What is the cost of visual complexity? This dissertation sets out to determine the effect of the complexity of word formation on the legibility of Arabic and the role that vocalization plays in reading.

Palaeography of an ancient nomadic writing culture

Taught from primary school to the university level – where new courses on the globalization of the Arabic writing system have cropped up (Abdallah 2014) – the Arabic script, with all its orthographic peculiarities and multiple facets, continues to shape languages other than Arabic, their communities…

An Ancient Egyptian System of Workmen’s Identity Marks

This thesis investigates the processing of words written in Japanese kanji and Chinese hànzì, i.e. logographic scripts.

This article is aimed to shed light on the Swahili-‘Ajam ī manuscripts, focusing on the major Swahili classical genre: the

The Egyptian hieroglyphic script was exceptionally versatile, as becomes clear when studying its multiple uses both within Ancient Egypt and beyond its borders.

In this dissertation a large corpus of letter signs and texts gathered during fieldwork in Niger, and to a lesser extent Mali and Burkina Faso is used to show the graphemic diversity of the traditional script of the Tuaregs, tifinagh, and to analyze the orthographic system.

What is writing? And what looks like writing, but isn’t? The Pseudo or Don’t pop-up exhibition explores the boundaries of scripts. The exhibition will run at Oude UB from 9 to 26 October.

A flake of limestone (ostracon) inscribed with an ancient Egyptian word list of the fifteenth century BC turns out to be the world’s oldest known abecedary. The words have been arranged according to their initial sounds, and the order followed here is one that is still known today. This discovery has…

When and how was alphabetic writing introduced to Greece and the wider Mediterranean region?

Welcome to the |0100| blog where our team will be sharing insights from the field and contributing to the various discussions and debates around AI, Islam and scripting futures.

With our research and teaching, we help make the world a better place. We join in the academic and public debate, and seek answers to economic and social issues – not just at the local and regional level but at the global one too.

In this thesis, we study different curved single crystals because of the diversity of surface structures across their curvature.

This lecture will be hosted on Thursday, 5 February 2026 at 6:00 pm.

On the 6th of January, Kefan Bao successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Kefan on this achievement!

Lecture, Keynote

Overview of the main research projects at the Leiden Papyrological Institute.

University Library, Witte Singel 27, 2311 BG, Leiden

Herta Mohr, Witte Singel 27A, 2311 BG, Leiden

Herta Mohr, Witte Singel 27A, 2311 BG, Leiden

University Library, Witte Singel 27, 2311 BG, Leiden

Herta Mohr, Witte Singel 27A, 2311 BG, Leiden

University Library, Witte Singel 27, 2311 BG, Leiden

University Library, Witte Singel 27, 2311 BG, Leiden

This volume contains the first edition of 66 papyri and ostraca in the collection of the Leiden Papyrological Institute.

The LIAS Office conducts the Institute's administration. Please feel free to stop by for information or assistance.

Address and contact information.

Please feel free to stop by for information or assistance.

How do dissociative states affect the ability to suppress emotional distraction (in the context of a working memory task) in patients with Borderline Personality Disorder?

Research goal: To support the design of technologies (counter-measures and communication measures) for the prevention, interdiction and mitigation of lone actor extremist events (LOEEs), which are hard to anticipate, yet can be highly damaging to local and national communities and therefore must be…

Hieratic Papyrology

Evert Jan van Leeuwen’s entry in Auteur Press’s Devil's Advocate series provides a complete study of the aesthetic appeal of Roger Corman's influential first Poe picture House of Usher.

News, events, announcements, social media and more about the building of the new Middle Eastern Library in Leiden

The basic program comprises a total of twelve courses organized by the Research School, that have been purpose-developed for training and support of PhD students and Research MA students who specialize in Medieval Studies (history, art history, and literary history, in particular).

Leiden University offers courses about papyri and papyrology for beginners and more advanced students (BA and MA), both based on texts in translation as well as in the original source languages, from Egyptian to Greek, Latin and Arabic.

The |0100| Project studies the discourses, practices and imaginaries of Islamic information society’s most debated component- Artificial Intelligence- using multimodal and mixed methods and comparing and contrasting narratives and imagery of AI-religious-futures in Muslim Southeast Asia.

How did the medieval manuscript develop as a physical object during the Twelfth Century Renaissance and what do these changes tell us about the intellectual culture of the period?

This 25th volume in the series 'Islam in Africa', edited by Annachiara Raia, is a pioneering collection of poetry by the outstanding Kenyan poet, intellectual and imam Ustadh Mahmmoud Mau (born 1952) from Lamu island, once an Indian Ocean hub, now on the edge of the nation state.

My artistic practice deals with documents and, more specifically, with the use and the exploration of their narrative potential.

Asim Zubcevic defended his thesis on 11 November 2015

The present monograph, spanning a wide range of world and local literatures represents a high academic standard of both literary criticism and philological analysis. By demonstrating her expertise as an Africanist conversant with the Arabic canon, Raia reveals how the narrative of Joseph has been re-narrated…