When you think of Timbuktu, what comes to mind? A faraway place?

Maybe the definition of a faraway place. From here to Timbuktu, that's how the saying goes,

a place so far away, it might as well be mythical. Except Timbuktu is a real place,

and only as far away as you are from it. Sure, it's far if you're in, say, Kalamazoo.

But if you're in Western Africa, well, then it's just right over there, in the country of Mali.

And as for its slightly mythic feel, well, there may be something to that, because Timbuktu

has a rich history, rich in a literal sense as a place that once housed great wealth,

but also rich as a scholarly hub, which was at its peak from the 1300s to the end of the 1500s.

And how do we know the story of this ancient magnificent city?

Through its famed collection of manuscripts, which, like the city, have become the stuff of legend.

I'm Dylan Thoris, and this is Alice Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange,

incredible, and wondrous places. Today, we're going to Timbuktu to explore the intellectual legacy

of one of the world's most misunderstood cities.

More after this.

This sort of connotation of Timbuktu as this faraway, imaginary, almost mythical, impossible to reach,

location has been going on for quite a while. That is Dr. Susanna Mullins-Literis.

I'm a social researcher at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University

of Cape Town in South Africa. Dr. Mullins-Literis told us that the mythical city narrative

actually begins with the story of one of the richest humans ever to live, a man by the name of

Monsa Musa. Monsa Musa was the king of the Mali Empire, an Islamic empire that existed from 1200

to 1700 in Western Africa. And Monsa Musa, like all Muslims, was required to make his pilgrimage

to the holy city of Mecca. Around 1320, he made that trip, but as the richest human alive at the time,

...