Miftah al-Miftah: A 13th-Century Persian Scientific Manuscript from Qatar

Qatar National Library provides a 21.1 GB high-resolution digital copy of the manuscript 'Miftah al-Miftah' by Qutb al-Shirazi. The work is a 13th-century Persian commentary on scientific topics, digitized from the library's heritage collection. The dataset was last updated on 2026-05-04 and is released under a CC0 1.0 public domain license.

Use Cases

• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) training for historical Arabic-script manuscripts based on high-resolution page images.
• Textual analysis of 13th-century Persian scientific commentary based on the transcribed content.
• Digital preservation studies based on the high-resolution scanning methodology.

Strengths

• Large 21.1 GB file size indicates high-resolution image scans suitable for detailed analysis.
• Released under a permissive CC0 1.0 public domain license, allowing broad reuse.
• Directly sourced from the Qatar National Library's heritage collection, providing authoritative provenance.

Limitations

• The specific number of manuscript pages or rows of text is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation for any transcribed text is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality and completeness require manual inspection after download.

Provenance

Source

Qatar National Library Heritage Collection (manuscript HC.MS.02205).

Collection Method

High-resolution digital master copy creation of a physical manuscript.

Time Range

Manuscript authored in the 13th century (author lived 1236/7-1310/11).

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-04 05:46:48; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Likely Persia (based on author Qutb al-Shirazi); held in Qatar.