory, slaves, salt and other goods by the Tuareg, Mandé and Fulani merchants, transferring goods from caravans coming from the Islamic north to boats on the Niger. Thus if the Sahara functioned as a sea, Timbuktu was a major port. It became a key city in several successive empires: the Ghana Empire, the Mali Empire from 1324, and the Songhai Empire from 1468, the second occupations beginning when the empires overthrew Tuareg leaders who had regained control. It reached its peak in the early 16th century, but its capture in 1591 by a band of Moroccan adventurers was not the start so much as a symptom of the crumbling of the ancient economy with Portuguese goods that came instead from the river's mouth (Braudel pp 434–35).

The leaders of the Songhai kingdom (also spelled Songhay) began expanding their domain along the Niger River. Like the kingdoms of Ghana and Mali that flourished in the region in earlier centuries, Songhai grew powerful because of its control of local trade routes. Timbuktu would soon become the heart of the mighty Songhai Empire. It became wealthy because many merchants traveled trade routes that went through it.