Chinguetti (Civ6)/Civilopedia

Chinguetti is a city on the edge of the desert. It has not always been this way. Prehistoric rock paintings show just how much the climate has shifted in human history, showing giraffes and other savannah creatures in a lush landscape. Now, the city is being swallowed by the Sahara.
But the Sahara is not entirely a wasteland – not for the Berbers, the nomadic people of North Africa. Rather, Chinguetti was a jumping-off point for routes across the great desert. As such, it was a place for Muslims to congregate before setting off on the pilgrimage to Mecca. And when pilgrims returned, they brought back wonders. Chinguetti was a repository for learning during the height of the Almoravid empire in the 11th and 12th centuries with a significance that lasted well into the 16th. Relatedly, and like its larger relative, Timbuktu, Chinguetti was home to a number of famous libraries, places where pilgrims could share all that they had found on their travels. This went well beyond religion to include mathematics, science, astronomy, and especially Islamic law. These centers of scholarship – ksour – were bastions of Islamic life and commerce and would have been oases of learning in the desert.
The city fell into relative disuse after sea voyages made the trans-Sahara routes obsolete: why take a risky camel train across the world’s largest desert when you could take a slightly less risky and a lot faster sea voyage? Today, Chinguetti is a UNESCO World Heritage site in the nation of Mauritania, known especially for the 13th-century Friday Mosque.