Or. 8264

Leiden University Library possesses 104 Arabic documents written on papyrus and paper. They bear the inventory numbers Or. 8264 and Or. 12885. The majority of these documents date from the A.H. 3rd/A.D. 9th century; a papyrus with Koranic text has been dated to the 1st/7th century and some paper documents may date from as late as the 7th/13th century. These documents cover a wide range of subjects, including private life, administration, commerce, law, religion and scholarship. The Koranic fragment on papyrus (Or. 8264) was privately purchased by C. van Arendonk, curator of the Leiden Oriental Collections, from the antiquarian Erik von Scherling in Oegstgeest, the Netherlands. This papyrus was bequeathed to the University Library at Van Arendonk’s death in 1946. This digital collection makes images of these documents available online together with preliminary transcriptions and metadata based on an unpublished catalogue by Petra M. Sijpesteijn, which has been enhanced in 2015-2017 by Jelle Bruning, Yasmin Ismail, Nasreen Sahebali, and Vincent Sterel.



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