Treasures of the Area Studies Collections: Reconsidering Primary Sources and Collections
Near East
The Near East Collection at Yale University Library is one of the oldest in North America, established in 1841 with the appointment of Edward Elbridge Salisbury to teach Arabic and Islamic studies at Yale University.
Building a library for this subject was difficult as Arabic-script printing was still in its infancy at this time, and printing presses were not yet widespread in Middle Eastern countries. Nevertheless, Salisbury was able to select and collect important books and manuscripts, laying the foundations of a collection which has evolved to become one of the most comprehensive collections in Arabic and Islamic studies in the United States.
The Arabic Collection included:
- Salisbury's personal collection, which he donated to the library.
- The collection of the Swedish Arabist Carlo Landberg of more than seven hundred volumes.
- Additional materials acquired by Yale University from various sources, including more than three hundred volumes of Arabic manuscripts and another 67 volumes of manuscripts in Persian.
Check out the Research Guide for the Near East Collection to learn more.
Sharḥ al-Muʻallaqāt / Abū ʻAbd Allāh [ibn ʻAlī] ibn Aḥmad ibn al-Ḥusayn al-Zawzanī. -- [ca. 1810]
The seven “suspended poems” (Muʻallaqāt), composed in pre-Islamic times, are generally considered to be masterpieces of classical Arabic literature, and al-Zawzanī was one of their most important commentators. This manuscript, from the personal library of the French Orientalist Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838), was interleaved with blank pages on which de Sacy made his own scholarly annotations to the text in Latin. The donor, Edward Elbridge Salisbury (1814-1901), was the first professor of Arabic and Sanskrit not just at Yale, but in the Americas, when he was appointed to this post by the Yale Corporation in 1841. During his first year of teaching in 1843, Salisbury gave public lectures on the Muʻallaqāt, quite likely relying upon this copy of the poems, which Salisbury had purchased from the auction of Silvestre de Sacy’s library held in Paris earlier that year.
Dhikr kalām al-nās fī manbaʻ al-Nīl wa-makhrajihi wa-ziyādatih. -- 1655
The title translates as, “What people say about the source of the Nile and its sources and its flood.” An anonymous and unique text, composed in 1655, on the presumed source of the Nile in the legendary Mountains of the Moon (variously identified in modern times as located in either Uganda or the Democratic Republic of the Congo). In the image, “north” is at the bottom, and “south” is at the top.
Muḥammad Aḥmad al-Mahdī (1848-1885). Rasāʾil. After 1885.
Copies of letters sent by Muhammad Ahmad, the Mahdi of Sudan, to various recipients. Beginning in 1881 and up to his death in 1885, the Mahdi led an uprising against Egyptian and British colonial forces that was finally suppressed in 1899. Shown here is the beginning of an undated letter sent to General Charles Gordon (1883-1885), inviting him to embrace Islam. Another copy of the Mahdi’s letters, captured in the Battle of Toski (1889), is held in Cairo. Yale acquired over 800 manuscript items from Count Carlo von Landberg of Sweden (1848-1924) in 1900. Landberg was a scholar of Arabic dialects, as well as an energetic collector who sold many Arabic manuscripts to European and U.S. libraries. However it is not known how Landberg would have obtained this copy of the Mahdi’s letters, which were probably copied at the time of sending by his personal secretary.
This is also one of the handful of items from our collection of Islamic manuscripts that has received scholarly study & publication, being the subject of an article in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, v. 31, no. 4 (1911), “A Letter from the Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad to General G.C. Gordon,” by George Sverdrup.
Mehmed Şefik (1819-1880), calligrapher. Elifba cüzü. 1852 or 1853.
A gift book created on the occasion of an elite Ottoman student’s entry into formal schooling, showing the forms of Arabic-script letters in various combinations. Richly ornamented with polychrome decoration and gold, with a beautifully stamped cover in silver and gold gilding. Purchased for the library from the New York bookseller Charles Kraus in 1949, it had previously been part of the personal collection of the American pharmaceutical entrepreneur Henry Wellcome (1853-1936).