359 Manuscripts From The Near East School Of Theology In Beirut, Lebanon, Are Now Active In Reading Room

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Mathematical diagrams from a treatise on geometry, Majmūʻat al-muhandisīn by Hüseyin Rıfkı (NEST AP 00038)

359 manuscripts from the Near East School of Theology in Beirut, Lebanon, are now active in Reading Room

Posted: 2024-01-16

Cataloging is complete for 359 manuscripts from the Near East School of Theology (NEST), a Protestant seminary in Beirut, Lebanon. The collection includes valuable works on theology, history, and science from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish traditions. The vast majority of the collection is in Arabic, but it also includes significant amounts of Armenian and Syriac and small portions in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, English, and Kurdish. This includes HMML's first ever manuscript of Kurdish in Armenian characters, a 20th-century hymnal (NEST B 00022), which complements examples from other collections of Kurdish in Syriac, Arabic, and Roman characters.

The collection dates back to the 13th century, including early manuscripts of rare Arabic works on Sufism (NEST AB 00044), mathematics (NEST AP 00015, NEST AP 00025), history (NEST AH 00008), and grammar (NEST AB 00027), and an Armenian hymnal (NEST B 00014) from 1270. The collection also includes the original 19th-century drafts of the Old Testament from the so-called Van Dyck Bible, the most important Arabic Bible translation of the modern era (69 manuscripts grouped under project number NEST AC 00036, starting with NEST AC 00036 01). Cataloging of this collection was begun by former HMML cataloger Salam Rassi some years ago and has now been completed. View now

Image caption: Mathematical diagrams from a treatise on geometry, Majmūʻat al-muhandisīn by Hüseyin Rıfkı (NEST AP 00038)

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