Later than the Tarikh al-Sudan and far less reliable: a seventeenth-century Timbuktu chronicle rewritten in the nineteenth century to serve the Masina caliphate, with insertions. Its opening pages carry the tradition of the Kayamagha (Ghana), of Mali's early kings and the Sosso, and of Jenne's beginnings, which is all it offers for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; use it only beside al-Sadi and Ibn Khaldun, and treat anything flattering to Masina with suspicion.
About this source
- Title
- Tarikh al-fattash fi akhbar al-buldan wa-l-juyush wa-akabir al-nas
- Author
- Ibn al-Mukhtar (attributed to Mahmud Kati); rewritten by Nuh ibn al-Tahir
- Author's dates
- Ibn al-Mukhtar wrote soon after 1664; Nuh ibn al-Tahir rewrote the text in the first half of the nineteenth century
- Written
- about 1665, rewritten about 1830 to 1845
- Language
- Arabic
- Covers
- the Songhay empire from Sunni Ali (1464) to 1599, with introductory matter on Ghana, Mali and the Za kings
- Kind
- Chronicle
Nobili and Mathee (2015) showed the received text to be a nineteenth-century reworking of Ibn al-Mukhtar's chronicle. The Internet Archive item (184 pages) appears to be the Arabic text volume; the Gallica link was taken from the Wikipedia article and not opened in this search.
Where to read it
Editions
Translations
- O. Houdas and M. Delafosse (trs), Tarikh el-fettach, traduction française (Paris, 1913), at Gallica
- C. Wise and H. Abu Taleb (trs), The Timbuktu Chronicles, 1493 to 1599: al-Hajj Mahmud Kati's Tarikh al-fattash (Trenton, 2011), English (not freely online)