Memoirs of an Arabic Manuscript Cataloguer
My first encounter with the Arabic manuscripts of Wellcome Collection was in August 2018. I was hired on a short-term basis to review some descriptions for a portion of the collection, which comprises in its entirety over 1000 manuscripts. Now, almost exactly four years and several hundred manuscripts later, I feel immensely fortunate to have had the opportunity to catalogue such a rich and endlessly surprising array of materials. Below I share some reflections on my work with the Wellcome Arabic collection over the past few years.
Medicine through the ages
My first ever assignment was, in more precise terms, to update the digital descriptions for the Wellcome Arabic manuscripts being hosted by the online manuscript catalogue Fihrist. These descriptions — numbering 79 at the time — were created using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), a standard for developing metadata for textual materials using the mark-up language XML. The descriptions were originally a collaboration between Bibliotheca Alexandrina and Kings College London, and required updating to align with the new guidelines issued by Fihrist. Being an Arabist by training and having already done some cataloguing for Fihrist, this work with the Wellcome Arabic collection was an ideal opportunity to build on my experience in the digital humanities field.
It was not just my technical skills which would benefit from this work. Having previously only dealt with literary and historical texts in Arabic, the Wellcome manuscripts introduced me to a very different sphere of knowledge — that of medicine and its many branches, particularly pharmacology. Within this genre, the 79 manuscripts formed a rich fabric of historical periods and intellectual traditions, from Arabic translations of classical Greek scholars such as Galen (d. 216) and Hippocrates (d. c. 370), to the seminal works of the Golden Era, such as those of Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037) and Ibn al-Nafīs (d. 1288), to the treatises of pioneering Ottoman physicians, such as Haci Pasha (d. 1417) and Ibn Sallūm (d. 1670).
While I had access to digitised images of the manuscripts, I was grateful that identification of most of the authors and texts had already been done in the catalogue of Albert Zaki Iskandar, A Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts on Medicine and Science in the Wellcome Historical Medical Library (1967). As such, much of my work at this stage involved using the catalogue to link these authors and works to digital authority files — a process which, as we confront the bewildering amount of data to be extracted from scribal materials, is becoming increasingly crucial to cataloguing projects.
Rethinking cataloguing practices
By this point, I had the impression of a collection of Arabic manuscripts meticulously constructed around a prescribed area of interest. I had no idea that the manuscripts included in the Iskandar catalogue — numbering 197 — were just one segment of the Arabic manuscripts within Wellcome Collection. This became apparent when I was offered the opportunity to continue my work with the Wellcome Arabic collection, this time on a set of unpublished TEI descriptions. These descriptions were informed by another, more recent printed catalogue: Nikolaj Serikoff’s Arabic Medical Manuscripts of the Wellcome Library: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Haddad Collection (WMS 401–487) (2005). The 87 manuscripts included in the catalogue form a subset within the Wellcome Arabic Collection acquired in 1985 and known as the ‘Haddad Collection’, having all been previously owned by Lebanese physician and academic Dr Sami Ibrahim Haddad (d. 1957).
As the title of the catalogue indicates, the majority of these manuscripts were, like those I had previously worked on, related to the study of medicine. But what struck me as I began to edit these TEI descriptions was the level of detail at which the catalogue engaged with the manuscripts — particularly when compared to the much more economical descriptions of Iskandar. The catalogue painstakingly dissected the content of each Haddad manuscript — parts, chapters, sections, sub-sections — in addition to providing information on physical features of the manuscript (binding, paper, handwriting, ‘codicological miscellanea’), and bibliographical references for the represented works. One description sometimes filled as many as ten pages. While undoubtedly an exceptional piece of scholarship, transferring this volume of data into the TEI descriptions seemed an overwhelming task, and frankly — given the open availability of digitised copies of these manuscripts — somewhat unnecessary.
Working on the Haddad collection was the moment at which I really began to consider my role as a manuscript cataloguer in a broader context, and how projects like TEI fit into the ever-shifting scales of cataloguing practices. How could legacy catalogues be used to maximise the current accessibility and discoverability of this material? And where should the boundaries of bibliographic data lie? I found sharing ideas and experiences on this topic with colleagues from both Wellcome Collection and Fihrist to be incredibly productive as I progressed with my cataloguing work. In fact, far from being exclusive to Arabic material, these conversations around legacy data are pertinent to the many different manuscript collections comprising Wellcome Collection.
Unravelling the collection
A major turning point in my cataloguing of the collection occurred around one year later. I had completed TEI descriptions for the manuscripts included in the printed catalogues, and was now given the opportunity to catalogue the remainder of the 430 digitised Wellcome Arabic manuscripts. While many of these manuscripts had pre-existing TEI descriptions, the data within them varied significantly, and at times required cataloguing from scratch. Though this felt like a sizeable step-up from my previous work, like any other manuscript enthusiast, I was above all excited for the task ahead. I felt the most compelling discovery during this phase of cataloguing was the vast array of genres which the collection unfolded. Having so far only come across medical works, I marvelled to find texts on astronomy, mathematics, history, poetry, grammar, Hadith and Islamic jurisprudence, as well as Qur’ans, Christian scriptures and talismans. The medical focus of the Wellcome Arabic collection dimmed in the face of this remarkable diversity.
During this period, my professional experience outside this role began to directly influence my cataloguing of the Wellcome Arabic collection. In September 2019 I joined the European Research Council project ‘Stories of Survival’ in the history department of Oxford University, which explored the mobility of Eastern Christians in the early modern Ottoman world through the lens of manuscript production and circulation. The project particularly emphasised the historical value of paratext — the extra notes and scribbles left in the margins of manuscripts over time by their various owners and readers. As a result, I became acutely aware of how paratextual notes in the Wellcome Arabic manuscripts could increase our understanding of the collection’s origins. In addition to indicators such as handwriting and binding, I found that scribal colophons and ownership notes traced the Wellcome Arabic manuscripts to multiple locations across North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, and multiple timeframes, spanning the 15th to the 20th century CE. The flexible structure of TEI allowed these notes to be easily categorised and recorded in original Arabic script and in English translation.
In this cataloguing phase, some curious and wonderful snippets of information about the lives of the Wellcome Arabic manuscripts surfaced: the prophetic biography witnessed by multiple scholars of the al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo (MS Arabic 776); the Arabic grammars copied in a school in the Khanate of Crimea during the seventeenth century (MS Arabic 809); the tracts on Islamic inheritance emanating from a small village in the Persian Safavid Empire (MS Arabic 821). Taken together, these details form an elaborate patchwork of individual and communal stories across time and space.
The Wellcome Arabic collection had further surprises to offer. As I continued cataloguing over the next two years, I encountered manuscripts both partially and fully written in languages other than Arabic, such as Persian and Ottoman Turkish. Though I was able to complete basic TEI descriptions for these manuscripts, they would certainly benefit from specialist interest.
Further insight into the linguistic and cultural breadth of the collection came with a recent discovery of several manuscripts in Karshuni (that is, Arabic language written in the Syriac script, used predominantly among Eastern Christians in the Ottoman era). Due to my research for both the ERC project and for the PhD which I began in October 2020, I had managed to develop proficiency in reading sources in Arabic Karshuni. As such, cataloguing the Wellcome Karshuni manuscripts was an exciting task — and a memorable moment to see my work as a cataloguer and my research interests so closely intertwined. Like a pocket-sized mirror on the entire Arabic collection, the Karshuni manuscripts reflected an assortment of genres: physiognomy, medicine, astrology and Christian theology.
A month before writing this, I completed the last of the TEI descriptions for the Wellcome Arabic manuscripts, ready to be showcased in the new Wellcome Collection online catalogue. Despite all the knowledge I gained during the process of cataloguing, I still struggle to define such a rich, multi-layered tangle of manuscripts. In the most general terms, I believe its existence is testament to the overwhelming cultural, intellectual, linguistic and religious diversity which characterised the early modern Arabic-speaking world — and, of course, beyond. There are, as always, more aspects to be explored, more histories to be unlocked. Like the lives of these manuscripts, the craft of the cataloguer is a never-ending journey.
