Dr Arnoud Vrolijk is Interpres Legati Warneriani and curator of Oriental manuscripts and rare books at Leiden University Libraries. He has published extensively on the Leiden Oriental collections and the history of Arabic scholarship in the Netherlands. Dr Kasper van Ommen is curator of early printed and rare books and coordinator of the Scaliger Institute at Leiden University Libraries. In 2020 he defended his doctoral thesis on Joseph Justus Scaliger’s Oriental bequest in the Leiden University Library. Dr Karin Scheper heads the conservation workshop in the Leiden University Library, where for many years she has focused on the study of the materiality of the Oriental collections. She received a PhD (2014) and has published a book and a range of articles on the subject. Dr Tijmen Baarda defended his PhD dissertation in 2020 about the use of Arabic, Syriac and other languages among the Christians of Iraq at the beginning of the twentieth century. Until 2022 he was subject librarian for Middle Eastern studies at Leiden University Libraries.

• 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-i Cihan-Nüma printed by .brahim 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 Sana.i’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 Ruba.iyat 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 Sa.id 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