Egypt
The largest continuous publishing record in the Arab world, held across four institutions and gathered under legal deposit since 1870. We are licensing the twentieth-century technical, scientific, legal and periodical record, along with the manuscript collections.
Arabic-language items identified
Estimated tokens after transcription
Source institutions
Continuous legal deposit since
Egypt corpus, revision 2026.09. Every figure is sourced on the provenance record.
Source institutions
Four holders, one legal-deposit tradition running back to 1870. The holdings below are the institutions’ own published counts.
Egyptian National Library & Archives
Cairo
Egypt's legal deposit library since 1870. Every title published in Egypt flows here by statute, which makes it the most complete record of Egyptian printing in existence.
- Arabic monographs
- 1,052,600
- Arabic periodicals, bound
- 240,000 vols
- Manuscript volumes
- 59,321
- Legal deposit intake
- 7,218 / yr
Bibliotheca Alexandrina
Alexandria
Successor to the Mouseion, and home to a working digitization facility that imaged 5.3 million pages in its first twelve months of operation.
- Printed items
- ~2,000,000
- Rare books
- 15,000+
- Rare periodicals
- 700 titles / 54,000 issues
al-Azhar Library
Cairo
The Islamic scholarship collection, continuously assembled since 1897 and among the most significant manuscript holdings anywhere in the world.
- Rare manuscripts
- ~34,000
- Printed books
- not published
Egyptian university system
Cairo, Alexandria, Ain Shams, Assiut, Mansoura
Masters and doctoral research written in native technical Arabic — medicine, engineering, agriculture, law — deposited across the national university system.
- Theses & dissertations
- deposited nationally
- AUC print volumes
- 566,949
Collections
What we are licensing from the Egyptian record, and how much of it there is.
Technical, scientific & legal print
Medicine, engineering, agriculture, economics, education, jurisprudence and government publication. Native Arabic written at length by specialists, across the whole twentieth century.
The twentieth-century press
Bound runs from 1828 onward: al-Ahram, al-Hilal, al-Muqtataf, al-Musawwar, Akhbar al-Yawm, Rose al-Yusuf. Already microfilmed, so these move through production fastest.
Theses & dissertations
Masters and doctoral work deposited across the Egyptian university system — sustained technical Arabic prose, written by subject specialists and never published commercially.
Manuscripts
Unique physical objects held nowhere else. Delivered as page images at manuscript resolution, which is the form required to train handwriting recognition for Arabic script.
Next regions
The same method, applied to the printed records we are scoping next.
Middle East
Arabic
Jordan and Saudi Arabia first, then the rest of the region's national and university libraries.
East Africa
Swahili
More than a hundred million speakers, and a printed record out of all proportion to what exists online.