Further resources and repositories
Hazine: A Guide to Researching in the Middle East and Beyond.
The Digital Resources page of the American Oriental Society.
Middle East Medievalists’ (MEM) and its list of recently published books in the field.
Resources page of the School for Abbasid Studies.
OpenITI (Islamic Texts Initiative). A Machine-Readable Corpus of Islamicate Texts built by Maxim Romanov and Masoumeh Seydi. The corpus draws together extent digitized collections including al-Jāmiʿ al-kabīr, Shamela, Shiaonlinelibrary.com, hindawi.org, graeco-arabic-studies.org, and ancientwisdoms.ac.uk.
Access to Mideast and Islamic Resources (AMIR), a huge site with lots of useful materials focussing on things that are available in Open Access.
The Ancient World Online is a blog that collects materials that are available in open access concerning the ancient world.
The website of the KITAB project: Knowledge, Information Technology, and the Arabic Book.
The Digital Archive for the Study of Pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions.
Resources for Teaching Medieval Slavery.
The HMML School of Arabic Paleography.
In 2014 Bibliotheca Orientalis published an open access issue collecting articles/lists of important online tools and databases on the following topics: Egyptology (Wouter Claes &Ellen Van Keer), Greaco-Roman and Christian Egypt (Alain Delattre & Paul Heilporn), Assyriology (Dominique Charpin), Hittitology (Federico Giusfredi), Archaeology (Stefano Anastasio & Francesco Saliola), Middle Eastern Studies (Birte Kristiansen & Ronald Kon).
The Internet Islamic History Sourcebook offers a wealth of online information on especially early islam and the medieval world, including many translated medieval texts.
The Silk Road Narratives A collection of translated texts concerning the silk road (translated from multiple languages).
Mouse&manuscript a collection of lessons in codicology – the study of handwritten documents or codices – and palaeography from the Muslim world. The lessons will guide you through the ways books were made and used there before the printing press, by investigating the traces left by producers, owners and readers of manuscripts.
CrossAsia A variety of tools for digital humanities research related to Asia. In the CrossAsia Lab there are some very promising tools in Beta-stage.
Cartae Europae Medii Aevi (CEMA) website The objective of this website is to bring together different resources for the interrogation of medieval charters on a European scale.
How to continue?
On this website we offered some starting points for researching material sources of Early Islam and the Late Antique Near East. However the sources mentioned are only a fraction of what is available and of course the corpus is ever-growing. We find ourselves in a period of change, so while printed bibliographies were the standard for a long time to keep updated with the field, this is no longer the case. Books and journals are only one aspect of academic publishing, databases and other digital output are gaining importance, but are not always easy to find. Investing in search strategies can help tremendously. A few years ago our colleague Birte Kristiansen wrote an article on search strategies for Middle Eastern studies and while some of the specific databases mentioned have been taken offline in the meantime (that is how quickly the landscape changes), the explanation of the framework of the digital landscape still stands, and might help you to improve your search strategies: Digital Resources in Middle Eastern Studies