Al-Burdah: High-Resolution Digital Manuscript of a 13th-Century Arabic Poem

A 607.7 MB high-resolution digital copy of manuscript HC.MS.00310 from the Qatar National Library Heritage Collection. The manuscript contains the poem 'Al-Burdah' or 'Al-Kawakib al-Durriyah fi Madh Khayr al-Bariyah' by the 13th-century poet Al-Busiri. The dataset was published by Qatar National Library under a CC0 1.0 license and last updated in June 2026.

Use Cases

• Train or evaluate OCR models based on high-resolution scans of classical Arabic calligraphy.
• Analyze poetic structure and language in a foundational work of Islamic praise literature.
• Study manuscript digitization and preservation techniques for cultural heritage materials.
• Conduct textual analysis on a widely circulated and influential Arabic poem.

Strengths

• High-resolution digital master copy suitable for detailed analysis.
• Source manuscript is from a known heritage collection (QNL HC.MS.00310).
• Released under a permissive public domain license (CC0 1.0).

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The dataset's 607.7 MB size suggests it is primarily image files, with text content likely not in a machine-readable, structured format.

Provenance

Source

Qatar National Library Heritage Collection, manuscript HC.MS.00310.

Collection Method

Digitization of a physical manuscript.

Time Range

The original poem dates to the 13th century; digitization date is unknown.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-03 09:23:10; freshness should be verified.