Conservationists dismiss Timbuktu texts fears Experts involved in cataloguing and preserving the texts in the cities' shrines and libraries revealed the Malian city's most valuable manuscripts had been spirited out the city or hidden in secret stores before it fell to rebel groups last April. Brittle, written in ornate calligraphy, and ranging from scholarly treatises to old commercial invoices, the Timbuktu texts represent a wide rage of documentation from law, sciences and medicine to history and politics. Some experts compare them in importance to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Mohamed Mathee of the University of Johannesburg said: "It seems most of the manuscripts are OK. These manuscripts are with families and are safe. The puritanical Islamic ideologues who had captured the city imposed a harsh regime that view its religious, musical and social traditions as heretical. The fighters destroyed many of the city's centuries-old shrines, the iconic legacy of Timbuktu's golden age of intellectual and spiritual achievement.