The previous essay showed that in the 1400s, Africa was not a “dark continent” but a continent of light — a leader in knowledge, trade, and culture. Cities like Timbuktu rivaled Oxford and Cambridge ...

One week after Islamic militants fled Timbuktu under French bombing strikes, preservationists are deeply uncertain about how to continue protecting the city’s priceless ancient documents — a conundrum ...

Beyond the reports of beatings, hand-choppings and other grim Shari’a punishments carried out in the ten months Islamists held the historic Malian city of Timbuktu, the fear that gripped many ...

Late in the afternoon of April 20, 1828, "just as the sun was touching the horizon," as he later described it, a young Frenchman, barely 29, walked into Timbuktu disguised as an Arab, wearing long ...

The golden city of Timbuktu, like the lost city of Atlantis, occupies a large place in the world's mythology, but resemblances pretty much end there. Atlantis was Plato's metaphor for the ideal ...