Augusta de Wit and the Genizah hoard
The discovery of the Cairo Genizah manuscript fragments in the synagogue in Al-Fustat, Old Cairo, has already been well documented. In January 1897, Solomon Schechter, […]
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A game of stones – how Cambridge acquired a cast of the Rosetta Stone
Exactly two hundred years ago, in 1822, the French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion (1790–1832) succeeded in his attempts to decipher the hieroglyphic text of the famous Rosetta […]
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A unique treasure: Johann Wansleben’s Ethiopic notes and letters
The manuscripts written in the Ethiopic language held in Cambridge University Library number fewer than seventy volumes in all, and for the most part, these […]
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James Rendel Harris: a Bible scholar on a quest for manuscripts
The later decades of the nineteenth century witnessed new directions being forged in the study of biblical texts, as new manuscript discoveries stimulated advances in […]
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War and words: Colin Macaulay and his manuscript connections
One of Cambridge University Library’s most treasured manuscripts, the Codex Zacynthius, is displayed in the Library’s exhibition ‘Ghost Words: reading the past’. The focus here […]
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A delight in Turkish: E. J. W. Gibb and his library
Elias Gibb was a rather private and reclusive man of scholarship, but his contribution to Turkish studies in the form of translations and discussions of […]
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An epic from a tiger’s library
Among the many beautiful and fascinating manuscripts in the Library’s Islamic collection is one particularly magnificent copy of the famous Persian epic poem, the Shāhnāma or […]
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Some Islamic manuscripts from Africa
In among the very varied items which constitute Library’s Islamic manuscript collection there is a small number of texts originating from the Saharan and sub-Saharan […]
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A letter of apology to Thomas Young
‘I am sorry I should have detained the proof longer than I intended, as the stone was just finished on Tuesday, and taken to Ackermann’s […]
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Giovanni Belzoni and his ‘Book of breathings’
In Ancient Egyptian culture, matters relating to death and the afterlife were of great significance, as both the body and the soul were believed to […]
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