About This Collection

The Minassian collection and its holdings of early Qur’an folios

This database catalogues the holdings of over 200 Qur’anic manuscript folios dating from the 9th to the 16th centuries housed within the special collections of the Brown University libraries. These items were acquired as part of a treasury of rich artistic and textual items donated in 1998 to Brown by Adrienne Minassian, the daughter of Kirkor Minassian (1874–1944), who was an active art collector and dealer based in New York and Paris in the early 20th century. In addition to the forty distinct manuscripts of the Qur’an represented here, the collection includes numerous Persian manuscripts, calligraphic panels, Persian and Central Asian ceramics and other art objects, as well as an impressive selection of miniature paintings from the Persian, Mughul and Indian traditions.

The Qur’anic manuscripts in this collection, as befits a university library, are well positioned to serve as a teaching resource for students interested in topics ranging from the development of Arabic calligraphy, the art of illumination, and the history of the Qur’an as a material object to the technology of book production and the cultural development of the Islamic tradition more broadly. Despite the fact that little is known of the provenance of these manuscripts, either in terms of date of creation or location of production and use, they do offer an important window into the circulation of these texts and their varied and changing lives as artifacts, art objects and scholarly resources. Several of the items in this database have been identified as belonging to manuscripts with folios to be found in other prominent collections, most notably that of Nasser D. Khalili. Consequently, a major impetus for the undertaking of this project is to foster the possibility for other such identification, a process of reuniting these manuscripts currently physically scattered around the world virtually through the digital medium.