Vincent E

Ms. 3406, Süleyman Efendi’s endowment deed on folio 1r. Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, ms. 3406 © 2023 by AMS Historica is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Rawda El-Hajji visiting the Church of Our Lady of Buda Castle, Budapest. © Ashraf Sarip

Once a hub of Ottoman culture, Süleyman Efendi’s library was scattered by conquest. In our PhD Research Series, Rawda El-Hajji traces these manuscripts, showing how they help reconstruct lost intellectual communities and reveal the fate of cultural heritage in times of conflict:
uhh.de/csmc-el-hajji

50. Read PhD and MA theses when you are doing research. There is so much great scholarship by people who never got the opportunity to publish their research as a book.

74. Historians should share sources more. Like, actually give colleagues sources that you found so they can use them.

Man könnte sagen - alles kalter Kaffee, aber Jens Spahn hat sich als Fraktionsvorsitzender in die Pole Position für die nächste Kanzlerkandidatur gebracht. Auch bei diesem Vorgang stellt sich, wie auch bei der Maskenaffäre die Frage -
für wen arbeitet Jens Spahn? Für sich oder für die Bürger*innen?

Andreas Eckert darf wieder unterrichten. 🤦‍♀️

Much of what we know about everyday reading practices in #Arabic writing cultures comes from audition certificates. We make these valuable #manuscripts accessible to research on an online platform. A new version now offers #OpenAccess to over 5000 sources:
uhh.de/csmc-acp

AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums "This is a moment where that community feels collectively under threat and isn't sure what the process is for solving the problem.”

AI bot scrapers are hitting every site on the web in search of training data. This report is the first good attempt to evaluate the impact of these AI scrapers, especially on smaller institutions that are trying to make their collections open to the public www.404media.co/ai-scraping-...

I read in the arabic script ʿAbdallāh Aḥmad al-[Ruzaynī?], most probably a miswriting here and ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Ṣabbāb though al-Ṣabbān ("the soap-maker“) would make sense in the context of merchants

And the stories we find in de la Croix's Mille et un jours travelled via Ottoman Turkish (ferec ba‘d eş-şidde) to French. I currently trace 1 of the stories for a paper in Arabic Literature, it is fascinating to see the same story in medieval Arabic sources, Persian, Ottoman, Cagatay + Malay

Is there any update when the digitised material will be published?

Nicht überraschend, wenn man sich anschaut wer das kuratiert, oder?

The 2nd phase of the #Qalamos project also focuses on the retro-conversion of catalogues describing Ottoman-Turkish manuscripts. These consist of five vols. that were created during the project #KOHD. They comprise exclusively manuscripts from the holdings of @stabiberlin.bsky.social.
.

This is great - thank you!

Weekend inspiration from the Robert Anhegger (1911-2001) archive, Leiden University Library, Cod. Or. 26.621 (13)

The 2025 Winter School on
Reading and Analysing Ottoman Manuscript Sources took place this week at IMS/FORTH, in Rethymno,
with great success. A wonderful experience for all!

Unfortunately, fried food is not the only problem here. Dutch universities are rushing to enforce austerity measures in preemptive obedience, which are then going to be topped by the right-wing government in one/two years time with a drastic defunding of science in general.

One of the many perks of my job is having the time to read and review important books. Recently, I dived into Sebastian Willert's 2024 publication on the translocation of archaeological artefacts from the Ottoman Empire to Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century.

For a contextualization of the trajectory of al-Jazzār’s manuscripts in the 19th and 20th century more general, see Konrad Hirschler’s contribution in the edited volume. For a list of other identified al-Jazzār manuscripts in collections around the world, see www.fdr.uni-hamburg.de/record/14296.

I reconstructed the libraries of the later owners Ḥusayn Ṭaha al-Dajānī (Ms. AP AR. 177) and ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Dajānī (Ms. AP Ar. 258) in my forthcoming article (autumn 2025) on the al-Dajānī family’s private collections in late Ottoman Jaffa and Jerusalem.

Without knowing the dimensions of the stamp, it would have been impossible to identify the following two stamps (Ms. AP Ar. 177 and Ms. AP Ar. 258). In addition, Said Aljoumani was able to find both book titles in the al-Jazzār library inventory.

It was a little more difficult to identify the same stamp here (Ms. AP Ar. 410):

Much less is known about the AP manuscripts that were digitized in 2022. While identifying ownership statements in the manuscripts, I found al-Jazzār’s stamp in 5 mss. Two of the stamps are quite clearly visible (Ms. AP Ar. 261 and Ms. AP Ar. 290):

The history of the AP collection became known mainly through Gish Amit’s articles on the appropriation in 1948, mainly focussing on the printed books: “Ownerless Objects” (2008): www.palestine-studies.org/sites/defaul... and “Salvage or Plunder?” (2011): doi.org/10.1525/jps.....

During the Nakba in 1948, the librarians of the Jewish National and University Library (today: NLI) appropriated the Palestinian manuscripts of the “AP” collection. Today, the NLI’s database includes about 700 AP manuscripts and more than 14,000 AP printed books.

The Library of Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār "The Library of Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār" published on 23 Dec 2024 by Brill.

The edited volume The Library of Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār has been published (open access; Brill: 2025: brill.com/display/titl...). I contributed to the project by identifying 5 manuscripts from al-Jazzār's library in the so-called AP (“abandoned property") collection of the National Library of Israel.

I'm excited to share my new (open access) article in Social Codicology, edited by Olly Akkerman.

The article connects Islamicate manuscript and talismanic scribal cultures with chemical-bacterial networks, Platonic cosmologies and technologies of climate resilience.

brill.com/display/book...

You may have heard about him on the radio recently. It's time to continue working through new biographical material on the collector Friedrich Grote, who cultivated contacts with Prussian cultural functionaries to help them extract cultural artefacts from the Middle East.
medisi.hypotheses.org/3860

Alright *cracks knuckles* let's do this!

Today I'm inaugurating an episodic Monday series titled History of Islamic Art in 100 Objects. But we have to ask the most important question first:

What is Islamic art? Also, why is this even a question? 🧵 #IslamicArt100Objects

www.aucegypt.edu/news/auc-lib...
Colleagues at AUC, IAS, NYU, Princeton, Umich, and cofc came together to make this happen. Proud of their work and of my husband Garrett Davidson who made it happen.