One of the burned Timbuktu manuscripts was in Hebrew

AS I FEARED: Ancient Timbuktu Manuscripts, 1 in Hebrew, Torched by Islamists (Arutz Sheva).

At least one of the manuscripts, buried beneath the sand or in cave for centuries in wooden trunks and boxes, was written in Hebrew. Another was written in Turkish, according to Seydo Traore, a researcher at the institute where the manuscripts were kept.

Most were written in Arabic, and some were written in African languages. They covered women’s rights, medicine, music, poetry, geography, history, religion and even astronomy, dating as far back as the year 1204. Researchers had managed to digitize only a small percentage of the manuscripts.

This is a manifold desecration and a great loss for human history.

Background here.

UPDATE: This just in. There are now conflicting reports that either the insurgents took some or most of the manuscripts with them or at least some of the manuscripts were removed for safe keeping by locals some time ago, well before any library buildings were burned, if any were. Time Magazine: Mali: Timbuktu Locals Saved Some of City’s Ancient Manuscripts from Islamists.

In interviews with TIME on Monday, preservationists said that in a large-scale rescue operation early last year, shortly before the militants seized control of Timbuktu, thousands of manuscripts were hauled out of the Ahmed Baba Institute to a safe house elsewhere. Realizing that the documents might be prime targets for pillaging or vindictive attacks from Islamic extremists, staff left behind just a small portion of them, perhaps out of haste, but also to conceal the fact that the center had been deliberately emptied. “The documents which had been there are safe, they were not burned,” said Mahmoud Zouber, Mali’s presidential aide on Islamic affairs, a title he retains despite the overthrow of the former President, his boss, in a military coup a year ago; preserving Timbuktu’s manuscripts was a key project of his office. By phone from Bamako on Monday night, Zouber told TIME, “They were put in a very safe place. I can guarantee you. The manuscripts are in total security.”

In a second interview from Bamako, a preservationist who did not want to be named confirmed that the center’s collection had been hidden out of reach from the militants. Neither of those interviewed wanted the location of the manuscripts named in print, for fear that remnants of the al-Qaeda occupiers might return to destroy them.

That was confirmed too by Shamil Jeppie, director of the Timbuktu Manuscripts Project at the University of Cape Town, who told TIME on Monday night that “there were a few items in the Ahmed Baba library, but the rest were kept away.” The center, financed by the South African government as a favored project by then President Thabo Mbeki, who championed reviving Africa’s historical culture, housed state-of-the-art equipment to preserve and photograph hundreds of thousands of pages, some of which had gold illumination, astrological charts and sophisticated mathematical formulas. Jeppie said he had been enraged by the television footage on Monday of the building trashed, and blamed in part Mali’s government, which he said had done little to ensure the center’s security. “It is really sad and disturbing,” he said.

But the mayor of Timbuktu says that not all of the manuscripts were saved.

The Globe and Mail: Priceless manuscripts missing in Timbuktu .

When hundreds of French soldiers rolled into the remote desert city in northern Mali on Monday, cheered by thousands of residents who were ecstatic that the Islamist rebels had fled, one of the biggest fears was the fate of Timbuktu’s ornately crafted manuscripts, as precious to world history as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The city’s mayor, exiled far away in Mali’s capital, alleged that the Islamist extremists had torched the manuscript libraries, burning them to the ground. This was quickly disproved by a Sky TV crew embedded with the French soldiers, who found the main library intact, alleviating the worst fears of many scholars.

Inside the library, television reports showed a few small piles of ash, along with dozens of empty boxes. Up to 10,000 manuscripts were gone. The immediate assumption was that the Islamist militia groups had stolen or destroyed them – although subsequent reports suggested that many of them had been hidden and saved.

[...]

In fact, the most alarming reports were unfounded. The main library, a new headquarters built in 2009 with South African funds, was still intact when the French arrived. Televised images showed dozens of empty cardboard boxes scattered around a courtyard. But each box holds just one manuscript, so the number of burned manuscripts may be relatively small.

The new library contained about 10,000 manuscripts last year when the rebels captured the city, Mr. Diagayete said. But the basement vaults were empty when the French troops arrived on Monday.

The fate of a second library, an older building where a further 29,000 manuscripts were held, was still unknown.

(Both stories via a Facebook friend of Brent Landau.)

It would be wonderful if the story of the burned library turned out to be a false alarm. But I remain very concerned for the manuscripts and antiquities of Timbuktu in the current atmosphere in Mali.

UPDATE (30 January): More here.