Towards a new study on the Tārīkh al-fattāsh

This article advances a new theory about the composition of the chronicle generally referred to as Tārīkh al-fattāsh. The Tārīkh al-fattāsh, allegedly written in the sixteenth-seventeenth century, is one of the most famous chronicles on which scholars have relied for information about West Africa’s pre-colonial history. However, there are still many puzzling issues and unsolved problems associated with this work, as edited by Octave V. Houdas and Maurice Delafosse in the early twentieth century. This analysis uses unexplored manuscripts that were either unknown or unavailable to previous scholars, and advances a new theory on the genesis and authorship of the chronicle: that the edited text in fact conflates two texts, a seventeenth-century chronicle and a nineteenth century one.