Syriac Manuscripts Online

A few years ago we created a page that collected and organized all the dispersed and sometimes hard-to-find Syriac manuscript catalogs. That page, which provides direct links to PDFs of those catalogs, has proved useful to many scholars who would not otherwise have access to all of them in one place at their local libraries. However, since creating that page, several collections of Syriac manuscripts have been digitized and made freely available online. We have endeavored here to create a complimentary resource that offers direct access to digitized manuscripts around the world. We hope this new tool will provide further avenues of research in fields which utilize Syriac, Arabic, and Garshuni.

Despite the revolution of digitized manuscripts being made available online, it is still often difficult to find individual manuscripts within the various online collections. Therefore, we have attempted to create here a single access point to the manuscripts themselves for scholars focusing on Syriac research. We have organized the manuscripts through two related tables, linked below. Both of them contain the entirety of the manuscript data, differing only in their two methods of searching.

These two digitized manuscript tables aim for comprehensive searchability of all Syriac manuscripts available online. The number of digitized manuscripts is now in the thousands and, consequently, we have not yet been able to incorpoate all the available manuscripts. As a start, however, all digitized manuscripts outside of vHMML (more than 3700 manuscripts) and the Dunhuang Project (approximately 650 fragments) are here present. We are continuously adding data from these two special collections (and other collections as they come online) and hope to complete their holdings soon. (Please note that, while all the manuscript images from vHMML are freely available online, an account is required to view them. Registration is offered at no cost to scholars, and the form for membership is here.)

This table is sortable by shelf-mark (i.e. manuscript name or project number), approximate date, and language. The contents of the manuscripts are searchable in this table by general keyword. The entries in the table contain the relevant information for each manuscript, and where possible a hyperlink is given to a published catalog entry containing information on the individual manuscript.

Not sure what to search for? This table organizes the collections of Syriac manuscripts by key terms. Click any of the categorized menu items to narrow down your search. As in the sortable table, entries in the faceted table contain the relevant information for each manuscript, and where possible a hyperlink is given to a published catalog entry containing information on the individual manuscript.