Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: Al-Sadi's Tarikh al-Sudan down to 1613 and other Contemporary Documents

John O. Hunwick's Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, Al-Sadi's Tarikh al-Sudan down to 1613 and other Contemporary Documents, published by Brill in 1999, is a scholarly translation and critical edition of the seventeenth century Arabic chronicle Tarikh al-Sudan together with other contemporary documents on Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, prepared by a leading specialist in West African Islamic manuscript sources. Its strength is that it makes a major primary Arabic chronicle, along with Hunwick's extensive scholarly annotation, accessible to a non-Arabic reading audience, and it remains the standard English source for this material. Its limit is that Al-Sadi wrote generations after some of the events his chronicle describes, drawing on earlier oral and written tradition himself, so a claim about the earliest Songhay period should be weighed against that documented gap between event and chronicle.