Small selection of illustrations from the Catalogue of the Turkish manuscripts in the library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, published in 2007.

The Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences ‒ established in 1826 ‒ houses many small and still hidden collections. One of these, the most comprehensive Hungarian collection of Arabic manuscripts, is brought to light by the present catalogue. These codices are described for the first time in a detailed and systematic way. A substantial part of the manuscripts is either dated to or preserved from the 150 year period of Ottoman occupation in Hungary. The highlights of the collection are from the Mamluk era, and the manuscripts as a whole present a clear picture of the curriculum of Islamic education. The descriptions also give an overview of the many additional Turkish and Persian texts thereby adding to our knowledge about the history of these volumes.

The Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences gives a detailed and systematic description of all the Persian manuscripts kept in the Library.

The subject of this two-volume publication is an inventory of manuscripts in the book treasury of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, commissioned by the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II from his royal librarian ʿAtufi in the year 908 (1502–3) and transcribed in a clean copy in 909 (1503–4). This unicum inventory preserved in the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Könyvtára Keleti Gyűjtemény, MS Török F. 59) records over 5,000 volumes, and more than 7,000 titles, on virtually every branch of human erudition at the time. The Ottoman palace library housed an unmatched encyclopedic collection of learning and literature; hence, the publication of this unique inventory opens a larger conversation about Ottoman and Islamic intellectual/cultural history. The very creation of such a systematically ordered inventory of books raises broad questions about knowledge production and practices of collecting, readership, librarianship, and the arts of the book at the dawn of the sixteenth century. The first volume contains twenty-eight interpretative essays on this fascinating document, authored by a team of scholars from diverse disciplines, including Islamic and Ottoman history, history of science, arts of the book and codicology, agriculture, medicine, astrology, astronomy, occultism, mathematics, philosophy, theology, law, mysticism, political thought, ethics, literature (Arabic, Persian, Turkish/Turkic), philology, and epistolary. Following the first three essays by the editors on implications of the library inventory as a whole, the other essays focus on particular fields of knowledge under which books are catalogued in MS Török F. 59, each accompanied by annotated lists of entries. The second volume presents a transliteration of the Arabic manuscript, which also features an Ottoman Turkish preface on method, together with a reduced-scale facsimile.