Chinguetti

Now we’re in the ancient town of Chinguetti, 1.5 hour’s east of Atar, passing spectacular mountains.

Salt traders & camel caravans travelled through here between Marrakech & Timbuktu. Le Ksar (the old town) is made up mostly of stone structures, dating from the 13^th century, many of which are in ruins and unoccupied from at least the 1950’s.

Chinguetti is the 7^th holiest city of Islam, and in its prime, was home to 20,000 people, 12 mosques, 5 medersa’s (Quaranic schools) and over 13 bibliotheque’s. We visited one of these old libraries, viewing 1500 year old religious texts & manuscripts. Most are filed away but the ones shown to visitors are not in any special storage at all, though the old ‘book keeper’ shall we call him, did use gloves.

The books are very tattered but on the inside, surprisingly quite clean, with sublime Arabic script. Apparently Arabic has changed very little from its original form, and the book keeper even recited a poem to us from one of the books.