Review of The Chronicles of Two West African Kingdoms: The Tarikh Ibn Al-Mukhtar of the Songhay Empire and the Tarikh Al-Fattash of the Caliphate of Hamdallahi

For African Affairs, Rahmane Idrissa wrote a review of The Chronicles of Two West African Kingdoms: The Tarikh Ibn Al-Mukhtar of the Songhay Empire and the Tarikh Al-Fattash of the Caliphate of Hamdallahi (The British Academy, 2025) by Mauro Nobili, Zachary Wright, and Ali Diakite. He calls the work a 'landmark event in the historiography of medieval West Africa. For the first time, the Arabic manuscripts from Timbuktu, collectively known as the Tarikh el-Fettach, following the title assigned to their 1913 French translation, have been translated into English directly from the Arabic originals. More significantly, this work restores the manuscripts to their historical truth and reality.'

Interestingly, the authors' research 'proved to be a genuine piece of "detective" work, which revealed not one but two books that differed markedly from one another, although the 1913 French translation had merged them into a single work', Idrissa writes. 

 

 

This is a preprint. Read the preprint.