Table of Contents; Foreword; Introduction; 1 The Ancient Near East; NINO’s Böhl Collection of Cuneiform Tablets; The Lion Gate at Hattusa on a Glass Slide; Persepolis in the Eyes of Charles Chipiez; Egyptologists and their Books: The Egyptology Library of NINO; The Description de l’Égypte: from Napoleon to Egyptology; 2 Materiality Matters; Manuscript Materials and Binding Practices: The Codex in the Middle East; Dala’il al-Khayrat or “The Waymarks of Benefits”: a Devotional Work on the Prophet Muhammad; The Stars in Leiden: Listening to the Stories of Islamic Manuscripts; Material and Textual Ties in a Yemeni Manuscript; Decorated Papers in Islamicate Manuscripts; Layers of Information in a Mamluk Manuscript; 3 The Great Arabic Heritage; An Ancient Fragment of the Qur’an; The Wonders of the World; Jacobus Golius and his Arabic Manuscripts on the Exact Sciences; Manuscripts as Illustrations of a Living Medical Tradition; The Amin al-Madani Collection of Arabic Manuscripts; The Earliest Sound Recordings from Arabia; 4 The Splendour of the Ottomans; Levinus Warner’s Manuscript Collection; A Natural History of the Americas and the Ottoman Economy; The Kitab-ı Cihan-Nüma printed by İbrahim Müteferrika; A Woman on a Banknote: Fatma Aliye and Women Authors in the Late Ottoman Empire; A Cut Above the Rest; Wouter Swets: Musician, Composer, and Ethnomusicologist (1930–2016); 5 Persian Refinement; Shahnamah: The Longevity of the Persian Book of Kings; Hakim Sanaʾi’s Garden of Truth and Law of the Right Path; The Materiality of a Hafiz Manuscript; Images from the Hotz Photographic Collection: Dutch Commercial Ventures in Qajar Persia; A Wedding Ceremony in Late Qajar Iran; The Rubaʿiyat of Umar Khayyam; 6 The Other Orient: Religions and Languages; Hebrew Manuscript Treasures at Leiden: A Personal Note; A Result of Jewish-Christian Cooperation in Twelfth-Century England: The Hebrew Psalter; A Dutch-Ashkenazi Esther Scroll for Purim; Leiden and the Christian Middle East: the Bible in Arabic, Armenian, and Syriac; A Psalter and its Mahdar; A Coptic-Arabic Lectionary and Homilies; Tashelhiyt Berber Manuscripts in Arabic Characters; 7 The World of Orientalism; The Exchangeable Sultan: Jan Luyken and Mehmed IV; Scaliger and his Collection of Arabic Books; Dutch Illustrators of the Thousand and One Nights; The “Indolent and Vicious Disposition” of the Moroccans; Maps of the Middle East; The Zanzibar-Leiden Connection: Sayyida Salme bint Saʿid ibn Sultan – Emily Ruete (1844–1924); Snouck Hurgronje, the Collector; Émile Prisse d’Avennes’s Search for Egyptian Art and Architecture; Frank Scholten: Modernity and the Biblical Lens; 8 Modern Times; “The Mecca of Culture, Knowledge and Literature”: Arabic Book Covers Between 1960 and 1980; “They’re Driving Me Crazy”: Egyptian Screen Goddesses and Western Fashion; Turkish female writers contemplating their position in Turkish society; A Pop-Up of the Great Mosque of Mecca; The Mediterranean in Leiden’s Photo Collections: Ad van Denderen’s So Blue So Blue; Mostapha Naji and the Making of the Moroccan Collections in Leiden; About the Authors
