This book includes a collection of early source documents focused on the history of the pre-modern Middle East.  The Middle East has a long history of producing various types of literature, which includes contracts, commercial documents, record keeping documentation, religious texts, political treatises, private correspondence, biographical literature, fictional or epic literature, histories, legal discourses, panegyric tracts, scientific and medical studies, humorous or whimsical stories and much more.   This documentation has long been highly valued by historians seeking to learn more about the great Middle Eastern civilizations of the past.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, Western scholars, known as Orientalists, translated many of these texts into European languages.  In the past few decades, several readers have been published that provide excerpts of Middle Eastern historical texts in translation, making them available to students who are not fluent in the Arabic, Turkish or Persian languages.  However, all of these collections have focused primarily on Middle Eastern documents from the modern period (i.e. from the nineteenth century on).  Despite the fact that quite a few important pre-modern Middle Eastern texts have been translated into English, no introductory collection of these texts was available for use by university students who are studying the history of the pre-modern Middle East prior to the publication of my 2020 reader, Pre-Modern Middle East History, with Cognella Academic Publishing.

I have also assembled this open educational textbook out of a desire to provide access for students who may have difficulty purchasing the Cognella reader.  As with all early sources, there is much that we can learn from these texts about the societies that produced them.  Where it is possible to link to these texts without violating copyright laws, I have done so.  In other cases, I have provided short excerpts that fall within the parameters of fair use guidelines.  For a few of these texts, I have opted to provide password protected links to excerpts for students in my classes.

As with all OER texts, this book is a work in progress.  I plan to continually refine and improve upon it in the coming months and years.  My hope is that you will enjoy connecting with the voices of men and women from centuries past, who introduce us to societies that most Americans are unfamiliar with, and that you will leave with a greater appreciation for the amazing civilizations that have inhabited the Middle East over the past few millennia.

If there are concerns about the copyright status of any of the content included here, please contact Mandi Goodsett at a.goodsett@csuohio.edu.