Brill and Leiden University Libraries digitise Middle Eastern manuscripts

Brill and Leiden University Libraries have published 110,000 pages of Arabic manuscripts under the title Pioneer Orientalists: The Manuscript Collections of Scaliger, Raphelengius and Golius from Leiden University Libraries.

Leiden University Libraries' core collection includes extremely rare, sometimes unique, manuscripts. The Golius collection in particular is well-known for its texts on mathematics and other Islamic sciences.

Brill and Leiden University Libraries have joined forces to scan and publish these manuscripts. As well as making them available to a larger community of scholars, the move also helps with preservation of the manuscripts, 30 of which were restored as part of the project. The collection consists of 267 manuscripts in 303 volumes, counting 109,517 pages. Most texts are in Arabic, with secondary texts in Ottoman Turkish and Persian.