Middle East and North Africa: Photographic Collection

This monumental Library of Congress collection portrays the Ottoman Empire during the reign of one of its last sultans, Abdul-Hamid II. The 1,819 photographs in 51 large-format albums date from about 1880 to 1893.

Akkasah is home to an archive of the photographic heritage of the Middle East and North Africa

This unique resource, originally compiled by Italian photographer Luigi Fiorillo, documents the British naval attack on 'Urabi Pasha's nationalists, who revolted against Taufik Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt, from 1879 to 1882.

The American Center of Oriental Research (ACOR) in Amman, Jordan, dedicated to promoting research and publication in the humanities and social sciences, with a particular focus on issues related to Jordan and the broader region.

This collection, created by Professor Scott Noegel, documents artifacts and archaeological sites of the ancient Near East. While the majority of the collection depicts structures and sites dating from 3000 BCE to 200 CE, the collection also has images of more recent sites, such as the al-Azhar Mosque and the modern creation, Lake Nasser. Currently, all images are of Egypt and Israel, although plans exist to eventually add images from Anatolia, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

This collection contains 770 Arabic documents on papyrus and more than 1300 Arabic documents on paper, as well as several pieces on parchment. It includes a significant number of documents from the pre-Ottoman period and thus offers unique source material on the political, economic, religious and intellectual life of Egypt during the first two centuries of Islamic rule and the period up to Ottoman domination.

In September 2011 the Netherlands Institute in Turkey (NIT) has launched a project for the digitization and publication of the photographic archive of Machiel Kiel. Created for the most part between the 1960s and 90s, it also contains visual documentation of many monuments that have not survived, or have been significantly altered in, the second half of the twentieth century.

An image database of Persian historical documents from Iran and Central Asia up to the 20th Century.

The digital catalogue of views of Cairo's monumental heritage taken by Italian photographer Beniamino Facchinelli (1839-1895). The catalogue currently features 726 high-definition reproductions of images identified among the holdings of six libraries and museums across the globe.

The Origins of Doha is a UCL Qatar research project and aims to explore the foundation and historic growth of Doha, its transformation to a modern city, and the lives and experiences of its people, through a combination of archaeological investigation, historical research and oral testimony.

The Ernst Herzfeld Papers housed in the Metropolitan Museum are divided between the Department of Islamic Art and the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. The museum’s holdings consist of several thousand items from Herzfeld's archives, including photograph negatives, photographs, original drawings and paintings, clippings, correspondence, maps, sketchbooks, notebooks, squeezes and manuscripts of scholarly work.

The works of the Champollion and Rosellini expeditions are invaluable and irreplaceable because they contain information and illustrations of Egyptian monuments made early in the exploration and exploitation of that country. They are two of the oldest and most important publications to include accurate copies of reliefs and inscriptions and are still regularly consulted for many of them.

The Archives of the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery contain more than 1,100 original prints and glass plate negatives by Antoin Sevruguin and other Persian photographers, dating from the late nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century.

The collection's purpose is to expose and provide accessibility to historical photographs of the Land of Israel.

Istanbul Urban Database is an accessible, interactive mapping platform for historians, architects, city planners and other researchers to examine and contribute to the collective memory of Istanbul. This project is a sustainable platform that blends a wide range of historical data, and is the most comprehensive online archive of Istanbul’s urban history.

This rare collection have originally written with different languages; Ottoman Turkish, Turkish, English, French, Latin, Arabic and Persian. General subject boundaries are; 19th and 20th-century Turkish literature, old Istanbul books which were written by voyagers, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Empires and their foreign affairs, Turkish revolution and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

This library contains over 10,000 monographs about the Kurds, in 25 languages, several tens of thousands of published documents, collections of reviews and newspapers, photographs, videos, post cards and posters, as well as audio archives and music recordings.

The latest items in the archive date from 2007. The main regions covered are Greece, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iran and Yemen, and less extensively Spain, Italy, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt. The strengths of the collection, reflecting Fowden's research and teaching interests at different periods, are: - the relationship between settlement and landscape religious architecture, especially the conversion of holy places, monasticism, and the emergence of Islam; - art and epigraphy preserved in architectural or archaeological contexts; - traditional domestic architecture.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is proud to unveil the first part of its newly digitized archive, which consists of over half a million negatives, prints, slides, films and videocassettes covering all aspects of the life and history of Palestine refugees from 1948 to the present day.

Paul’s collection amounted to about 850 books. Later, books, documents, maps and paintings were added to the collection, now boasting approximately 2,000 books, double that number of historical documents, pamphlets and maps, paintings and photographs.

The materials selected for the debut of this evolving digital collection include classics of illustrated travel and regional archaeology, as well as the Library's earliest works of photography in the Middle East region.

This Flickr site brings together a large number of photographs of archaeological sites in both Syria and Southeast Turkey. The site gives a sample of the archive of 70,000 photos taken over the last 40 years which [the author] hopes to make available to a wider audience. In case of further inquiries, a mailbox is available either through Flickr.

A website dedicated to exhibiting 19th and 20th century photographs of the Middle East and North Africa.

As a journal of stories and critical writing about urbanism and the city, Portal 9 blends creative writing, photography, and personal essays with academic scholarship, perceptive journalism, and cultural critiques.

The site includes several audio-visual documents, including:
51,512 photographs, 1,124 portraits, 1,359 audio-visual and read speeches, 1,209 documentaries, in addition to the Nasser and Culture collection, which includes plastic and applied arts, songs of the revolution, poetry, and Nasser’s writings.

The Qatar Digital Library (QDL) is making a vast archive featuring the cultural and historical heritage of the Gulf and wider region freely available online for the first time. It includes archives, maps, manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs and much more, complete with contextualized explanatory notes and links, in both English and Arabic.

The Rare Books and Special Collections Digital Library at the American University in Cairo supports research and teaching in the arts, culture, and society of Egypt and the Middle East by providing online access to unique cultural heritage resources.

The photographs, originally sold as a boxed sets, document 19th century Egyptian culture and the history of travel in the Middle East. The wide geographic scope of its subjects spanning along the Nile River, the Suez Canal towns and the Egyptian deserts render a thorough introductory visual representation of Egypt as opposed to the contemporaneous amateur and subjectively compiled albums of its time.

The archive shows the lives of Palestine refugees since 1948, in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza.

This document provides an overview of the Waguih Ghali, a Coptic, Anglophone Egyptian write, Unpublished Papers collection, including background and origin of the collection, information about the digitization project that produced the archive, and a table of literary influences found in Ghali's diaries.

Explore the lives of women during the Qajar era (1796-1925) through a wide array of materials from private family holdings and participating institutions. Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran provides bilingual access to thousands of personal papers, manuscripts, photographs, publications, everyday objects, works of art and audio materials, making it a unique online resource for social and cultural histories of the Qajar world.