Michael Erdman

The British Library · Middle East and Central Asia

The study of language and script change among the Turkic communities of the Soviet Union often focuses on the switch from Arabic to Latin scripts. Less attention is paid to adaptations of the Arabic script to Turkic vernaculars, and to attempts aimed at convincing the literate masses of their usefulness. In the current paper, I aim to do just that....

In this book chapter, I explore the creation of markers for Turkmen identity in the magazine Tyrkmen Medenijeti. Published in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the periodical was a forum for experimentation in language and expression of national characteristics. It was also one of the early victims of the Stalinist wing's narrowing of intellectual an...

In the age of big data, small collections are often overlooked. Too numerically few to cause waves, the issues and problems that affect them are rarely addressed by cataloguing institutions. In the present paper, the author focuses on one such collection – holdings of Siberian Turkic materials at the British Library – to explore how homogenizing tr...

Language is a crucial component of categorizing and contextualizing manuscripts. At times, curators and cataloguers have noted the "incorrect" orthographies of manuscript texts, positioning them in relation to orthographic standards that might be anachronistic or constructed post-factum. In the current paper, I argue that such categorization create...

The national idea is largely recognised to have arrived in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. It first took root in the Empire’s Christian population, particularly in the Balkans, but later spread to other regions and confessions. Religion continued to be an important factor in everyday life and administration, but it was also increasing...

In this chapter, I explore the construction of the Turkish and Turkic collections at the British Library, with a particular eye to the colonialist and orientalist ideologies that underpin them. I investigate provenance and the lack of information about it; strategies of acquiring and accounting for contemporary collections; and potential solutions...

In this chapter, I explain the Garshuni system of recording Arabic and how to read it. After first exploring the historical contexts in which Garshuni is found, I provide an overview of the mapping of the letters to Arabic graphemes, and their transliteration into the Latin script. I end with examples of texts from a variety of Garshuni Arabic manu...

In this article, published in INFOLIB, the journal of the National Library of Uzbekistan, I explore the rich diversity of Turkic lects recorded in the British Library's Chagatai Collections. I problematize the use of the word "Chagatai" and ask how we might go about identifying linguistic communities from which items were sourced, as well as the so...

The author of the article investigates the problems of cataloging and curatorship in the British Chagatai Manuscript Library. It starts with a brief overview of some of the previous work done to catalog manuscripts, and then an overview of how these collections compare to those of other institutions in Western Europe. In doing so, the author provid...

The current work is an exploration of the life and linguistic scholarship of the Crimean Tatar linguist Bekir Çobanzade. In it, I pay particular attention to the impact of the author's socio-political environment, especially the rise of Stalinism, on his works relating to the history and classification of the Turkic languages. I demonstrate how the...

Published in the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchal Journal (ISSN 2414-6986), this paper explores Syriac elements in Arabic written documentation from the Mont Liban region created between the 16th and 19th centuries.

In this paper, I reflect on the discipline of historiography and its application to conflict resolution. I start from concepts found in the phenomenological writings of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I expand upon these to discuss the concept of positionality within time and space to uncover the context-specificity of nationalist his...

In this paper, I examine common themes in the writings of Ziya Gökalp and Michel Aflaq. Rather than seeking to establish the direct or indirect influence of the former on the latter, I explore the manner in which common concepts of the interaction between the individual and the state persisted throughout the former Ottoman Empire. I problematize th...

This study problematizes the coup d’état of 12 September 1980, perpetrated by a group of high-ranking Turkish military officers against the elected government of Süleyman Demirel, and its relationship to class dynamics in late 1970’s Turkey. The paper works backwards from the effects of the coup and the policies implemented by both the military rég...