Timbuktu is a Sahelian city of northern Mali, set on the Niger river bend at the meeting point of the Saharan, Sudanese, and Niger-bend cultural and economic spheres. The Berber etymology of the toponym — conventionally read as "the well of Buktu," after a Tuareg woman of the founding period — is preserved in the Tamasheq Tinbuktu and the Arabic transcriptions across the medieval geographical literature.
The city was founded around 1100 CE by Kel Es-Suk Tuareg as a seasonal Saharan-Sahel transhumance camp and developed across the late medieval period into the principal commercial and intellectual centre of the western Sudan. Under successive Mali Empire (14th c.), Songhay Empire (15th–16th c.), Saadian-Pashalik (1591–1612), and post-Pashalik Arma authority, Timbuktu was the principal trans-Saharan trade entrepôt of the Niger bend and the principal western African Islamic teaching centre.
The three great mosques — Djingareyber, Sankoré, Sidi Yahya — and the surviving family-and-community libraries are the principal surviving record of medieval and early-modern Timbuktu. The libraries hold tens of thousands of manuscripts in Arabic, Songhay, and several Berber varieties, with substantial holdings on theology, jurisprudence, astronomy, history, medicine, and poetry. The libraries were partially evacuated and substantially preserved through the 2012–2013 jihadist occupation of Timbuktu, with international recovery and digitisation programmes continuing.
Timbuktu was inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1988 and placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2012 after the destruction of the principal Sufi mausoleums by the occupying force; UNESCO undertook substantial reconstruction across 2014–2015 with international contributions. The contemporary city remains under Malian state authority but with continuing security constraints; its cultural and economic functions are substantially reduced from the pre-2012 period.