Academic Reading — Test 79

Reading passage

For several centuries during the medieval period, the Sahara Desert was not the empty barrier that it might appear on a modern map, but a busy commercial highway crossed by long lines of camels carrying valuable goods. The most important of these goods was gold, which was mined in the lands to the south of the desert, in regions watered by the upper reaches of the Niger and Senegal rivers. Merchants from North Africa and the Mediterranean were eager to obtain this metal, and in exchange they offered a commodity that was, surprisingly, just as precious in the south: salt. In the hot climate of West Africa salt was scarce and essential for preserving food and maintaining health, while in the desert itself salt could be cut in great slabs from dried lake beds. The two substances, gold and salt, therefore moved in opposite directions across the sand, and the wealth generated by their exchange supported a series of powerful African states. The journey across the desert was slow and dangerous. A caravan might consist of hundreds, or in exceptional cases thousands, of camels, and it could take two to three months to travel between the northern and southern edges of the Sahara. Travellers depended entirely on oases, the scattered points where underground water reached the surface and where dates and other supplies could be obtained. Guides who knew the position of these water sources were indispensable, and a single mistake in navigation could prove fatal for an entire party. The camel was the animal that made such journeys possible at all, because it could travel for many days without drinking and could carry heavy loads over terrain that would have destroyed other beasts of burden. Without it, the regular crossing of the Sahara on the scale that developed would have been unthinkable. Among the towns that grew rich from this commerce, Timbuktu became the most celebrated. It lay close to the point where the Niger river bends towards the desert, so that goods arriving by camel could be transferred to boats and carried further into the interior, and goods coming up the river could be loaded onto caravans heading north. This convenient meeting of two transport systems, the boat and the camel, turned Timbuktu into a natural marketplace. By the fourteenth century it had become part of the empire of Mali, one of the largest and wealthiest states of its day. The reputation of Mali's gold spread far beyond Africa, and reports of the kingdom's riches reached European courts and encouraged later interest in the region. Yet Timbuktu was famous for more than trade. As the city prospered, it attracted scholars, teachers and students, and it developed into one of the leading centres of learning in the Islamic world. Mosques were built, the most renowned being the Sankoré mosque, around which an informal university grew. Books were imported, copied and studied in enormous numbers, and a manuscript could command a higher price in the markets of Timbuktu than almost any other item of trade. These manuscripts covered an astonishing range of subjects, including astronomy, mathematics, medicine, law and history, and many were beautifully written and decorated. The presence of so many books demonstrates that the city's wealth was invested not only in luxury but also in knowledge. The fortunes of Timbuktu did not last indefinitely. From the sixteenth century onwards a number of factors combined to reduce its importance. European sailors had begun to reach the West African coast by sea, and this gradually opened an alternative route for trade that did not require the long desert crossing. Goods that had once passed through Timbuktu could now be carried directly to the coast and shipped to Europe, and the inland city slowly lost its central position. Political instability and conquest added to its difficulties. Although the town survived, it became a quiet and remote place, and in the imagination of distant peoples its very name came to stand for somewhere impossibly far away and mysterious. In recent times the manuscripts of Timbuktu have attracted renewed attention. Many had been preserved for generations within private family libraries, hidden and protected through periods of danger. Scholars now recognise these documents as a remarkable record of African intellectual life, evidence that contradicts an older and mistaken assumption that the medieval societies of the region had left little in the way of written culture. Efforts to catalogue, conserve and digitise the surviving texts continue today, ensuring that the achievements of this once-great city are not forgotten.