QNL Manuscript HC.MS.00363: A 1551 Arabic Astronomical Treatise

Qatar National Library provides a 339.4 MB high-resolution digital master copy of manuscript HC.MS.00363 from its Heritage Collection. The manuscript, titled 'Al-Mufaḍḍal fī al-'amal bi-niṣf dā'irat al-mu'addal', was authored by Abd al-Aziz ibn Muhammad al-Wafa'i and dates to 1551. The dataset was last updated on April 30, 2026, and is released under a CC0 1.0 license.

Use Cases

• Train optical character recognition (OCR) models for historical Arabic script based on the high-resolution manuscript images.
• Conduct historical and linguistic analysis of 16th-century Arabic scientific terminology.
• Perform digital preservation and restoration analysis using the high-resolution master copy.
• Study the transmission of astronomical knowledge in the Islamic scholarly tradition.

Strengths

• High-resolution digital master copy suitable for detailed analysis.
• Clear provenance from the Qatar National Library Heritage Collection.
• Released under a permissive CC0 1.0 public domain license.
• Specific manuscript date (1551) and author (Abd al-Aziz ibn Muhammad al-Wafa'i) are provided.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality and structure require manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The dataset's 339.4 MB size suggests it is primarily image-based, which may limit direct computational analysis without preprocessing.

Provenance

Source

Qatar National Library Heritage Collection.

Collection Method

Digitization of a physical manuscript.

Time Range

Manuscript dated 1551.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-30 08:47:34; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Likely associated with the Arabic-speaking scholarly world of the 16th century; specific origin unknown.