The library's traditional catalog. Records from Orbis are also contained within Quicksearch Books+.

Find books AND other 'whole' items, like e-books, DVDs, datasets, music scores, journals, magazines, and more.

Yale’s Beinecke Library preserves a small but diverse collection of eighteen items in Syriac, some transferred from the American Oriental Society Library in 1977. This article is a checklist based on informaiton gathered in 1991.

Detailed descriptions of four fully-digitized Syriac manuscripts in the Beinecke collections, plus links to an additional seven fully digitized items.

This article presents an introduction to the history of collecting Turkish manuscripts at Yale (totalling some 576 items) and a checklist of 196 titles in the collection.

Includes link to digitized handlist of 1253 numbered items (chiefly in Arabic) and an additional ~360 MSS in Armenian, Syriac, Turkish, etc.; also to digital versions of selected manuscripts, some only partially digitized.
NOTE: the information in this handlist is preliminary and has been superseded by full cataloging information, available in Orbis (search by author, title, or local call number).

A guide to Arabic-script paleography, compiled by Evyn Kropf.

Online course, by Prof. Jan Just Witkam. In this educational site specimens of Arabic, Malay and Persian manuscripts are given, together with a short bibliographical description, and the transcription of a modest portion of the text. With the help of this transcribed text the student of paleography can become accustomed to the particular hand. The student’s task is to transcribe the portion of the manuscript following the portion which has been transcribed already. The student is also requested to make a list of those reading signs used by the copyist, which are uncommon in printed texts.

Short courses offering training on such topics as codicology and the palaeography of early Qur'anic scripts, led by international experts.

Learn the basics of Arabic-, Latin-, and Syriac-script palaeography online

A website designed to help researchers decipher illegible words in Ottoman manuscripts. Based on the legible letters and the symbols for illegible letters entered into the boxes, LexiQamus's algorithm provides a list of possible words matching the search criteria, drawing from a collection of historical dictionaries. Possible hits link to the off-site Ottoman-English dictionary, Osmanlıca Sözlükler, with definitions.

Searchable, multilingual glossary for codicological terminology, including English, French, Spanish, and Arabic.

A practical tool for conservators, educators and other scholars working with Islamic manuscripts. The terms have been defined in English, eventually the definitions will be translated into other languages, such as Arabic, Persian, and Turkish.

This study provides definitions for important technical terms related to Ethiopian codicology. The entries, provided in script and transliteration, are arranged in Latin alphabetical order.

Embraces the full complexity of global manuscript studies in the digital age, conceived with four goals: First, to bridge the gaps between material and digital manuscript research; second, to break down the walls which often separate print and digital publication and serve as barriers between academics, professionals in the cultural heritage field, and citizen scholars; third, to serve as a forum for scholarship encompassing many pre-modern manuscripts cultures—not just those of Europe; and finally to showcase methods and techniques of analysis in manuscript studies that can be applied across different subject areas.

Lists 66 collections as of 5 December 2021, including those listed on this page below.

In 1989 the IHF set up a research project to investigate, as comprehensively as possible, the present state of Islamic manuscript collections extant worldwide. The outcome of this project was the publication of the World Survey of Islamic Manuscripts. The World Collections area of the Digital Library Portal presents the libraries of the World Survey in geographical context for the user to browse and explore interactively. For example, hovering over a library on the world map provides a quick preview of the library and its holdings.

Current holdings represent a range of Islamic cultures found in the troves of literary and archival materials from Timbuktu, the manuscripts of Harar in Ethiopia, the major family libraries of Jerusalem, the Zaydi tradition of Yemen, and Persian manuscripts from the Indo-Persian culture of the Mughal Empire in India as well as from the collection of the Library of Congress.

OA catalog of descriptions of Islamic manuscripts, representing the combined holdings of UK libraries in all subject areas, and from various geographical origins, dating from the 7th to the 19th century CE.

Qalamos is the portal for manuscripts and block prints from Asian and African script traditions. It contains approximately 150,000 datasets describing 110,000 physical objects written in 162 languages and 81 scripts (as of June 2022). Qalamos aims at providing metadata and digitised copies of all collections kept in German memory institutions. In addition, the portal will also include holdings of international cooperation partners.

A limited group of manuscripts from various collections in Russia in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish.

Provides an in-depth diachronic understanding and effective representation of the geography of Coptic literary and manuscript production and, in particular, of the corpus of literary writings, almost exclusively of religious content, produced in Egypt between the 3rd and 13th centuries in the Coptic language. PAThs takes an original and pluridisciplinary approach, combining philology, codicology, palaeography, archaeology and digital humanities, in order to explore the process of production, copying, usage, dissemination and storage of Coptic works in relation to the geographical contexts of origin of both the texts themselves and their related writing supports.

Partial list of library collections where Islamic manuscripts can be found, along with guides & research tips.

Manuscripts held in the library of the Agha Buzurg Mosque in Iran.

Union catalog of manuscripts in Turkey.

This list, organized alphabetically by city, is meant to facilitate serious research into the wealth of Syriac literature. The most important historic collections of Syriac manuscripts are located in London (the British Library), Rome (Vatican Libraries), Birmingham (the Mingana Collection), Manchester (the John Rylands Library), Berlin, Paris, and Oxford and Cambridge Universities. The Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai also has an extremely important collection. In North America the most important collection is at Harvard University, which acquired the bulk of the manuscripts owned by James Rendel Harris (1852–1941).

This site holds basic information and resources relating to the study of Islamic manuscripts. If you are new to thinking about the material aspects of Islamic manuscripts or are simply curious and want to know more, then this site is for you!

Resources for the study of manuscripts produced in the Islamic world and the manuscript cultures they represent. NOTE: any links on this page pointing to licensed resources may not be visible to the Yale community; try searching in Orbis if this happens.

This website is about paper, paper study, and paper history. It provides various resources in the following areas: historical research of paper in Europe, expertise for paper documents, measurement of structural characteristics of paper, support for the creation of new paper databases, introduction into digital paper studies.

Online lessons in codicology (the study of handwritten documents or codices) and palaeography from the Muslim world. The lessons, centered around fully digitized manuscripts from the Oriental collection of Leiden University Libraries, include samples in Arabic, Persian, and Coptic, from cultures ranging from the Maghrib to Mughal India. The lessons can be read in any order. All include suggestions for further reading and questions (with answers) or assignments.

Some of the terms used by papyrologists can be obscure, and since many of them are Greek or Latin terms, they can be difficult to remember. If you are in doubt about the meaning or usage of a particular term, hopefully you will find it here. This listing is by no means complete, but covers some of the more common terms which may be foreign to beginners.

Provides faculty, librarians, and students the tools to uncover the hidden stories of rare books at their home institutions and in digital repositories around the world.