Invisible East

15/06/2026

Our Programme Director, Arezou Azad and Assistant Database Manager, Ed Shawe-Taylor will be presenting on the Invisible East Digital Corpus at this Summer School tomorrow.

Can't make it to Paris? Explore the corpus at home: www.invisible-east.org

15/06/2026

We were delighted to welcome Mr Safarov, from the Embassy of Tajikistan, to meet with Invisible East researchers in Oxford.

We visited Bodleian Libraries, together with colleagues from Wadham College, for a manuscript viewing session with Niko Kontovas.

11/06/2026

📚 Series launch for 'The Islamicate East' and 'Ancient and Medieval Afghanistan', both published by Edinburgh University Press.

📅 Wednesday 17 June, 6.30pm

📍 Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme, 54 boulevard Raspail, Paris

🔗 A few tickets remain. Book yours at:

Viens fêter les séries 'The Islamicate East' et 'Ancient and Medieval Afghanistan': table ronde, questions-réponses, réception et concert.

03/06/2026

📚 Series launch for 'The Islamicate East: New Approaches to Texts and History' and 'Ancient and Medieval Afghanistan'

📅 Wednesday 17 June, 6.30pm

📍 Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme (FMSH) at 54 boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris, France

🔗 For full information and to reserve your place: bit.ly/ParisSeriesLaunch

Viens fêter les séries 'The Islamicate East' et 'Ancient and Medieval Afghanistan': table ronde, questions-réponses, réception et concert.

02/06/2026

Our Programme Director, Arezou Azad, is speaking at an event hosted by Centre Camille Jullian and CPAF at Aix-Marseille Université tomorrow - all are welcome.

29/05/2026

We are delighted to announce that Invisible East has won the 2025 Digital Humanities award! Thank you to all those who voted for us and have supported us over the years. We dedicate this prize to the people of Bamiyan, Ghorband, Panjshir, Firuzkuh, Ghur, Qom area, and other places from which the texts in the IEDC stem, and to our 40,000 users all over the world. Your trust in, and passion for, the new history that these hitherto little-known texts reveal is truly inspiring and important !

26/05/2026

May's Document of the Month discusses a surprising phenomenon among the Cairo Geniza documents: the appearance of Muslim blessings for the prophet Muḥammad (the taṣliya) in two mercantile letters sent by twelfth-century Jewish traders in the Indian Ocean.

Read Alan Elbaum's piece now on our project website: bit.ly/DotMMay26

21/05/2026

As many of you know, we work on documents from Ghur province, and one of our researchers is from Ghur. He has means to reach the community profiled in the heartbreaking BBC piece: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0q25dwj807o These families are suffering hunger and starvation, to the point that one father says he is willing to sell his daughter to keep the family alive. We cannot just stand by and are willing to raise funds for these families through our Crowdfunder. If you would like to donate, please do so, adding "GHUR" to the comments so we know it's for them and not for our research team. Just click here: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/invisible-east-2036 . We will make sure the money reaches the families directly.

In Afghanistan today, a staggering three in four people cannot meet their basic needs.

15/05/2026

12/05/2026

Join us on Zoom tomorrow, from 5pm BST/6pm CEST, to hear Dr Nima Asefi speak on 'Documents from Turbulent Times: Studying Middle Persian Collections from the Late Sasanian and Early Islamic Periods-Opportunities and Challenges'.

Registration is essential: bit.ly/RethinkingHistoryZoom