A chronicle of authors without books

Claim (verbatim)

Al-Sa'di's Ta'rikh al-Sudan, the mid-seventeenth-century chronicle of the Niger Bend, is among other things a necrology: obituary after obituary of Timbuktu's jurists, imams of Sankore and Jingere Ber, and qadis of the Aqit line, each with teachers, offices, and death dates. A tradition in which composition was the ordinary work of scholarship, remembered by name in the hundreds, should have left a literature; it left a chronicle of authors without books. If loss rather than idleness made the difference, the gap is quantifiable and should be lopsided: for scholars dying before the Moroccan conquest, attested names will vastly outnumber surviving works, and the rare exceptions should cluster exactly where a post-conquest transmitter carried them — the circle of Ahmad Baba's own teachers, such as Muhammad Baghayogho al-Wangari, memorialized in the Nayl al-ibtihaj. Prediction: fewer than one in ten of the pre-1591 Timbuktu scholars individually named in the Ta'rikh al-Sudan will be creditable with even a single extant work across the ALA IV author-lists and the AMMS union records, and at least half of those who are will belong to Ahmad Baba's documented teaching circle (primary clause: the under-ten-percent extant-work share; the verdict follows it). Kill: the name-roster of Hunwick's annotated translation, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire (Brill 1999), cross-matched author by author against Arabic Literature of Africa IV (Brill 2003) and the AMMS union catalogue; the computation is a prosopographical join and two counts.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: fewer than one in ten of the pre-1591 Timbuktu scholars individually named in the Ta'rikh al-Sudan will be creditable with even a single extant work across the ALA IV author-lists and the AMMS union records, and at least half of those who are will belong to Ahmad Baba's documented teaching circle (primary clause: the under-ten-percent extant-work share; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the name-roster of Hunwick's annotated translation, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire (Brill 1999), cross-matched author by author against Arabic Literature of Africa IV (Brill 2003) and the AMMS union catalogue; the computation is a prosopographical join and two counts.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The prosopography of Timbuktu's scholars and the loss of their books are well described (Saad's social history; Hunwick's annotated Ta'rikh al-Sudan), but the specific join — the share of pre-1591 named scholars creditable with an extant work across ALA IV and AMMS — has not been computed, nor the teaching-circle clustering of the exceptions.

• J.O. Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: Al-Sa'di's Ta'rikh al-Sudan down to 1613 (Brill, 1999)
• E.N. Saad, Social History of Timbuktu: The Role of Muslim Scholars and Notables 1400-1900 (Cambridge, 1983)

Predictions

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