A Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts in the Oriental Institute of Chicago

By Miroslav Krek

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This catalogue provides an inventory of the Arabic manuscripts held in the collection of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. The majority of the manuscripts were purchased in 1929 by the Oriental Institute, on the recommendation of Professor Martin Sprengling, from the private collection of the late Bernhard Moritz, former director of the Egyptian Library in Cairo. Most of them represent well-known works composed or copied between the tenth and the twentieth centuries AD. Especially worthy of mention are a tenth-century fragment of Ibn Hanbal's Musnad (no. 70) and al-Baghawi's MuCjam al-sahabah (no. 48), an early specimen of the sahabi literature. The other manuscripts in the Oriental Institute collection have been acquired over the years through purchase and gift from various sources. Most of the Druse literature and the manuscripts in pocket size seem to have formed, at one time, part of the manuscript collection of the French scholar Clement Imbault Huart.

  • New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1961
  • Pp. ix + 46