Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences

The Institute of Oriental Manuscripts (IOM) of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS; Russian: Институт восточных рукописей Российской академии наук), formerly the St. Petersburg Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is a research institute in Saint Petersburg, Russia that houses various collections of manuscripts and early printed material in Asian languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Tangut.

The origins of the IOM date back to 1818, when the Russian Academy of Sciences learned that Louis-Jacques Rousseau (1780–1831), the French consul at Aleppo and Tripoli (then both part of the Ottoman Empire), was selling his extensive collection of manuscripts written in the Arabic script.

[3] The IOM has a collection of more than 100,000 manuscripts and early printed books, encompassing about 65 different languages, including Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, Ethiopian, Georgian, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Manchu, Mongolian, Persian, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Tajik, Tangut, Tibetan, Turkic, and Uyghur.

Other Tibetan and Mongolian books were sent back to Russia by members of the Russian Spiritual Mission in China during the 19th century.

By the start of the 20th century the Asiatic Museum had the largest collection of Tibetan books and manuscripts in Europe, but it was still deficient in some areas.

[6] Kozlov unearthed thousands of manuscripts and woodblock prints, mostly written in the dead Tangut script, which had been preserved beneath the sands of Khara-Khoto.

During the first expedition Oldenburg explored a number of sites around Turpan, including Shikchin, Yarkhoto and Kucha, and collected murals, paintings, terracottas, and about one hundred manuscripts, mostly fragments written in the Brahmi script.