The Catalogue of Arabic manuscripts in the National Library of the Czech Republic on CD-ROM
The collection of Arabic manuscripts in the National Library of the Czech Republic contains 200 items. It is a component part of larger holdings of Oriental manuscripts, especially Persian, Turkish, and Indian. The whole collection of Orientalia has ca. 1200 volumes of which Indian manuscripts mainly on palm-leaves form more than a half.
The library possessed a small number of Oriental manuscripts in the 19th century as it results from the documents from the period, when the director of the library was Pavel Josef Safarik. Large acquisitions of Oriental manuscripts took place in 1920s and 1930s. From this time also their first - rather imperfect - list has been preserved. Their more detailed processing is taking place only towards the end of 1990s.
The Arabic manuscripts cover various branches of human activity as, for example, logic, mathematics, religion, politics, law, astronomy, medicine, science of nature, or literature. Concrete information about their acquisition has not been preserved.
This short catalogue is their first list ever published. It is appearing in these days thanks to the sponsorship of the Ceskoslovenská obchodní banka as a joint publication effort of the bank with the National Library of the Czech Library, Albertina icome Praha Ltd., and the Dar Ibn Rushd Publishing House, Prague.
The CD-ROM catalogue has also been granted the UNESCO Memory of the World logo.
There is a small gallery of samples.
However, if interested in the list of 200 manuscripts, you can access the WWW version of the catalogue, in which higher quality images are presented in the new DJVU format thanks to our colleagues from the IKAROS e-journal.
5 March 1999 by Adolf Knoll