Collections of Islamic manuscripts in the former Soviet Union and their cataloguing

Vast regions of the former Soviet Union have had a long Islamic past, in which a rich, diverse literature has played its part thousands of texts have been repeatedly copied. The earliest inscriptions and documents in Arabic to appear in Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus date from the beginning of the second/eighth centuries, and it was not much later that the first books were written. From the 160s/760s, Samarkand became a centre for paper production and supplied it to the whole Islamic world for almost two hundred years.