Libraries · a Light

A Damascus library's own catalogue survives with 2,000 titles

Attached to a mausoleum in thirteenth century Damascus was a modest library called the Ashrafiya. Its catalogue survived, bound into a manuscript now in Istanbul, and it is the most detailed library catalogue to come down to us from the medieval Muslim world. It lists roughly two thousand titles by about twelve hundred authors, ordered by the size of the volume and then alphabetically by the first letter of the title, with notes on condition and on multiple copies. The shelves held law and hadith as expected, and also poetry, cookery, chess, veterinary medicine, popular epics and Christian texts. Konrad Hirschler edited it in 2016, which means we can now read what an ordinary reader in Damascus could borrow.

Ashrafiya library, Damascus · 13th century