During the six hundred years of its existence, innumerable of manuscripts with, mostly, Turkish texts were produced in the Ottoman Empire. These are mainly preserved in libraries in the countries that once were part of that extended empire; a lesser number of such manuscripts had their origin in central Asia, Persia and India. From the sixteenth century in particular, interest for these handwritten books increased in Europe and found their way to the libraries of scholars, book collectors and universities. The John Rylands University Library is one such repository of Turkish manuscripts of...

The German Assyriologist Fritz Rudolf Kraus was an academic emigrant who was forced to leave Germany during the Nazi period. Kraus spent thirteen years in exile in Istanbul, where he was appointed cataloguer at the Archaeological Museum. During his exile he kept in touch with his family in Germany and with colleagues, in particular his former teacher, Benno Landsberger, who had moved to Ankara in 1935. The selection of his voluminous correspondence presented in this work is an important source for the history of both Turkey and Germany during the years 1937 to 1950. Der deutsche Assyriologe...

The book consists of transcriptions and summary translations of two texts in, mostly, Ottoman Turkish, the first of which is the recently discovered second volume of the diary of the German orientalist Karl Süssheim, covering the years 1903-08 which he mostly spent in Istanbul. The second text is a printed memoir of a Young Turk officer called İsma’il Hakkı, in which the latter discusses his life, political engagement and the resulting problems. Süssheim met İsma’il Hakkı in Cairo in 1908 and kept in contact with him later. The texts offer a lively picture of Istanbul and Cairo in...