Textual and Morphological Typology of the Seals in the Manuscripts of the Chester Beatty Library

Abstract

The Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, Northern Ireland, is home to one of the richest collections of Islamic manuscripts. Most of the works in this collection were purchased in the midst of World Warr II and the years of disunity in Islamic countries or during the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire; an interval of time during which the most exquisite cultural works of the Orient were sold instead of a small price and easily accessible to the West. Considering the importance of this issue, all seals were extracted from the library site, out of which 773 were selected for the present study. After conducting an initial study (including elimination of duplicates, reading the texts and validating their originality), the necessary information was collected based on library-documentary and Internet studies and the relevant statistics and graphs were extracted and plotted. Then, the obtained information was analyzed in a descriptive and analytical method. In order to extract the statistics and graphs, the statistical population of the study was divided into five main groups including the number of words, language, context, form and content. The results of the study indicate different characteristics of the seals, the most obvious of which can be recounted as follows: most shapes are circular and oval , and the most important languages are Arabic and Persian, and in terms of text, most of them include names and addresses of people and an expression of their religious beliefs.

Keywords

• islamic seals
• chester beatty
• manuscripts