The first academic periodical of the Asiatic Museum (now: the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts) of the Russian Academy of Sciences “Mélanges Asiatiques” was published in French in 1849. Later on, the Asiatic Museum / the Institute of Oriental Studies in Leningrad was publishing “Proceedings of the Collegiums of Orientalists”, “Proceedings of the Institute of Oriental Studies”, “Academic Proceedings”, “Transactions of the Istitute of Oriental Studies” and others. From 1966 to 1991 Leningrad Branch of the Institute of the Peoples of Asia / Leningrad Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences (now: the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts) published 24 volumes of reports delivered at the LB IOS USSR AS Annual Conference which were called “Written Monuments and Problems of the Cultural History of the Peoples of the Orient” in 1966-1989.

In 1970, the first volume of the annual "Pis'mennye pamiatniki Vostoka" was published. Ten volumes of this annual contained articles studying principles of publication of written monuments of the Orient and analyzing literary monuments and historical sources. It also contained works on written monuments publication, description of manuscripts, reviews of manuscript collections and publications. The annual was mainly addressed to Orientalists – historians, philologists, and those working in the interdisciplinary fields.

Since 2004, the journal "Pis'mennye pamiatniki Vostoka" is being published by the initiative of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences as a periodical; since 2016 with a frequency of 4 issues per year.