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Map showing main trans-Saharan caravan routes c. 1400.Also shown are the Ghana Empire (until the 13th century) and 13th – 15th century Mali Empire, with the western route running from Djenné via Timbuktu to Sijilmassa.
Timbuktu was still relatively unimportant and Battuta quickly moved on to Gao. At the time both Timbuktu and Gao formed part of the Mali Empire. A century and a half later, in around 1510, Leo Africanus visited Timbuktu. He gave a description of the town in his Descrittione dell'Africa which was published in 1550. [12]
Ultimately, however, it was the rise of sea trade along the West Africa coast that doomed the overland routes that connected North Africa to sub-Saharan Africa. The city lost its economic base and its fine university was not enough to save Timbuktu from decline. Cut off from major trade routes, the city retained an aura of spectacular treasure.
The Mali Empire started in 1230 and was the largest empire in West Africa and profoundly influenced the culture of West Africa through the spread of its language, laws and customs. [15] Until the 19th century, Timbuktu remained important as an outpost at the southwestern fringe of the Muslim world and a hub of the trans-Saharan slave trade .
A map of Mali Location of Mali. Mali is a landlocked nation in West Africa, located southwest of Algeria, extending south-west from the southern Sahara Desert through the Sahel to the Sudanian savanna zone. Mali's size is 1,240,192 square kilometers. Desert or semi-desert covers about 65 percent of Mali's total area (1,240,192 square kilometers).
A map showing the route from Timbuktu to Taoudenni is included here. The article is also available from the Internet Archive. Hunwick, John O. (2003), Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: Al-Sadi's Tarikh al-Sudan down to 1613 and other contemporary documents, Leiden: Brill, ISBN 90-04-12560-4. First published in 1999 as ISBN 90-04-11207-3.
Mali, [c] officially the Republic of Mali, [d] is a landlocked country in West Africa.It is the eighth-largest country in Africa, with an area of over 1,240,192 square kilometres (478,841 sq mi). [9]
The Jewish history of Mali begins in the 8th century, when multilingual African-Jewish Radhanites first settled in Timbuktu in the Songhai Empire. These medieval merchants established a trading center in the city, from which a network of trading routes were created through the desert.