In April 2024, CBRL received a grant from The Al Tajir Trust for the digital re-publication of Ottoman Jerusalem: The Living City: 1517-1917 along with the digitisation of valuable drawings and photographs from the Mamluk Jerusalem survey, currently housed at the Kenyon Institute in Jerusalem. Once digitised, both volumes of Ottoman Jerusalem: The Living City: 1517-1917 will be made available online for anyone to read, through JSTOR open-access, hosted by CBRL. The Mamluk Jerusalem archival collection will eventually be accessible through CBRL’s forthcoming digital repository.   

This project builds on the strong foundation of a previous grant from The Al Tajir Trust in 2022 to digitise Mamluk Jerusalem: An Architectural Study by Michael Burgoyne (1987) and protect the unpublished archive of photographs and drawings associated with the Medieval and Ottoman architectural survey held at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem (formerly the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem) that led to the Islamic Jerusalem publication series. This volume is now available on JSTOR and an online exhibition of photographs and materials from the unpublished archive is available here.   

The project is underway, and so far, the project team has been thrilled to look through the materials and anticipate the value of the materials, and the volumes, being accessible to a wider audience.   

Currently working on the project is local specialist in Mamluk Jerusalem architecture, Qasem Abu Harb, an Archivist and Librarian at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, and Clara Ewert, an archivist who worked with CBRL previously on the Endangered Archive Programme grant this past year.   

Please see the link to Mamluk Jerusalem: An Architectural Study for more stories about the Mamluk Archive.