Golius and Tychsen and Their Quest for Manuscripts. Three Arabic Letters

Abstract

Letters exchanged between early modern Orientalist scholars and their correspondents from the Islamic world are a major source for our knowledge of the networks that facilitated the acquisition of Oriental manuscripts. They are equally important for the study of Arabic epistolography in the period. This contribution adds to the growing corpus with the edition and analysis of three such letters concerning the acquisition of manuscripts. The first two were written by Jacobus Golius (1596–1667) in 1624 and probably 1644, while the third was adressed by Aḥmad ʿAzmī, the Ottoman ambassador to Prussia, to Oluf Gerhard Tychsen (1734–1815) in 1791.