Topkapi Palace Library (Photo: Emily O'Dell)
The Ottoman Palace Library Inventory of 1502-3
Harvard University Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture
April 4th-6th, 2014
This workshop focuses on a unique manuscript, in the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which is a catalogue in Arabic of the holdings of the Topkapı Palace Library in Istanbul, compiled for Sultan Bayezid II by his royal librarian in the year 909 (1502-3). The presentations are preliminary versions of essays that will be published in the Supplements to Muqarnas Series (Brill, Leiden and Boston) of the Aga Khan Program of Islamic Architecture at Harvard…The aim of the workshop is to appraise what was collected, along with an assessment of early sixteenth-century Ottoman intellectual culture from the viewpoint of the royal palace library, with its “universal” collection of approximately 5700 volumes and 7200 titles in all branches of knowledge, written in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman and Chaghatay Turkish.
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