The Mingana Collection is made up of over 3000 Middle Eastern manuscripts in over 20 languages, which include Arabic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Georgian, Hebrew, Samaritan and Armenian.
This unique and rich collection was acquired during the 1920s by Alphonse Mingana (1878-1937), a Chaldean priest born near Mosul, who had settled in England. Mingana's three trips to the Middle East to acquire manuscripts were funded by Dr Edward Cadbury, who generously named the collection after its first curator.
The Birmingham Qur'an is part of the Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts.
The collection came to be cared for by the University of Birmingham's Special Collections department when the Selly Oak Colleges merged with the University in the 1990s.
See Mingana manuscripts online
The illustrations here can only give a flavour of the riches available for research or consultation. Some of the Mingana manuscripts have been digitised and can be viewed online. For the remainder, please contact us for information about viewing the originals.
How the collection is made up
The value of the collection to scholarship is enormous. The Syriac section with its 662 manuscripts rates third in the West after the British Library and the Vatican Library. The Christian Arabic section is surpassed in the West only by the Vatican Library and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.
The collection is made up of:
- Over 2000 Arabic Islamic manuscripts on mainly religious subjects, including Qur'an commentaries, Hadith, law, literature, science and mysticism.
- 270 Arabic Christian manuscripts, including a fragment of the oldest known text of the Acta Thomae, and a very early copy of the Arabic translation of some works by St Ephrem.
- Over 660 Syriac and Karshuni (Arabic in Syriac characters) Christian manuscripts. This includes church documents, gospels, works on liturgy, lives of saints and homilies. Amongst the earliest items are a number of important fragments originating from St Catherine's Monastery, Sinai.
There are also examples of Armenian, Coptic, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Persian, Samaritan and Sanskrit manuscripts.
The importance of the collection
The Mingana Collection is a Designated Collection, meaning the exceptional quality and significance of the collection is recognised as being of 'outstanding national and international importance' by Arts Council England (ACE).
The whole collection is important from a palaeographical perspective, because of the use of different media. It consists of parchment, papyrus and early Arabic paper, as well as examples of early Middle Eastern binding techniques.