Among Zoroastrian burial items, there is a camel-shaped zoomorphic OSTADON lying there. It was found…
According to sources, as soon as the eastern manuscripts were acquired by the Public Library, they were catalogued.
Printed descriptions of Kulliyat by Navoi (cat. 2) and “Tuhfat al-Ahrar” by Jami (cat. 4) were published in the catalogue compiled in 1852 by Boris Andreyevich Dorn (Bernhard Dorn). Later on, information on the new acquisitions was published in the annual Reports of the Imperial Public Library. From 1874 to 1917 acquisitions were catalogued by Vasiliy Dmitrievich Smirnov, a long-time head of the eastern branch of the library, senior lecturer and professor at St. Petersburg University.
Galina Ivanovna Kostygova compiled and published the catalogue of the New Series of Persian manuscripts in 1973, and the catalogue of all the Persian manuscripts stored in the library in 1988 – 1989. She also wrote reviews of the collections of Amir ‘Alim Khan and I. O. Simonich.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that Vladimir Vasilyevich Stasov (1824 – 1906), a well-known art historian and a long-standing employee of the Public Library, was the first person not only in Russia but in the entire world who paid attention to the decoration of manuscripts associated with Mawarannahr. He not only published samples of the decorations of the Samarkand Quran, but also included the ornamented details of five Chaghatay manuscripts of the 18th – 19th centuries in his first album.
You can learn more about the topic in the book-album "Arts of the book in the 15th–17th-century Mawarannahr" (Volume XVII) in the series "Cultural Legacy of Uzbekistan in the World Collections". The main sponsor of the project is the oilfield services company Eriell-Group.
