Remember when your parents were going to knock you from here to Timbuktu... or when the neighbor's husband mysteriously disappeared to Timbuktu? The conflict in Mali brought back the once commonly used name of that distant place and I wondered about its origin.

The French orientalist René Basset forwarded a plausible explanation: in the Berber languages "buqt" means ""far away", so "Tin-Buqt" means a place almost at the other end of the world, resp. the Sahara. Tin-Buqt is but a syllable away from Timbuktu.

Timbuktu's geographical setting made it a natural meeting point for nearby African populations and nomadic Berber and Arab peoples from the north. It has a long history as a trading outpost that linked west Africa with Berber, Arab, and Jewish traders throughout north Africa, and thereby indirectly with traders from Europe. This lent the city a fabled status, and in the West it was long used as a metaphor for exotic, distant lands: "from here to Timbuktu."

One very sad thing to add. Fleeing Islamic militants burnt manuscripts within libraries that were hundreds of years old, some dating back to the 1300. Timbuktu was once a revered Islamic seat of learning, so they destroyed their own history; their own own heritage. This represents a terrible loss not just to Islam, but to the world.