IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 218

Timbuktu lies on the southern edge of the Sahara, close to the great bend of the Niger River, in what is now Mali. For nearly a thousand years it has been a meeting point between the desert and the lands to the south, and its wealth came from that position: gold travelled north from the mines of West Africa, salt came south from the Sahara, and with the goods came books. By the sixteenth century the city had become one of the most important centres of learning in the Islamic world, and the manuscripts that survive in its family libraries are the principal written record of intellectual life in the western Sudan.

According to tradition the city was founded around the year 1100 by nomadic Tuareg, who used it as a seasonal camp. It grew rapidly after it was absorbed into the Mali Empire, and its golden age began in the fourteenth century. The emperor Mansa Musa, whose pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 was remembered for the gold he gave away in Cairo, brought scholars and architects back with him, and the great mosque of Djinguereber was built soon afterwards. A second mosque, Sankore, became the focus of a community of teachers and students. The phrase 'University of Sankore' is sometimes used, although the city had nothing resembling a modern university: teaching took place in mosques and in the courtyards of scholars' houses.

The city's most prosperous years came under the Songhai Empire, especially during the reign of Askia Muhammad, who seized power in 1493 and made Timbuktu a centre of government as well as trade. Scholars copied texts, wrote commentaries on them and corresponded with learned men as far away as North Africa and Egypt. Books were valuable enough to be traded and inherited. The traveller Leo Africanus, who visited the city in the early sixteenth century, described a brisk trade in manuscripts, which he judged to be more profitable than any other merchandise. Some volumes were brought across the Sahara from the Mediterranean, but many were written and copied locally.

The manuscripts themselves are diverse. Most are written in Arabic, but a significant minority are in African languages such as Soninke, Fulfulde and Tamasheq, written in Arabic script in a tradition known as Ajami. Their subjects range from the Qur'an and Islamic law to grammar, astronomy, medicine, mathematics, history and poetry, and there are letters, contracts and notes on the treatment of illness that have attracted the interest of medical historians. Some are fine calligraphy on polished paper; others are rough working copies. What makes the collections unusual is where they are kept: not in a single library but in hundreds of private family collections, handed down through generations and regarded as a form of inheritance.

Decline came abruptly. In 1591 an army from Morocco defeated the Songhai at Tondibi, and the invaders looted the city. The scholar Ahmad Baba was among those taken prisoner and spent years in exile in Marrakesh; he returned home towards the end of his life and died in 1627. Trade routes gradually shifted towards the Atlantic coast, and the caravans that had made Timbuktu rich grew fewer. When the Scottish explorer Alexander Gordon Laing reached the city in 1826 he was attacked as he left it, and the French traveller René Caillié, who arrived two years later, found a poor settlement of mud-brick houses. For Europeans, the scholarly city seemed to have vanished with its trade.

Interest revived in the twentieth century. Timbuktu became part of French Sudan, and some manuscripts were carried off to European collections, while others were sold to visiting scholars. From the 1960s UNESCO and foreign research institutes began to catalogue what remained, and in 1973 a national centre for manuscript research was founded in the city, later named after Ahmad Baba. Microfilming projects followed, and in 1988 the old town was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list. Digitisation, begun in the 1990s with European partners, made copies of thousands of volumes available to researchers far from Mali.

The gravest threat came in 2012, when armed groups took control of northern Mali. They destroyed several of the city's shrines and regarded the manuscripts, with their learned commentary and their emphasis on debate, as a danger to their own teaching. Staff at the Ahmad Baba centre managed to remove some of its holdings before the fighters arrived, and families across the city hid their collections in their homes.

A rescue operation was organised by Abdel Kader Haidara, a librarian and collector, who with a network of relatives and colleagues smuggled manuscripts out of Timbuktu in rice sacks, on motorbikes and by boat along the river. Estimates of the total moved vary, but a figure of several hundred thousand manuscripts and fragments is often quoted. Not everything was saved: a few thousand volumes were destroyed.

Removing the manuscripts proved easier than keeping them safe. In Bamako they were stored in conditions that alarmed conservators, who worried about humidity and insects. International foundations and Malian institutions paid for boxes, shelving, training and a programme of cataloguing and photography, and a digital library was established so that copies could be studied even if the originals remained in store. There have since been calls, and some attempts, to return collections to Timbuktu, but suitable storage there is limited, and some families prefer to keep their manuscripts where they can supervise them.

For several centuries the greater part of the land farmed in northern Europe was cultivated under a system that seems, to modern eyes, wasteful. Fields were divided into two or three enormous open areas, each subdivided into narrow strips worked by different households, and part of the land was left unsown every year so that it could recover. This arrangement is usually called the open-field system, and its three-field variant, which became common in the centuries after about 800, gave medieval farmers a way of feeding a growing population without artificial fertiliser or machinery.

In the three-field system, the arable land of a village was divided into three roughly equal fields. One was sown in autumn with winter crops, normally wheat or rye, which were harvested the following summer. A second was sown in spring with crops such as oats, barley, peas and beans, which ripened later in the same year.

The third was left fallow for a season, grazed by livestock and ploughed several times to control weeds. In the following year the fields changed roles, so that each was cropped twice and rested once in a three-year cycle. Peas and beans were grown for food and because they could be stored, and their stalks provided fodder.

The obvious advantage of this rotation was arithmetic. Under the older two-field arrangement half the arable land lay fallow at any time, so only half produced a crop. With three fields, two-thirds could be sown each year. For a community whose numbers were rising, and whose rulers demanded grain and cash, that increase in the area under crops mattered more than any improvement in the yield of an individual strip. The system also spread work more evenly through the year, since autumn sowing, spring sowing and two separate harvests followed one another.

Three-field farming made heavy demands on equipment and organisation. Breaking the stiff clay soils of the European plain required a mouldboard plough, which turned the turf over rather than merely scratching it, and such a plough needed a team of several oxen or horses. The horse collar, which allowed an animal to pull without choking, and the iron horseshoe, which protected hooves on heavy ground, both spread through Europe in the medieval centuries and gradually made horses a practical alternative to oxen. Because strips were scattered and animals had to be kept off growing crops, sowing, harvesting and grazing were controlled by the village community rather than by individual farmers.

The system did not appear everywhere at once. Its elements can be traced to the Frankish lands in the eighth and ninth centuries, and it spread across the fertile plains of northern France, the Low Countries, Germany and England in the following centuries. It was never universal. In Mediterranean regions, where rainfall was unreliable and soils thinner, two-field rotations and tree crops remained common; in upland Britain and parts of Scandinavia, farmers divided land into an infield that was cropped continuously and an outfield that was used intermittently; and in some areas land was converted between arable and pasture as prices and population changed.

Historians have long argued about how much the three-field system contributed to the growth of population and towns in the central Middle Ages. Some have treated it as part of an agricultural revolution, pointing out that it fed more people from the same land and encouraged the cultivation of legumes. Others are more cautious. They note that the nitrogen fixed by peas and beans is modest, that the fallow was not wasted land because it fed the village's animals, and that the system spread where soils and climate suited it. The evidence, they suggest, supports a gradual improvement in output rather than a dramatic one.

Reconstructing the system depends on a mixture of sources. Manorial documents are the richest: surveys and custumals list tenants' holdings and the services they owed, and estate accounts record what was sown, harvested and sold. Later maps and surveys show the strips and furlongs before enclosure, while aerial photographs and surviving earthworks reveal the corrugations of ridge and furrow on land that has not been ploughed since. Archaeology adds the tools themselves, from iron plough shares to quernstones, and environmental evidence from waterlogged deposits can identify the crops and weeds actually present.

Each of these sources has its limits. Written records survive mostly from large estates, monasteries and wealthy tenants, and the peasant holdings that made up most of the farmland are far less well documented. Terms are treacherous: an acre meant a different area in different places, and the same word might describe a single strip or an entire field. The earliest detailed maps date from long after the system was established, and pollen analysis can show what was grown in a region without revealing who decided it. Dating tools and earthworks closely is often impossible.

Three-field farming declined from the fourteenth century. The Black Death reduced the population sharply, labour became scarce and expensive, and many landowners found it more profitable to turn arable land over to sheep. Enclosure, the process by which open fields and strips were consolidated into hedged holdings, gathered pace over the following centuries, and by the nineteenth century the system had largely disappeared from England. Its principles survive, however: alternating crops with rest, and returning organic matter to the soil, remain part of modern practice.

Every year several million people send a sample of saliva to a company and receive, some weeks later, a set of percentages: 42 per cent of your ancestry from one region, 18 per cent from another, with a map and a list of possible relatives. The results are presented as a discovery about the self, and many customers describe them in exactly those terms. Should they? The question matters, because the answer shapes how we understand family history, group belonging and the stories that communities tell about their past.

Two kinds of test are usually involved. The first examines the Y chromosome, which passes from father to son, or mitochondrial DNA, which passes from mother to child, and traces a single line of descent far back into prehistory. The second compares a person's autosomal DNA — the bulk of the genome, inherited from both parents — with reference collections of samples from living populations around the world, and reports how similar the customer's DNA is to each collection. The percentages, in other words, describe a statistical resemblance to groups defined by the companies themselves; they are estimates, and the companies say as much, though the caveats are usually printed more quietly than the headline figures.

Population geneticists make a point that sits awkwardly with the way these results are commonly read. The great majority of human genetic variation is found within any population rather than between populations, and the boundaries drawn between groups are matters of sampling and labelling as much as biology.

Reference collections are also uneven: European and East Asian populations are represented in far greater detail than many others, so a customer whose ancestors came from a poorly sampled region may receive a vaguer or simply a different answer. As collections grow, published estimates change, and a result revised from one year to the next is not evidence that the previous result was a lie, merely that the comparison has improved.

None of this makes the tests worthless. For people whose families were separated by migration, adoption or the transatlantic slave trade, the paper trail may stop abruptly, and a match with a distant cousin can be the first thread that leads back to a name and a place. Genealogists have used genetic matches to reunite families and to identify remains that had been buried without names. The tests can also show that a family legend about a foreign ancestor is, or is not, plausible, and they have introduced many people to the deeper history of human movement out of Africa and across the continents. Curiosity of that kind is worth satisfying.

But there is a large step from learning that some of one's ancestors came from a particular region to concluding that one is, in any meaningful sense, of that culture. A percentage of similarity to a reference group says nothing about language, religion, humour, cooking or the memories that make a family what it is. A person brought up in one country, speaking its language and knowing its songs, does not become a member of another people because a laboratory reports a fraction. Identity is not encoded in a proportion, and the attempt to make it so has an unpleasant history.

That history is worth remembering. Claims about the purity of descent have been used within living memory to exclude, to persecute and to kill, and the language of percentages can slide easily into the language of blood. Some political movements have seized on genetic studies to argue that nations are natural units with fixed boundaries. Geneticists themselves generally resist this, insisting that migration and mixing are the normal condition of humanity and that their methods cannot identify who belongs to a nation. The science, in other words, is usually more modest than its popular uses.

Nor are the alternatives to a DNA test automatically reliable. Family stories are shaped by forgetting as well as remembering, and paper records reflect the interests of those who kept them: the tax collector, the landlord, the parish. Archival researchers are the first to point out that a record proves a legal relationship, not a biological one, and that a documented pedigree going back to a distant century is often a work of optimistic reconstruction. The honourable course is to treat both documents and DNA as evidence of different kinds, each with its own kinds of error.

Privacy is the other difficulty, and here the problem is structural. A result about one person is also a result about their relatives, who may never have consented to being studied. Databases built for genealogy have been used to identify suspects in criminal cases, sometimes through a distant relative who had uploaded a sample for an entirely different purpose. Regulators in several countries have begun to ask how long samples are kept, who may sell them and whether customers understand what they have agreed to. The answers vary widely between companies and jurisdictions.

My own view is that ancestry tests are a legitimate and sometimes valuable instrument, provided they are understood as a beginning rather than a verdict. They can open a door onto history; they cannot tell anyone who to be. Companies should be required to state the uncertainty of their estimates as prominently as the percentages themselves, and to explain in plain language what will happen to the samples. But the decision about what a result means belongs to the person who took the test, and to the communities whose memories that person shares.