The year 2024 marks the opening of the new Middle Eastern Library of Leiden University, a purpose-built facility to serve the needs of all those who engage in the study of the Middle East and North Africa from the dawn of history to the present day. To celebrate the occasion, more than 40 authors from Leiden and beyond have contributed to this special volume on the library’s rich and multifaceted Oriental holdings.
Topics range from the Ancient Near East to the material and conservational aspects of Oriental manuscripts, and the classical heritage of the Islamicate Middle East in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and Persian. Other subjects include Berber languages, Jewish writerly culture in Hebrew and Aramaic, Eastern Christianity, the fascinating but often controversial world of Western Orientalism and the role of modernity in the twentieth-century Middle East. The essays and highlights are enhanced with more than 300 full-colour illustrations.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The Ancient Near East
- NINO’s Böhl Collection of Cuneiform Tablets
- The Lion Gate at Hattusa on a Glass Slide
- Persepolis in the Eyes of Charles Chipiez
- Egyptologists and Their Books: The Egyptology Library of NINO
- The Description de l’Égypte: from Napoleon to Egyptology
- 2 Materiality Matters
- Manuscript Materials and Binding Practices: The Codex in the Middle East
- Dala’il al-Khayrat or “The Waymarks of Benefits”: a Devotional Work on the Prophet Muhammad
- The Stars in Leiden: Listening to the Stories of Islamic Manuscripts
- Material and Textual Ties in a Yemeni Manuscript
- Decorated Papers in Islamicate Manuscripts
- Layers of Information in a Mamluk Manuscript
- 3 The Great Arabic Heritage
- The Wonders of the World
- An Ancient Fragment of the Qur’an
- Jacobus Golius and his Arabic Manuscripts on the Exact Sciences
- Manuscripts as Illustrations of a Living Medical Tradition
- The Amin al-Madani Collection of Arabic Manuscripts
- The Earliest Sound Recordings from Arabia
- 4 The Splendour of the Ottomans
- Levinus Warner’s Manuscript Collection
- A Natural History of the Americas and the Ottoman Economy
- The Kitab-ı Cihan-Nüma printed by İbrahim Müteferrika
- A Woman on a Banknote: Fatma Aliye and Women Authors in the Late Ottoman Empire
- A Cut Above the Rest
- Wouter Swets: Musician, Composer, and Ethnomusicologist (1930–2016)
- 5 Persian Refinement
- Shahnamah: The Longevity of the Persian Book of Kings
- Hakim Sanaʾi’s Garden of Truth and Law of the Right Path
- The Materiality of a Hafiz Manuscript
- Images from the Hotz Photographic Collection: Dutch Commercial Ventures in Qajar Persia
- A Wedding Ceremony in Late Qajar Iran
- The Rubaʿiyat of Umar Khayyam
- 6 The Other Orient: Religions and Languages
- Hebrew Manuscript Treasures at Leiden: A Personal Note
- A Result of Jewish-Christian Cooperation in Twelfth-Century England: The Hebrew Psalter Or. 4725
- A Dutch-Ashkenazi Esther Scroll for Purim
- Leiden and the Christian Middle East: the Bible in Arabic, Armenian, and Syriac
- A Psalter and its Mahdar
- A Coptic-Arabic Lectionary and Homilies
- Tashelhiyt Berber Manuscripts in Arabic Characters
- 7 The World of Orientalism
- The Exchangeable Sultan: Jan Luyken and Mehmed IV
- Scaliger and his Collection of Arabic Books
- Dutch Illustrators of the Thousand and One Nights
- The “Indolent and Vicious Disposition” of the Moroccans
- Maps of the Middle East
- The Zanzibar-Leiden Connection: Sayyida Salme bint Saʿid ibn Sultan – Emily Ruete (1844–1924)
- Snouck Hurgronje, the Collector
- Émile Prisse d’Avennes’s Search for Egyptian
Art and Architecture
- Frank Scholten: Modernity and the Biblical Lens
- 8 Modern Times
- “The Mecca of Culture, Knowledge and Literature”: Arabic Book Covers Between 1960 and 1980
- Turkish female writers contemplating their position in Turkish society
- A Pop-Up of the Great Mosque of Mecca
- The Mediterranean in Leiden’s Photo Collections: Ad van Denderen’s So Blue So Blue
- Mostapha Naji and the Making of the Moroccan Collections in Leiden
- About the Authors
- Colophon
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