Mediterranean History

FIHRIST is a free on-line catalogue for manuscript descriptions. Provides information on where different manuscripts are with links to digital copies when available.

A multi-institutional effort to construct the first machine-actionable scholarly corpus of premodern Islamicate texts.

More than 3,500 fully digitized manuscripts from across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia dating from the 12th to the 20th centuries including government, popular, religious, and scholarly texts.

WAAMD is a bi-lingual database that was developed at the University of Illinois in the late 1980s to describe a collection of Arabic manuscripts in southern Mauritania (Boutilimit). It subsequently has been used to compile a union catalogue of other West African collections, including manuscript libraries in West Africa, Europe and the United States.

The Rare Books and Special Collections Digital Library at the American University in Cairo supports research and teaching in the arts, culture, and society of Egypt and the Middle East by providing online access to unique cultural heritage resources.

Open-access online collections of premodern and modern Arabic texts. Interface and texts in Arabic. With over 6,000 volumes, most work deal with Islamic religious sciences, but include other topics as well, such as travelogues, chronicles and biographical dictionaries.

Open-access online collections of premodern and modern Arabic texts. Interface and texts in Arabic.

Interface and texts in Arabic. Digital facsimiles of texts focused on Islamic religious sciences, but also includes many volumes on other topics, including Islamic economics; history; the Muslim family; contemporary life; and Arabic language and literature.

Nearly 500 volumes of Arabic manuscripts covering not only medicine and pharmacology, but cosmology, alchemy, cookery and more are available online.

The Arabic Papyrus, Parchment & Paper Collection is the largest of its kind in the United States, containing 770 Arabic papyrus documents, 1300 Arabic paper documents, and several pieces on parchment. A large number of pieces date to the period between 700 and 850 CE.

The Danish National Library's digitized collection of materials--from Qur'anic and other religious texts to medicine and natural sciences--in Arabic starting in the 10th century (CE).

A selection of facsimiles of Cambridge University Library's collection of Islamic manuscripts. This collection includes the University's earliest Qurʼānic manuscripts copied during the first four Centuries of Islam.

Welcome to the Islamic Painted Page - a huge free database of Persian, Ottoman, Arab and Mughal paintings, illuminations, decorated Qur'an pages, and book bindings from over 270 collections worldwide.

Manuscripts of the Muslim World is a digitization project that feature more than 500 manuscripts and 827 paintings from the Islamicate world broadly construed. Together these holdings represent in great breadth the flourishing intellectual and cultural heritage of Muslim lands from 1000 to 1900. The bulk of the collection consists of manuscripts in Arabic and Persian, along with examples of Coptic, Samaritan, Syriac, Turkish, and Berber.

Interface in English; Material in Arabic and other languages.
Includes 1) The Manuscript Collections of Scaliger, Raphelengius and Golius from Leiden University Libraries; 2) The Ottoman Legacy of Levinus Warner; 3) Arabic Manuscripts from the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest; 4) The Shangoda Collections from Dagestan.
BC institutional login required.

The manuscripts are chiefly in Arabic but also include Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and other languages of the extended Islamic world written in Arabic script. They date from the early centuries of Islam through the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Most of the manuscripts originated in Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and other main centers of Islamic civilization. Subject coverage is broad and comprehensive, including theology based both on Qur’ān and tradition (hadīth); Islamic law (fiqh); history and biography (especially of the Prophet and other religious leaders); book arts and illustration; language and literature; science; magic, and the occult; and other aspects of the intellectual and spiritual life of the Islamic world and its diverse peoples.

The private manuscript libraries of Yemen, estimated at 50,000 codices, constitutes the largest and most important set of unexamined Arabic manuscripts in the world today.

A catalogue of the Cairo Genizah manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, including digitised images of this large collection of fragments from the Bible, early rabbinic literature.

Clark’s group also chose 1,284 illuminations from 113 manuscripts to be photographed in 4 x 5 inch black and white format.

Facsimiles of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls held at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

A digitised copy of Maimonides authorized copy of his major halakhic work, the Misneh Torah. [Bodleian]

Startling evidence of the once vibrant Jewish life in Iraq came to light in May 2003 — over 2,700 books and tens of thousands of documents were discovered in the flooded basement of the Iraqi intelligence headquarters by a US Army team. The remarkable survival of this written record of Iraqi Jewish life provides an unexpected opportunity to better understand this 2,500-year-old Jewish community.

More than 170 manuscripts from the 16th century to the 20th. Some illustrated/illuminated.