Scientific Historians and Timbuktu

Image by Aluka Digital Library via Flickr

Today, this remote and impoverished city is rich in some 14,000 old books that've literally come out of its woodwork. Scientific historians who converge upon Timbuktu have only dented the task of translating the old science texts from Arabic and other less know languages. They find that Timbuktu's medieval and renaissance scholars followed a path separated from Europe.
Their astronomers didn't follow the European leap to a sun-centered solar system, but they sprang far ahead in the mathematics of calendar writing -- far ahead in trigonometry. The writings detail astronomic events six hundred years ago. Scholars, racing to translate this huge trove of literature, now wonder what these ancients knew of medicine, botany, chemistry and climatology. How did the knowledge of other regions flow through this glittering outpost? How much new science did it create?