Skip to Main Content

Middle East Studies: Sound

Guide to Middle East Studies: ancient, medieval & modern.

Middle East music collections

Arabic Wax Cylinders

  • From the Cylinder Preservation & Digitization Project, UCSB Library's Special Collections 

Golha Project

  • "The Golhā ('Flowers of Persian Song and Music') comprise 1400 radio programs consisting of approximately 886 hours of programs broadcast over a period of 23 years - from 1956 through 1979."

Iraqi Maqam

    The classical music of Iraq

Music collections worldwide

Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries

      check under these countries: Algeria, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Morocco, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Iran,             Israel-Palestine, Kazhakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkey, Yemen; and others as appropriate

Spoken Word

Sirat Bani Hilal

  • The Sirat Bani Hilal Digital Archive is devoted to preserving and making accessible to scholars and the general public original recordings and other documentation concerning the Arabic oral epic poem Sirat Bani Hilal
  • The Archive was created by Prof. Dwight Reynolds and is maintained with support of the American Council of Learned Societies and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Ottoman History Podcast

  • Published by PhD students from Georgetown University this collection contains recordings of various lengths on topics related to Ottoman history, politics, and culture (including music)
  • Each podcast is accompanied by selected bibliography on the topic