
Saharan Village Is Home to Thousands of Ancient Texts - diodorus
https://mymodernmet.com/chinguetti-mauritania-desert-libraries
======
Deimorz
This article says almost nothing and then just has a lot of stock photos. This
one linked from it is much better:
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jul/27/mauritania-
her...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jul/27/mauritania-heritage-
books-libraries)

~~~
jacobolus
If you search the web for Chinguetti you can find better material.

In particular this article discusses much more of the history and context,
[http://worldlibraries.dom.edu/index.php/worldlib/article/vie...](http://worldlibraries.dom.edu/index.php/worldlib/article/view/159/114)

Also try a video search,
[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Chinguetti](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Chinguetti)

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radicaldreamer
It's odd that the article states that they're "fighting against the desert
elements to preserve their texts"... which doesn't really make sense since the
desert is one of the best places to preserve old paper. Unless the "elements"
is a reference to the geopolitical situation.

~~~
Arubis
Sufficiently old books are more likely to be vellum or similar, which will
indeed decay if sufficiently dry.

~~~
thaumasiotes
You mean sufficiently recent books. Old books in the Sahara Desert are
unlikely to be vellum; they're much more likely to be papyrus.

~~~
jacobolus
Do you have evidence for that or are you just speculating?

We are talking about books from no earlier than the 10th century. Apparently
the oldest book in the city is a Quran written on gazelle skin,
[https://en.qantara.de/content/cultural-heritage-
endangered-i...](https://en.qantara.de/content/cultural-heritage-endangered-
in-mauritania-the-koran-on-gazelle-skin)

But there’s at least one 11th century book written on Chinese paper,
[https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-
africa/tradit...](https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-
africa/tradition-destruction-lost-libraries-chinguetti-009651)

Edit: here we go
[http://worldlibraries.dom.edu/index.php/worldlib/article/vie...](http://worldlibraries.dom.edu/index.php/worldlib/article/view/159/114)

> _Paper in particular became as valuable as salt or slaves (the two top
> commodities of the trans–Saharan trade), especially after the eleventh
> century, when it replaced parchment, and even more after the introduction of
> Italian paper in the thirteenth, which significantly raised the standards of
> quality for this type of material. Paper was more practical to use but also
> more difficult to recycle since, unlike parchment, it could not be scraped
> and overwritten; besides, it came from farther away than parchment, salt or
> slaves (all North or West African commodities), and it was more perishable
> than any of them._

~~~
thaumasiotes
So... I said early books are unlikely to be vellum, and you're saying you
don't want to talk about early books?

~~~
jacobolus
The material used in the Kingdom of Kush or at the Library of Alexandria (or
whatever) is 100% irrelevant to this discussion.

It seems unlikely to me that there was ever any significant number of papyrus
books in the western end of the Sahara desert, since as far as I understand
the papyrus plant doesn’t grow anywhere within 2500 miles.

Some kind of parchment would be the obvious local material to use.

But apparently there started to be trade in paper (another non-local material)
starting about 1000 years ago.

------
Arubis
Some additional, non-stock library photos from a few days I spent passing
through Chingutti in 2013, for context:
[https://flic.kr/s/aHsmGcnZEY](https://flic.kr/s/aHsmGcnZEY)

------
Arubis
TFA points to Kottke, which in turn references this Twitter thread, which is
superior to the original article:
[https://twitter.com/incunabula/status/1156460080327360517](https://twitter.com/incunabula/status/1156460080327360517)

Atlas Obscura also has a few excellent photographs:
[https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-libraries-of-
chingue...](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-libraries-of-chinguetti-
chinguetti-mauritania)

------
munk-a
I am so confused by this article... are all the images just rando stock photos
that someone thought would be relevant? It really detracts from the actual
meat of the article to have them there.

~~~
Arubis
I passed through Chingutti about six years ago and believe I recognize the
librarian. That’s certainly Mauritanian garb. Let me see if I’ve got pictures
available online; will reply here in a bit if so.

~~~
Arubis
Also posted this at the top of comment hierarchy.
[https://flic.kr/s/aHsmGcnZEY](https://flic.kr/s/aHsmGcnZEY) Pretty sure
that's the same librarian; I'm squinting and mentally adding six years.

------
SomeOldThrow
The article was interesting for me to read—I wish they made it clearer how
these books are treated to protect them.

I also found it interesting that all the photos were stock photos but,
crucially, I didn’t realize it until the end of the article despite being
prominently declared beneath each photo. They seem to give the impression of
being linked to the article but are in fact entirely unrelated(?)

------
lgessler
Reminds me of a talk I went to by a Benedictine monk who has spent time
traveling the world digitizing texts that are at risk, especially when they're
threatened by religious persecution or war. Really fascinating talk, perhaps
the closest thing I've seen to a real-life Indiana Jones[1].

If you're curious about what kind of a digital life these texts could have,
I'll shamelessly plug a project I've worked on for Coptic texts[2]. OCRing a
document (or more commonly for Coptic, at least for now, hand-transcribing it)
is often just the beginning of the ideal digital edition: there are all kinds
of things humanists want, including Uniform Resource Names (URNs), linguistic
annotations (POS tags, syntactic trees), orthographic normalization (i.e.,
bringing spelling conventions in line with modern editorial standards), and so
on.

[1] I think this is him: [https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/03/13/columba-
stewart-m...](https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/03/13/columba-stewart-
manuscripts)

[2] Example document, a kind of parable about early church fathers from a body
of works, the Apophthegmata Patrum:
[http://data.copticscriptorium.org/texts/ap/ap096n281bread/an...](http://data.copticscriptorium.org/texts/ap/ap096n281bread/analytic)

------
dharma1
This is a great article about the ancient manuscripts in Mauritania -
[https://elpais.com/elpais/2016/10/01/eps/1475273119_147527.h...](https://elpais.com/elpais/2016/10/01/eps/1475273119_147527.html)

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ghthor
I do not find it odd that Chinguetti is on the only road to the Richat
Structure, which is one of the strangest places I've ever seen from satellite
photos.

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thepaperone
It just looks so hot.

------
munk-a
When it comes to preserving antiquity I don't really care about family
heritage crap. If the libraries are hesitant to release the books to be copied
for preservation because they may be damaged - I understand... if they don't
want them copied because then nobody needs to go all the way to the town to
read them then... eh, I'm cool with their rights being disrespected.

~~~
radford-neal
Are you really so sure that confiscating historical treasures that have been
preserved by a family for generations will have good results? Have you
considered that this will encourage other people with treasures to sell them
on the black market before they are confiscated? Have you considered that
those stealing the treasures may not be all that concerned with preserving
them? Have you considered that the treasures might be destroyed as people
fight over them?

Maybe it would be better to help these families develop better preservation
methods and security.

~~~
munk-a
I disagree, I don't see a family as an inherently secure method for transfer -
how many libraries don't exist because one of the generations along the way
had a gambler that sold off all the books to cover a debt?

I also didn't mean to suggest that the families be deprive of the content or
even the originals they are preserving, I was only advocating for this
information to be copied and preserved digitally. The article is sadly lacking
on what sorts of preservation difficulties these families are running across,
I assumed it would mostly be material degeneration which is quite destructive
but thankfully can be side-stepped by copying.

I also don't think anything should be confiscated, these families should
retain the originals - but copies should be made.

