Human beings learn through experiences and pass the skills so earned to their posterity. Manuscripts are the manifestation of such experiences into physical form recorded by hand at different times. Manuscripts always remained useful to the society since they represent the selected fragments of time, which help in recreating the past and deciphering the history of mankind. Looking at the world history, one finds that the East has always had an edge over the West in respect of richness of culture. About all leading civilizations of the past belonged to the East, popularly known as the Orient. Egypt, Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia and India have a bright and recorded past. Plenty of manuscripts were produced in these civilizations, which remained the personal property of kings and nobles for many centuries and were guarded by political might. A large number of such manuscripts have been lost with political instability from time to time, still we have them in plenty, even today. In this book, an attempt has been made to survey the organizations possessing oriental manuscripts and provide general introduction to their major collections available worldwide. Material for this book was collected from all possible sources including the traditional as well as the current electronic media. It was found that the information available in print was outdated in most of the cases whereas the same, although current, was brief on the World Wide Web. The book will be specially useful for researchers in Oriental disciplines and history, students of library and information science, library professionals and all those who have interest in rare and invaluable manuscripts available all over the world.
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