If you have suggestions for this library guide, please e-mail Deborah Schlein, Near Eastern Studies librarian, directly.
This library guide will introduce you to the Near East Manuscript Collections and available resources here at Princeton University. The guide also provides useful information and links for other manuscript collections and resources that exist in North America, Europe, South and East Asia, the Near and Middle East, and Africa.
Scholars are encouraged to submit links, titles, and information that would be useful to include in this guide to the Near East Collections Curator.
Scholars with specific questions and/or requests regarding Princeton's manuscript collections may contact the Manuscripts Division of Special Collections at Princeton University.
Some text within the box descriptions of this guide has been taken from websites and online guides; other descriptions were written by K. E. Leaman or Princeton University Library staff.
Selections from Album of miniatures and specimens of calligraphy of Indian origin.
The Princeton University Library's Near East Manuscript Collections include more than 20,000 titles in 11,000 codexes; predominantly in Arabic, but there are also many in Persian and Ottoman Turkish. The Collections owe an enormous debt to Robert Garrett (class of 1897), who in 1942 gave to Princeton his superb collection of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscripts, and then added the gift of the Yahuda Collection in 1943, which contains over 5,000 medieval Arabic items. The Garrett Collection is one of the most important scholarly resources of the Library's Near East Collections, and accounts for approximately two-thirds of what is considered the greatest Collection of its kind in North America.
In addition to manuscripts, the Library holds modern and personal papers relating to the Near East Collections and is also home to the S.D. Goitein Laboratory for Geniza Research and the Computer Geniza Project.
The Collections are housed in the Manuscripts Division of Special Collections at Firestone Library and at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library.
A wealth of information—such as image galleries, descriptive lists, and catalogs—concerning manuscript libraries and collections has been made more accessible thanks to the digital initiatives of individuals and institutions from around the world.
This guide has organized links to online manuscript libraries, collections, and catalogs alphabetically and by geographic area.
Copyright for all images in this Library Guide lies with the named individual or institution. Permission to use these images must be requested from the relevant source.
