Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
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The Centre Numérique des Manuscrits Orientaux (CNMO) is a digitization and archiving initiative based in Erbil, Iraq, dedicated to preserving the manuscript heritage of Christian communities in Iraq and the broader Middle East. Founded by Father Najeeb Michaeel, OP, a Dominican monk who later became the Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Mosul, the project emerged from a need to rescue ancient Oriental manuscripts threatened by conflict and instability.
The CNMO was originally established in Qarah Qūsh (also known as Bakhdida), Iraq, and worked in close partnership with the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) at Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. When Mosul fell to Islamic State forces in 2014, Father Najeeb organized the evacuation of irreplaceable manuscripts from the region, though thousands were lost or destroyed. CNMO and its remaining holdings relocated to Erbil, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The Topotheque online platform, developed by the Austrian Topothek organization, was adopted to create a publicly accessible emergency digital backup of the rescued materials, preserving over 12,500 photographs and documents.
The CNMO archive holds digitized images of Syriac, Arabic, Arabic Garshuni, Neo-Aramaic, Armenian, Turkish, Persian, Greek, Kurdish, French, and other manuscripts from dozens of ecclesiastical collections across Iraq. Holdings span the 13th to the 20th centuries and include liturgical texts, biblical manuscripts, and historical records belonging to the Chaldean Catholic Church, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Syrian Orthodox Church, the Syrian Catholic Church, and associated institutions. Over 520 manuscripts from 49 private collections have been catalogued in cooperation with HMML.
The archive is accessible online via the Topotheque platform at cnmo.topotheque.net. Users can browse and search digitized images of manuscripts and historical documents. The CNMO collection is also accessible through HMML's vHMML Reading Room, which provides a scholarly environment for manuscript studies. The project continues to expand as Father Najeeb and a team of displaced Iraqi refugees work to locate and digitize additional collections.
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