Timbuktu's traditional founding is dated to around 1100 CE by oral tradition and early Arabic chronicles such as the Tarikh al-Sudan, but no archaeological or documentary evidence fixes an exact founding year, and estimates in the scholarly literature range across more than a century.
What would resolve this A stratigraphic excavation of the city's earliest occupation layers, or the discovery of an earlier independent written record naming the settlement, would narrow the range historians currently work with.
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