History of a book: The Gospel in Arabic is discovered in the library of Bashkortostan

Employees of the Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books of the National Library of Bashkiria have found a unique gospel in Arabic script, released in 1820 by Scottish missionaries, among 40 thousand books.

At the beginning of XIX century, Emperor Alexander I allowed Western missionaries to work among Muslims in the North Caucasus. In 1802, the Scottish Missionary Society has received permission to open a mission near the village Sultanali Karras (near-Beshtau Pyatigorsk), in 1804 from Scotland it was brought a printing house of the quality of Arabic and Turkish fonts with the European, and in 1815 the company opened the mission in Astrakhan and Orenburg. In Astrakhan from Karras four Scottish families moved, as well as it was transported a printing house, which was called typography of a missionary John Mitchell.

As reported, the found in the library Gospel is published "on the literary language of West Kipchak of the Turks, and close to the Karachay-Balkar, and other western Kipchak language".

According to the library, the collections of the department stored three books published in the print shop of John Mitchell. Besides the discovered Gospel, there is also the Holy Gospel, published in 1818, as well as the Bible of the Old Testament, published in 1819.

The presence of these books in the holdings of the library has great scientific value, since the most of the books have not survived. Currently, they are of great value for the study of both ancient and modern languages of Russia.

The National Library of Bashkiria is a national repository of documents, the Republican center of scientific research in the field of library science, bibliography and book science. The holdings of the library include more than 3 million copies of the documents in all fields in more than 20 languages. More than 1 million copies are of the special fund of technical literature. Library stores manuscripts of the 15-16 centuries (over 200 copies) in philosophy, logic, folk medicine, law, linguistics, the first and the lifetime editions of famous Russian writers, works of Oriental writers, published in the 18-19 centuries.