This dataset comprises 120 digitised images (TIFF files) drawn from a selection of historical Arabic scientific manuscripts (10th-19th century) digitised through the British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership. Also contained are ground truth transcriptions (XML) for each page that can be used for training optical character recognition (OCR) or handwritten text recognition (HTR) software on historical Arabic handwritten texts. The folder contains the images and ground truth used for the RASM2018 and RASM2019 competitions, part of ICFHR 2018 and ICDAR 2019. The images are out of copyright and the transcriptions are also public domain.