The manuscripts are indicative of Timbuktu’s cosmopolitan past.

Related: These women are restoring and reclaiming Kenya’s dilapidated, colonial-era libraries This legacy that is passed down from scientists, emperors and philosophers is of utmost importance to safeguard,” Haidara explained. “I turned to Google for digitization because I want to record this legacy we have in West Africa. But determined never to see the country’s national heritage lost forever, in 2014 he contacted Google. Haidara still protects these precious texts, spending most of his days as an indexer – a job that requires him to read through the manuscripts before summarizing their contents. In time, most of these documents were returned to Timbuktu, and today over 30,000 manuscripts have been photocopied and are safely housed in over 30 libraries in the city. These African heritage sites are under threat from rising seas, but there's still time to save them In the 1500s, Timbuktu experienced a golden age of wealth and trade, and scholars from all spheres of life and from all over the world converged on the city to exchange knowledge and wisdom. In the 1300s Timbuktu was known for the Djinguereber Mosque and the University of Sankoré, both important centers of learning. Now, thanks to local residents and global academics, over 40,000 pages spanning the 11th to the 20th Century have been preserved for good in Google Arts and Culture’s “ Mali Magic” portal – a compendium of digitized artifacts, many of which have never been publicly available before. Those manuscripts have had a turbulent past, threatened by Islamist rebels and irrevocable loss.

Today it’s still known for its imposing earthen mosques, and the hundreds of thousands of scholarly manuscripts held in public and private collections. Located in the West African nation of Mali, the name Timbuktu has come to embody the idea of a distant place, but this city was once famed as a center of learning, religion and trade. But until recently, some of the most important evidence of one of Africa’s most vibrant medieval cities was absent from the web. Today, it can feel like the sum of all human knowledge is only an internet search away.

Timbuktu manuscripts bible