Baghdad is home to a number of important Syriac and Christian Arabic manuscript collections, several of which remain uncatalogued. The work on the forty-three manuscripts catalogued here was done in 1997, and at the time they were housed in the Iraqi Centre of Manuscripts in Baghdad. Given the precariousness of the fate of manuscripts in many parts of the Middle East it is very good that Harrak has provided detailed descriptions of these manuscripts which range in date from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, and which come from six different communities (though the provenance of the majority is either the Church of the East or the Chaldean Church). Despite the comparatively late date of the manuscripts, there is a great deal here of interest for the history and literature of the communities which produced them, as Harrak points out in his extended and very helpful introduction. The history of the various Syriac communities during the last half-millennium has to be stitched together from all sorts of incidental pieces of information often only to be found in colophons of manuscripts, and it is for this reason above all that scholars will be grateful to Harrak for his careful work in compiling this catalogue. Finally, it is worth noting that among the manuscripts are some rare examples of collections of vernacular Aramaic poems.