To celebrate World Digital Preservation Day, why not join us on Saturday to find out about the challenges and opportunities of digitisation! Find out more about this FREE event and book via Eventbrite ⬇️

Precisely what happened to medieval Arab author and polymath al-Jāḥiẓ in Basra over 1000 years ago

A fascinating story about a manuscript seller’s archive in Egypt and the stories that it will make possible.

Bram Stoker was born on 08 November 1847. The Irish novelist & theatre manager is best known for the novel 'Dracula'. This first edition of 'Dracula' was published in 1897 & is part of our Lloyd Book Collection! 📷 Lloyd 828.8/STO-4 #BramStoker #OnThisDay #Dracula #RareBooks

The Citadel in Erbil, after a long meeting about archives in Mam Khalil's tea house in the qayseri bazaar - a wonderful cafe that dates back to the 1940s, and has its walls covered in hundreds of old photos of Kurds and Arabs

I took a walk to Ankawa, Erbil's Christian quarter, to have a look at the various Assyrian, Chaldean and Catholic churches. In addition to numerous churches, the other sign of the different religious demographic round here is the large number of off-licenses selling alcohol

The Holy Father announced the inclusion in the Roman Martyrology of St Isaac of Nineveh, also known as Isaac the Syrian, one of the most venerated Fathers of the Syro-Oriental tradition. Holy See Press Office

Two statues in Erbil of Leyla Qasim, the young Kurdish activist executed by the Ba'ath regime in Baghdad fifty years ago

Back in Ainkawa, outside the Chaldean Catholic Cathedral of Saint Joseph (Mar Yousif) in Erbil - just missed the service, but still caught the lingering smell of incense

Tucked away behind an Erbil shopping mall, an old mausoleum

A bust of Ahmed Naji (1898-1956), founder & first headmaster of Erbil Al- Uwla, the first school in the city, and a camera used to take photos of staff & students. In the fascinating Museum of Educational Archives, Erbil

Still on the subject of photography in the region...

Syriac religious manuscripts in Alqosh

Looks like our plane circled over Essex a few times

A selection of foreign and occult alphabets- most of which will be recognizable to anyone working with Islamicate manuscripts- from an Icelandic equivalent of a majmū'a produced in 1765 by the scribe Jakob Sigurðsson, beautiful instance of global early modernity (SÁM 66)

We were delighted to welcome visitors to our Economic and Social Research Council Festival of Social Science event ('Making the Analogue Digital') on Saturday! We collaborated with Exeter Digital Humanities to digitise items from the archive of Jack Clemo, and to talk about the challenges and possibilities of digitisation.

Some huge items in our collections are scrolls created by traditional scroll painters from Naya Village in West Bengal as part of the AHRC project 'Famine and Dearth in India and Britain, 1550-1800'. Here is archivist Hollie unrolling a scroll! #EYAHuge #ExploreYourArchive

Theo Brown was the Recorder of Folklore for the Devonshire Association and wrote 9 papers for our Transactions

For #EYADisco we have an advert for the Al Mansour Melia Disco Club in Baghdad. According to the advert, it was “the most unusual disco club” in Baghdad and surely the best place to hear the hottest “international hit parades” 🪩🕺 📷: EUL MS 143/19/8