One of the odd things to me is that this important ancient town doesn’t show up on old maps. Another half hour and I’ll have the Songhay and maybe even Seneca in there, so I should stop and see if anyone thinks it’s plausible. But I knew nothing about the region and this is just what half an hour on google led me to. So I’m putting forward the hypothesis that Chinguetti had a French development of its own via Bilad Shinaqiti. This is apparently sometimes spelled in a way transliterated Shinaqiti, which seems to further establish that it’s related to the Sanhaja/Zenhaga. Other early maps show the Regnum Senegae:Īnd I read that the Arabic locational trinomial Shinqiti isn’t typically meant as a reference to the town/city of Shinqit, but to the entire region – Bilad Shinqiti, encompassing all of Moorish NW Africa. The etymology of Senegal is thought to be related to the Zanhaya or Sanhaja tribe, which is spelled Zenhaga on this early map: And how was “ Chinguetti” derived from the Arabic name شنقيط Šinqīṭ? (Thanks, Trevor!) National Geographic even estimates that 700,000 manuscripts have survived in the city of Timbuktu alone.Įthiopia - that’s quite a journey! If I ever knew about Makuria (Greek Μακουρια, Arabic al-Muqurra), I’d forgotten. Upon the real and present dangers posed by fires, insects, and plundering, some one million manuscripts have since survived from the northern edges of Guinea and Ghana to the shores of the Mediterranean. Thousands of more old manuscripts have equally survived in the West African cities of Chinguetti, Walata, Oudane, Kano, and Agadez. Also, thousands of documents from the medieval Sudanese empire of Makuria, written in at least eight different languages were dug out at the southern Egyptian site of Qasr Ibrim. Just about 250,000 old manuscripts from the libraries of Timbuktu still survive in present-day Ethiopia. I’ve made several posts about the manuscripts and libraries of Timbuktu (put “Timbuktu” into the search box to find them), but I found some details in this story particularly interesting:
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