The smallest library of his kin

Claim (verbatim)

Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti, deported to Marrakesh in 1594 after the Sa'dian conquest of Songhay, testified that the conquerors plundered 1,600 volumes from his library — and his, he said, was the smallest library of any of his kin. Leo Africanus had reported, two generations earlier, that manuscripts were the most profitable merchandise in Timbuktu. Read together, the two testimonies price the loss: a city-wide book stock in the tens of thousands at minimum, of which the physical pre-conquest stratum has all but vanished. The conquest of 1591 should therefore behave in the catalogue record like an event horizon, not a gradient: scholars of the Niger Bend who died before it survive as names in Ahmad Baba's own biographical dictionary, the Nayl al-ibtihaj, while their books fell out of the copying stream in the sack and the deportation of the scholar class; authors active after it — Ahmad Baba first of all, teaching in Marrakesh with his works flowing back down the caravan routes — re-entered the stream and were recopied for three centuries. Prediction: in the union records of the West African Arabic Manuscript Database (AMMS), Niger-Bend authors who died after 1591 will show at least five times the median extant-copy count of those who died before 1591, and Ahmad Baba will rank as the most-copied Timbuktu-born author of any period (primary clause: the fivefold median copy-count ratio across the 1591 line; the verdict follows it). Kill: the West African Arabic Manuscript Database (AMMS) union catalogue — including the IHERI-AB (Ahmed Baba Institute) and Northwestern Herskovits collection records — cross-keyed to the author entries of Arabic Literature of Africa IV: The Writings of Western Sudanic Africa (ed. Hunwick, Brill 2003); compute extant copies per author and split authors by death date at 1591.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in the union records of the West African Arabic Manuscript Database (AMMS), Niger-Bend authors who died after 1591 will show at least five times the median extant-copy count of those who died before 1591, and Ahmad Baba will rank as the most-copied Timbuktu-born author of any period (primary clause: the fivefold median copy-count ratio across the 1591 line; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the West African Arabic Manuscript Database (AMMS) union catalogue — including the IHERI-AB (Ahmed Baba Institute) and Northwestern Herskovits collection records — cross-keyed to the author entries of Arabic Literature of Africa IV: The Writings of Western Sudanic Africa (ed. Hunwick, Brill 2003); compute extant copies per author and split authors by death date at 1591.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The 1591 rupture and the scarcity of pre-conquest volumes are standard in Timbuktu scholarship, and Hall & Stewart have counted most-copied texts and authors across the AMMS libraries; but no one has computed extant-copy medians split by author death-date at 1591, nor tested Ahmad Baba's copy-count rank among Timbuktu-born authors.

• B. Hall & C.C. Stewart, 'The historic "Core Curriculum" and the book market in Islamic West Africa', in G. Kratli & G. Lydon (eds), The Trans-Saharan Book Trade (Brill, 2011)
• J.O. Hunwick (ed.), Arabic Literature of Africa IV: The Writings of Western Sudanic Africa (Brill, 2003)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.