World Manuscripts
Hebrew, Armenian, Syriac, Ethiopian and Coptic books; Mesoamerican codices in bark paper and deerskin, most of them burned; the Timbuktu manuscripts smuggled out of Mali in rice sacks in 2012; and the writing traditions that never entered the European story at all.
Part of Books
46 moments in this segment.
- - Syriac manuscript 11 century liturgy - 2. A Syriac manuscript in the Aramaic script used by the Churches of the East.
- - Syriac Orthodox icon of Jesus Christ, St. Peter, and St. Paul. A Syriac manuscript in the Aramaic script used by the Churches of the East.
- - Ephrem's Commentary on the Diatessaron. A Syriac manuscript in the Aramaic script used by the Churches of the East.
- - T-S NS 163.57. A fragment from the Cairo Geniza, the storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue that preserved roughly 400,000 discarded Jewish manuscript fragments.
- - SMT D119 Facsimile of f plate 21 of the manuscript Troano. Maya codex material. Only four pre-conquest Maya codices survive; much of what circulates is nineteenth-century facsimile plates.
- - CodexPages9 17. The Dresden Codex, the best preserved of the four surviving Maya codices, containing astronomical and calendrical tables.
- - SMT D111 Facsimile of plate 20 of the manuscript Troano. Maya codex material. Only four pre-conquest Maya codices survive; much of what circulates is nineteenth-century facsimile plates.
- - MA D363 Maya animals hunted. Maya codex material. Only four pre-conquest Maya codices survive; much of what circulates is nineteenth-century facsimile plates.
- - Dresden Codex f8461796. The Dresden Codex, the best preserved of the four surviving Maya codices, containing astronomical and calendrical tables.
- - Detail of Maya Codex - Museum of Anthropology - Mexico City - Mexico. Maya codex material. Only four pre-conquest Maya codices survive; much of what circulates is nineteenth-century facsimile plates.
- - Atl tlachinolli. A page from a Mesoamerican pictorial codex, the Aztec and colonial-Mexican book form combining image and glyph.
- - Cholula, Tlaxcala, Mexico WDL502. A page from a Mesoamerican pictorial codex, the Aztec and colonial-Mexican book form combining image and glyph.
- - Muchitlan, Tlaxcala, Mexico WDL407. A page from a Mesoamerican pictorial codex, the Aztec and colonial-Mexican book form combining image and glyph.
- - Ta'rikh al-Fattash Mamma Haidara Library 34122 n02. A manuscript from the private libraries of Timbuktu in Mali, covering law, astronomy, mathematics and theology in Arabic.
- - Timbuktu Manuscript. A manuscript from the private libraries of Timbuktu in Mali, covering law, astronomy, mathematics and theology in Arabic.
- - Ethiopian Manuscript Painting and Text. An Ethiopian Christian manuscript in Ge’ez, written on goatskin parchment and bound in the distinctive Ethiopian wooden-board style.
- - Ethiopic manuscript cover. An Ethiopian Christian manuscript in Ge’ez, written on goatskin parchment and bound in the distinctive Ethiopian wooden-board style.
- - Ta'rikh al-Fattash Mamma Haidara Library 34122 n01. A manuscript from the private libraries of Timbuktu in Mali, covering law, astronomy, mathematics and theology in Arabic.
- - Assumption of the Virgin and God the Father Holding an Orb, Coptic Christian manuscript, Ethiopia, Amhara peop. An Ethiopian Christian manuscript in Ge’ez, written on goatskin parchment and bound in the distinctive Ethiopian wooden-board style.
- - Timbuktu-139068. A manuscript from the private libraries of Timbuktu in Mali, covering law, astronomy, mathematics and theology in Arabic.
- - Timbuktu-139070. A manuscript from the private libraries of Timbuktu in Mali, covering law, astronomy, mathematics and theology in Arabic.
- - The Maya creation story, told by the Smithsonian. Short museum film on the Popol Vuh narrative of the Hero Twins and the making of humankind from maize.
- - Making the Florentine Codex. Getty lecture on how Bernardino de Sahagún and 22 Nahua artists produced the twelve-book encyclopedia of Mexica life and language in 1576, and on the pigments and materials they used.
- - The Hebrew Manuscripts Digitisation Project. British Library introduces its Polonsky-funded programme to digitise its Hebrew manuscripts.
- - The librarians who saved Timbuktu's manuscripts. A BBC report on the smuggling of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts out of Timbuktu to save them.
- - X-raying the Syriac Galen palimpsest. Stanford describes using synchrotron X-ray imaging to recover a 6th-century Syriac translation of Galen hidden beneath 11th-century hymns.
- - Preserving the manuscripts of Timbuktu. PBS NewsHour on the manuscripts smuggled out of Timbuktu during the 2012-13 occupation and the effort to digitise them.
- - The Ahmed Baba Institute, seven years after the fire. Archive report from Timbuktu on the research institute whose manuscripts were burned by militants, and on the scholars who now stay away.
- - The hidden treasures of Timbuktu. An animated TED-Ed history of the Timbuktu manuscripts and why they spent centuries hidden in private hands.
- - The Popol Vuh: a Maya book that survived as a copy of a copy. The K'iche' Maya creation epic was written down in the Latin alphabet in the mid-16th century and survives only through a Dominican friar's early 18th-century transcription in Chichicastenango, now in Chicago.
- - The manuscripts and intellectual legacy of Timbuktu. A Gresham College lecture on the West African manuscript tradition, the empires that produced it, and the surviving family libraries.
- - The bookmaker: an ancient craft in Ethiopia. Al Jazeera follows Ethiopian craftsmen making manuscripts by hand, from preparing skins to sewing the binding.
- - Hebrew manuscripts at the British Library. Curator Ilana Tahan presents the British Library's Hebrew manuscript collection and its major exhibition.
- - Reading the Maya, Mixtec and Aztec codices. A lecture on the Mesoamerican screenfold book, made from deer hide or bark paper, and what its pictorial writing records.
- - An introduction to the Matenadaran. A survey of Yerevan's Matenadaran, the world's largest repository of Armenian manuscripts, and what its collections contain.
- - The Codex Mendoza: an Aztec book made for a Spanish king. Dr Daniela Bleichmar on the codex made around 1541 by Indigenous artists at the viceroy's request, recording Mexica tribute, conquest and daily life in pictographic script with Spanish glosses.
- - Codice Maya de Mexico, the oldest book of the Americas. A close reading of the roughly 900-year-old Maya screenfold that tracks the movements of Venus, one of only four surviving Maya books.
- - Ethiopians recreate ancient manuscripts. A news report on priests and lay scribes replicating centuries-old Ethiopian religious manuscripts to keep the tradition alive.
- - Have the libraries of Timbuktu been lost?. A Gresham College segment on what actually happened to the manuscript collections of Timbuktu.
- - What the Dresden Codex records about the sky. Spanish-language DW report on the astronomical content of the Maya codex in Dresden and the researchers decoding its tables.
- - Two hundred crates of manuscripts return to Timbuktu. Reuters footage of the manuscripts being brought back to the city they were smuggled out of, amid a still fragile security situation.
- - Mali returns the manuscripts to Timbuktu. DW reports on the return of thousands of manuscripts evacuated to Bamako in 2013 when armed groups occupied the city.
- - Timbuktu's manuscripts return after years in hiding. AP reports on the return of medieval manuscripts smuggled out of Timbuktu to escape destruction by armed groups.
- - Mesoamerican maguey paper. A Library of Congress conservator's research on maguey paper, its botanical origin and its regional manufacture.
- - Reading the Dresden Codex. Detailed walk through the Maya bark-paper screenfold held in Dresden, whose Venus and eclipse tables encode centuries of astronomical observation. It is the most complete of the four surviving Maya books.
- - Restoring Armenian manuscript pastedowns. Conservators from the Matenadaran present their treatment of pastedowns in Armenian bindings at a Baltic conservation triennial.
