A Relation of a Journey (1615), a very popular account of the places he visited in the Middle East.]]> George Sandys]]> Books]]> Sinai and Palestine (1856) stretches from the African desert and the River Nile to Damascus, Syria. Two high peaks are shown: Mount Hermon (جبل الشيخ or جبل حرمون‎ / Jabal al-Shaykh or Jabal Haramun; Hebrew: Har Hermon), which is at 2,814 m (9,232 ft) above sea level, the highest point in Syria; and Mount Sinai (طُور سِينَاء‎, Jabal Mūsā, lit. ‘Moses’ Mountain’ or ‘Mount Moses’; Hebrew: הַר סִינַי‬, Har Sinai), which is at 2,285 m (7,497 ft). The highest peak in the Middle East is Iran’s Mount Damavand, at 5,610 m (18,406 ft) above sea level. Stanley (1815–1881) travelled to Egypt, Arabia and Syria in 1852. This very popular work was the end-result. It also contains an appendix of Hebrew topographical words.]]> Arthur Penrhyn Stanley]]> Books]]> in situ, which were later reproduced lithographically by the Belgian-born Louis Haghe. Some 247 views and two maps make up the six volumes of this monumental work, which has been described as ‘one of the most important and elaborate ventures of nineteenth-century publishing.’ (Abbey, 1970). Roberts visited the pyramids at Giza, sailed up the Nile, sketched street scenes in Cairo, visited tombs and sites at Philae, Karnak, Luxor, and Dendra, and drew interior views of mosques. He was one of the few Europeans to do so.]]> David Roberts]]> Books]]> Qur’an (Koran) is the central religious text of Islam, which Muslims believe to be a revelation from God (Allah). It contains laws, commandments, and codes for social and moral behaviour. These were mainly revealed to the Prophet Muhammed in the towns of Mecca and Medina over a twenty-three-year period, beginning around 610 and ending with Muhammed’s death in 632 CE. The Arabic text is divided into 114 chapters (surah), which are then divided into verses. This Qur’an on display is a very unusual manuscript. Called by one scholar a ‘Baptized Qur’an’, it contains Christian crosses inside a number of the ornaments that resemble flowers. It once belonged to the Rev. William Arderne Shoults (1839-1887), whose collection is now housed here in Special Collections.]]> ___]]> Manuscripts]]> [Guillaume-Joseph Grelot]]]> Books ]]> Rev. R. Walsh]]> Books]]> Present State of Turkey, he wrote favourably of the Turks and their architecture, such as the Great Ottoman mosques. The work established his reputation as an authority in the area. In the 20th century, events such as World War I and the Greco-Turkish War ended what was the Ottoman Empire. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne formally established the Republic of Turkey, which moved its capital to Ankara.]]> Thomas Thornton]]> Books]]> Institutiones Linguae Turcicae, a Turkish-to-Latin dictionary and grammar, in 1680. It was ground-breaking in its comprehensiveness; the first on Turkish grammar. Modern-day language historians and linguists still find this publication a valuable reference work for the Turkish language of the early modern period. This copy is the second, enlarged edition, printed in Vienna in 1756.]]> Franciszek Meninski]]> Books]]> The Present State of the Ottoman Empire was the first comprehensive description of the area, written in English. Importantly, it was based on Rycaut’s long residence in Constantinople and Smyrna, which began in 1661. Rycaut (1629-1700) played close attention to politics and customs, and learnt Turkish. Indeed, this work is of linguistic importance because of the words he introduced in the text. This is the fifth edition; the first edition being scarce because most copies were destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666.]]> Paul Ricaut [Rycaut]]]> Books]]> Grammar of the Turkish Language (Kitāb al-ʿilm al-Nāfiʿ fī taḥṣīl Ṣarf wa Naḥw Turkī; 1832) was dedicated to Mahmud II, the Sultan of Turkey. Davids managed to enjoy the fruits of authorship; he died aged 21, three weeks after the book was published. It was a seminal work, one of the first to cover the topic in Europe since the early 18th century. The terms for ‘Arts, Trades, and Professions’ make interesting reading.]]> Arthur Lumley Davids]]> Books]]> dībācheh) to the Gulistān (The Rose Garden), an important prose piece by Saʿdī Shīrāzī (d. c. 1292), a major Persian poet of the medieval period. Although there is some doubt about author attribution, the stamped seal of Sayyid Muḥammad (Mehmet) bin Ḥāfiẓ Osmān is present, dating the manuscript copy to 1178 AH (1764 AD). While the script of the commentary is in Ottoman Turkish, the text is replete with references to Persian poets and thinkers such as Ḥāfiẓ Shīrāzī (d. c. 1390 AD); Firdowsī (d. c. 1025 AD); Kamāl Khujandī (d. c. 1401 AD); and Nāṣir Khusraw (d. c.1088 AD). This manuscript once belonged to the Rev. William Arderne Shoults (1839-1887).]]> Maḥmūd ibn Osmān ibn ʿAlī al-Lāmiʿī]]> Manuscript]]> Hashish – one of 70 works written by the opium addict and Islamic convert. De Monfried (1879-1974) bought a consignment of hashish in Greece and transported it to Egypt via Somalia, the Suez Canal, and a band of Bedouin nomads.]]> Henry de Monfried]]> Books]]> Qur’an; it is the most holy site for the Islamic faith. Within the Grand Mosque of Mecca lies the Kaaba (pictured here). All Muslims, who are able, are expected to embark on a pilgrimage, or Hajj, there at least once in their lifetime. In 1925, Eldon Rutter (b. 1894), a British Islamic convert, posed as a Syrian merchant to make his journey to Mecca and his way into the cloth-draped Kaaba itself. Rutter’s recollections of his journey from Egypt to the holy city inform his book, The Holy Cities of Arabia, a veritable ‘treasure house of descriptive writing, social anthropology, Islamic history and scholarship’ (Shipman, 2016).]]> Eldon Rutter]]> Books]]> Michel M. Alouf]]> Books]]> George Sandys]]> Books]]> David Roberts]]> Books]]> George E. Kirk]]> Books]]> ea vallis, quam ambient montes bini, orientalis et occidentalis’– ‘in a valley between two mountain ranges’. The author described in detail the many ancient Egyptian monuments like the Pyramids at Giza and wrote of the incredible engineering and technical skills of the Egyptians.]]> Muwaffaq al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī]]> Books]]> Handbook, with notes in his neat, compact script.]]> J. Selden Willmore]]> Books]]> Elements of Geometry, which is considered as one of the most successful and influential textbooks ever written. This is a battered Arabic manuscript in naskh script of chapters 1 to 3 of Euclid’s work, beginning in the middle of definition ten. It is an Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn-Thābit ibn Qurra version, the most influential of Arabic translations. Euclid – the ‘father of geometry’ – first became known in Europe through Latin translations of these versions. The age of the manuscript is probably much later than given date of c.1800.]]> Euclid]]> Manuscript]]> Grammatica Arabica (1613). It contained the first Arabic typeface, designed by Raphelengius. Printers Bonaventure and Abraham Elzevir acquired the oriental (Syrian, Arab, Aramaic and Hebrew) fonts that once belonged to Erpenius. They printed this later edition of Erpenius’ Rudimenta Linguae Arabicae, which first appeared in 1620. This edition contains both Latin and Arabic, and where incomplete, a diligent person has written out the entire text by hand. There are numerous marginal notes throughout.]]> Thomas Erpenius]]> Books]]> Oratio de Laudibus in 1524. The cursive nature of Arabic script and the large number of characters needed to complete the font presented a vast number of complexities. In fact, in some instances books were printed with spaces left to write the Arabic in by hand. This edition of the Bible, the work of Arabic scholars J. D. Carlyle (1759-1805) and Henry Ford, is significant not only because of the work that it entailed, but because it was completed by Sarah Hodgson, a female printer living in Newcastle upon Tyne. It was sponsored by the British and Foreign Bible Society for distribution into the Middle East.]]> ___]]> Books]]> The Arabs, ‘[they] are a people clustered round an historical memory’. There is no definite delineated Arab territory, but parts of the African continent, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine are part of the ‘Arab World’, an area of 13.6 million square kilometres. United by their language, Arabic, and their religion, Islam, Arabs began to populate various countries in the Middle East after Muhammed’s death in the 7th century. Arabs are townspeople and nomads, Sunni and Shi’ite, Asian and African. Today in the world, there are around 420 million people who identify as Arabian.]]> H.A.R. Gibb]]> Books]]> Muhammad ibn Sulaymān al-Jazūlī]]> Manuscripts]]> East is West is a memoir of that time.]]> Freya Stark]]> Books]]>