An Ottoman Turkish translation of Zekeriyyâ el-Kazvînî's Acâibü'l-Mahlûkat ve Garâibü'l-Mevcûdât, the Wonders of Creation: a cosmography of the marvels of everything made — heavens and stars, angels, seas and their islands, animals, stones, plants. This copy is Walters Art Museum W.659, made in 1121 AH / 1717 CE: 608 folios, 263 of them illustrated, in the public domain.

There are two ways to read it. Compare sets the page image beside its lines: for each line the Arabic-script text, a transliteration and a literal gloss that keeps the manuscript's own word order. Hover a line and it lights up on the page. Reading leaves only the flowing translation, with the miniatures where they stand in the text; click a sentence to jump to its lines.

In Reading, a sentence marked with an asterisk (*) rests on a reading no human has approved yet. The asterisk takes you to the note at the end of the page: how the word was read, what else it could be, and why. Readings settled from context carry no asterisk but keep their note. We would rather show the doubt than guess past it.

So far 27 folios have been read and 3 blank leaves marked. Across them 113 readings await human approval and 111 have been resolved or approved. The English translation is ready for 27 of them.

The manuscript has been around for three hundred years, yet it stays closed to almost every reader. Here each folio has its own address and the text is part of the page itself; nothing to sign up for, nothing to download.