ISAP IX Conference 2023 Abstracts

Coptic Manuscripts and their Inscribers in Fatimid Egypt

Wafaa Abdel Wahaab, Fayoum University, Egypt

During the Fatimid’s regime in Egypt (969-1171), the distinct traditional languages of Christian Egypt, the Greek and Coptic, declined, until they were no longer in use in daily life, after their replacement by the Arabic language. Since then, the Christian and Coptic literary traditions started to be written in Arabic. The remaining Coptic resources, however, were numerous after this radical linguistic shift. Nevertheless, they came to represent a detached linguistic tradition survived by chance.
Although the usage of the Coptic language ended at that time, limited numbers of invaluable manuscripts were obtained from the libraries of churches and monasteries. They are preserved now in the libraries of various institutions and establishments around the world. Among these manuscripts is the Esna-Edfu Codex, the focus of this research paper, found in Saint Mercurius Monastery’s library. The codex, found in the early 20th century, consists of numerous manuscripts full of transcribers, languages, and different texts, and is preserved now in the British Library of London. It includes 24 manuscripts, nine belonging to St. Mercurius Church, near Edfu, one to Angel Michael’s Temple, one to Anba Haroun’s Temple, in the desert near Edfu, and two to Saint Gabriel’s Church, in Esna. Moreover, the codex contains five manuscripts by the inscriber Victor ben Makarios, deacon of St. Makarios Church in Esna, and three ones copied by the tenth-century inscribers of the library as well as the deacons of John the Baptist Church’s library in the same region.
The study of these manuscripts calls forth significant linguistic, cultural, and social questions such as why were they written in Coptic instead of the common Arabic by then? Was it due to the preservation of the Coptic legacy? Or benediction? What is the type of their texts? Their date? Inscribers? What are their subjects? Were they sermons, eulogies, or heaven/hell tours? How did society influence their contents? What was the economical role played by their inscription? And what were its effects upon Esna-Edfu regions and the inscribers?

The Office of Commander of the Faithful in the Third Century AH: New Papyri Evidence.

Asmahan Abu-Alasaad, Egyptian National Library, Arabic Papyri Department, Egypt

This paper studies unpublished Arabic papyrus from the collection of the Egyptian National Library: (P. Cair. EgLib. inv. 781 r, v- 13 cm height x 18 cm width). The document contains an official letter concerning the Office of Commander of the Faithful and other matters relating to financial administration in the third century AH/ ninth century CE.
The document records an official letter from the Office of Commander of the Faithful (Dīwān Amīr Al-muʾminīn) concerning the administrative proceedings of measuring and registering the Commander of the Faithful land tax (kharāj Amīr Al-muʾminīn). This document also provides information about several officials and employees who work at Commander of the Faithful’s tax office, for example, 41 weighing officers, guides, tax collectors, witnesses, trustees, and tax administrators. While the tax offices and other types of offices (such as the Office of Accounts, the Office of Correspondence, the Office of Supervision, the Office of the Audit. etc.) are attested in documentary and literary sources. While (Dīwān Amīr Al-muʾminīn) is a rare term, scarcely appeared in a few literary sources, appearing in a way irrelevant to the function or the duties of this office, but rather a mere anecdote.
The text raises several interesting points and problematic questions for discussion:
A. What was the function of the Office of Commander of the Faithful, and especially, was this office responsible for collecting land tax?
B. What was the hierarchy and relationship between the Estate Office, Land Tax Office, and the Office of Commander of the Faithful?
C. Also, the term Dīwān Amīr Al-muʾminīn implies a private treasury. If true, why did the scribe use this term rather than directly refer to a private treasury?
In this paper, I present a preliminary edition of the documents, and study them compared to the relevant information mentioned in literary sources and other official letters from the third century A.H.

Reporting and investigating burglary and housebreaking: unpublished document from the Egyptian National Library

Hazem Hussein Abbas Ali, Beni-Suef University, Egypt & Middle East College, Muscat

The paper document P.CAIR No. 771 Recto and Verso (card number 4568, 4568 A) is currently housed in the Egyptian National Library collection, contains a description of burglary and housebreaking.
It seems that some of individuals in the village were responsible for preserving the people's deposits of wheat and barley which is called "Matmur"(a warehouse where crops are kept).
From the context of the document, it seems also that its creator has an administrative capacity in the village. He draws up the document based on listening to the complainant's statements, and the thief is brought to him, who confesses his crime, he also counts the number of missing items.
It seems also that the addressee holds an administrative position, and his share of the barley has been stolen. It is a part of the daily life of the villagers.

Healing a Woman in Labor: Uncommon Miracle in Coptic Martyrdoms

Christine Ayad, Fayoum University, Egypt

Most of the Coptic Martyrdoms that were recompiled and copied between 8th and 10th century are epic passions which are far from what is called “real history”. The martyrdoms followed certain literary patterns which barely changed from passion to passion. Thus it came to our interest, when we find something doesn’t follow one of the common patterns.
One of these patterns is the miracles done by the martyr. This research is interested only in the martyrdoms classified as Julian Cycle only. These miracles are modeled on biblical miracles, especially those done by Jesus himself. The most common miracles mentioned in the Julian cycle martyrdoms are related to healing blinds, lames, exorcism …. etc.
However there is an only miracle mentioned which doesn’t follow the biblical patterns. The miracle is related to healing a woman who had difficulties in birth, and through the prayers of the saint to her, she gave birth naming her son by the name of the Saint.
However this miracle doesn’t follow a biblical pattern, it is repeated in about five martyrdoms from the Julian cycle. The miracle is mentioned in the martyrdoms of Apa Epima, Apa Camoul, Apa Apatil, Apa Didyme, Apa Nahroou.
It is known that Coptic martyrdoms that were written between the 8th and 10th century, they were composed in rural communities to be read in rural communities. Since the mentioned above miracle doesn’t follow the common literary patterns, it comes to our mind that it might have a relation with this rural society, so it attracted the attention of the authors.
Egypt, especially the Fallahin or rural communities, they gave pregnancy and childbirth special care. When a woman in Fallahin doesn’t bear, or lose her child, this causes a deep grief in the whole family. And it comes to their mind directly that there is an evil work. From here comes the relation between the miracle mentioned and the rural communities.
This paper will go further to illustrate the relation between the mind set of Fallahin regarding pregnancy and childbirth and the miracle mentioned.

The possession, tenancy and cultivation of  land in pre-modern Nubia as seen through archaeological, literary and documentary sources

Tomasz Barański, University of Warsaw, Poland

After the disintegration of the Christian Nubian states of Makuria and Alwa, the territory of Middle Nile Valley, reaching from Aswan beyond the sixth cataracts, was open for increased Arab infiltration especially from Egypt. Since that time, the latter was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire which exercised power also over some Nubians as far south as Qasr Ibrim, and temporally even on the island of Saï. The new political situation did not changed the land cultivation system in general, which continued centuries-old agricultural traditions. The inhabitants of the Nile valley, however, faced new problems and challenges as for instance: the introduction of new types of crops and external markets expectation that, together with other factors, influenced patterns of the land use. Some changes were significant only for the Egyptian land holders others influenced Nubian peasants as well.
In my paper I will try to determine to what extent the situation in the Egyptian countryside in the Ottoman period can be compared to the land cultivation in Nubia at the time. Furthermore, it is particularly interesting to highlight the possible differences between Lower Nubia, governed by Turks, and the Dongola Reach, being under the influence of the Funj Sultanate. Some already published documents from Qasr Ibrim as well as newly found texts from Old Dongola allow us to develop further investigation on the land management and agricultural techniques in this period. The memoirs of the early modern European travellers, land charters from Sennar and archaeological artefacts are going to be used in the discussion of some general ideas on the pre-modern landholding and agriculture technology in the Middle Nile Valley as proposed previously, among others, by Anders Bjørkelo, Rex O'Fahey, Jay Spaulding, and Intisar el-Zein Soughayroun.

Building a church; a late Coptic letter

Rudeina Bayoumi, Fayoum University, Egypt

Coptic letters are considered one of the most distinguished types of Coptic documentary texts, as they are the largest in number among Coptic texts, and they were known from the beginning of the emergence of Coptic texts until its demise. In addition to the various topics presented by these letters, which show us various aspects of people's daily life in this period, as well as the different formulas, expressions and words, it gives us a lot of information about the nature of interactions between individuals with each other or with different institutions (religious or governmental), in addition to the various distinctive formulas which varies according to the personality of the sender and addressee, which also helps to identify the possible region which the letter came from. As for the late letters (dated roughly from the middle of the ninth to the eleventh centuries) are distinguished from others because they help in understanding the nature of the social interaction between on one hand Christians and Muslims, and on the other hand between Egyptians and Arabs. It also shows an overlap between languages, as the Egyptians used many Arabic words and expressions in these late Coptic letters.
This paper will deal with one of these late Coptic letters; the letter is almost complete text. The letter was written on the back side of a papyrus that originally contained Arabic text, but it is incomplete. The content of the letter is interesting and not very common, as it deals with some of the details belongs to building a church by a group of brothers (monks) who ask the fathers to pray and bless their work in this church, and mentioned some of building construction process, and the building materials of local area.

Peasants, Merchants, and Taxation in post-Abbasid Egypt

Lorenzo Bondioli, University of Cambridge, England

This paper analyzes the intertwining of land taxation and merchant capital in the Egyptian countryside between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Triangulating between Judeo-Arabic Geniza documents, Arabic papyrus and paper documents, and fiscal manuals penned by Egyptian bureaucrats, this paper will chronicle the unfolding of a profound transformation in the rural economy of Egypt, arguing that Abbasid taxation policies opened the way for the rise of new class of merchant capitalists who invested large amounts of money in market-oriented agricultural production.
Eager to monetize Egypt’s exceptional fertility to finance their imperial ambitions, the Abbasids and their regional successors turned away from a millennial tradition of tax collection in kind, decidedly tipping the balance in favor of taxation in cash. As a result, peasant households who previously surrendered a portion of their harvest now had to sell a much-increased share of their produce to procure tax-money. The whole system would not have worked had Egyptian merchants not been ready to invest staggering amounts of money-capital in the purchase of this produce.
At first, this investment took the form of advance sales to merchants – a form of credit allowing peasants to borrow money to meet taxes due ahead of harvesttime by using their future harvest as security. By the eleventh century, the system had further evolved, as particularly wealthy and well-connected merchants started striking deals with the state to pay taxes on behalf of peasants, acquiring in return a state-backed claim to their produce.
By documenting the symbiotic ascent of monetized taxation and merchant capital, this paper sheds new light on the political economy of the Egyptian countryside at a key moment of transformation, describing the rise and entrenchment of new forms of capital-intensive agrarian commercialization that were to have a long and lasting influence on the subsequent history of Egypt.

Bulğusūq in the 5th/11th Century: A Micro-Historical Analysis of some Real-Estate Sale Contracts

Farouk Bouaziz, University of Tunis, Tunisia

Among the Arabic papyri edited by Adolf Grohmann in the first volume of his APEL, one can find a series of five sale contracts (i.e., P.Cair.Arab. 54, 61, 62, 63 and 67) all coming from Bulğusūq, a village in the Fayoum district, (probably ancient Κερκεσουχα ῎Ορους) and dating back to the second quarter of the 5th/11th century (between 423/1032 and 450/1058). These legal deeds deal with the transfer of property of some parts or shares of real estates, mostly residential ones, which seem to be finally gathered in the hands of someone named Abū al-Sarī b. Helia b. Rafrafīl, the Christian, and his sons Abnīla and Abū al-Badr. However, a closer reading suggests family inheritance issues within this Coptic family.
Therefore, it seems interesting to study the story of these properties and their dependencies especially since they contain some problematic appellations and descriptions such as al-qūrāh or al-qawrā’, al-mu‘awwal, al-usṭuwān or al-usṭuwānī, al-ḫalā’, al-qirmāṣ… Thus, a lexicographical analysis of these uncommon terms may lead to a more accurate understanding of the rustic buildings in the Fayoum during the medieval era, in comparison of other Egyptian localities. Moreover, the formulas of identification of the properties, which are followed by sections that specify their topographical locations and the description of their boundaries offer some hints of the landscape of this village during the first half of the 5th/11th century and its mutations. On the other hand, these documents reveal the social dynamics, particularly those relevant to familial relationships, inheritance, joint ownership, and neighborhood, not only between the parties of the contracts but also with their close environment, almost occupied by the Coptic community. In consequence, a social network analysis based on comparison of these deeds of sale with other Fayoumic documents, mainly contemporary ones, may contribute to an informative micro-historical essay about this not very well-known village and its inhabitants during the Fatimid period.

Edfu Language Transition from Coptic to Arabic: The Testimony of unedited Coptic and Arabic Ostraca: A first report of IMHOTEP Project

Anne Boud’hors, CNRS, France, Ahmed Nakshara, Ain Shams University, Egypt, Ahmed Nabil, University of Sadat City, Egypt, Maher Eissa, Fayoum University, Egypt

IMHOTEP is a scientific cooperation funding program that finances the mobility of two research teams, one Egyptian and one French, working together on a joint research project. It is managed on the French side by the Scientific and Academic Cooperation department of the Embassy of France, and on the Egyptian side by the Academy for Scientific Research and Technology (ASRT). The French team consists of Anne Boud’hors, Esther Garel, Maxime Thérond and Naim Vanthieghem, and the Egyptian team consists of Maher A. Eissa, Ahmed Nakshara, Ahmed Nabil, Fatma Elgabli, and Mohamed Nassar.
Edfu played a major role in the Egyptian economic, political, and religious life thanks to situation on the trade route. Therefore, a paramount importance has been given to Edfu since the 1860s in the domain of archaeological excavations. For more than 130 years excavations have brought to light hundreds of documents from the town that play crucial role in tracing the practices, and impact of transition from Coptic to Arabic. The Edfu documents of the post Arab conquest that have reached us could be genera divided into three categories according to their languages: the Greek, the Coptic, and the Arabic corpuses. In fact, the first two corpuses preserve the earliest texts (7th and 8th centuries), while the third corpus introduces a much later information (starting from the 9th century).
This project aims to editing both unedited Coptic ostraca kept at the Louvre and the Arabic ostraca kept at the IFAO. Both collections, indeed, contain a wide array of documents, such as letters, accounts, receipts, orders of payments. This variety will lead to the study of different topics related to the economic and social life of Edfu in the first two centuries following the Arab conquest, hence better our understanding of the transition from Coptic to Arabic in this town. The core of the project is to prepare the edition, translation, and commentary of unedited Coptic ostraca kept at the Louvre as well as inedited Arabic ostraca kept at the IFAO. Both collections are inevitable to complete our understanding of the daily life, the socio-economic situation, the administration, and the Arabization in Edfu during the two centuries following the Arab conquest. Since documentations from the post Arab conquest Edfu are relatively consecutive, well preserved, and organized discovered, constructing a full picture of a late antique place transferred to Arabic should be both easily and securely granted. Hence, this town case study can contribute to our perception of the Arabization of the whole Egypt. In this talk we will present our progress in the project and present some of the outcomes.

A Fāṭimid petition to al-Ḥākim bi-amr Allāh: Esoterics in a petition or a writing exercise?

Rocío Daga Portillo, LMU Munich, Germany

The State Library of Berlin comprises a collection that is claimed to belong to Tebtynis, Ṭūṭūn. Although by the middle of the 10th. century, the majority of inhabitants were Christians in Ṭuṭūn, the collection does bring documents concerning Muslims. A Fāṭimid petition tells us of a Muslim asking the ruler for help at the beginning of the 11th.century. The matter of the petition seems to be that the father of al-Ḥākim, al-ʿAzīz bi-llāh, had been giving alms to the petitioner and the petitioner asked for the continuation of it. The approximative date of the document is possible to state due to the fact that al-Ḥakim bi-ʾAmr Allāh is mentioned in it, however, the place from where the petition was sent, is not clear. As M. Rustow mentions, Arabic letters of petition are prior to the Fāṭimids, but a petition as a distinctive genre, formulary and layout, developed in the period of Fatimid rulers in Egypt (969–1171). In this case, it will be possible to analyse the particularities of a petition addressed to Imām al-Ḥākim (ruled 996-1021).
By studying the formulas of invocations and layout of Fāṭimid petitions of Gheniza, Ayyubids and others, we will shed light on the document P.Ber.inv. 24054. Invocations play a big role in Ismāʿilī and Shīʿa rituals and believes. Thus the role of invocations in Shīʿa and Islamʿīli rituals would be analysed, asking the question of its role in a formal document of petition. Furthermore, attention will be paid to the analysis of the layout. Document P.Ber.inv. 24054 verso is remarkable because it is a Fāṭimid petition containing a special layout due to the visual setting of formulas. Indeed, P.Ber.inv. 24054 exhibits in verso a number of formulas whose setting makes us think of a magical and esoteric text. Based on the study of Fāṭimid formulas and layouts, it would be possible to state if the verso of this document is a document of an esoteric character or it is just part of a petition, that may have an esoteric character by itself. At any rate, this petition is very different from the Gheniza ones. Furthermore, the geographical origin of the document will be a matter of research based on palaeographical studies and other features.

From Egypt to Artâs: Rereading of Hilma Granqvist 's monographs

Mona Dorani, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany

This paper looks at the monographs of Hilma Granqvist, the Finnish anthropologist. Her ethnographic works focus on the lives of Palestinian peasants in the village of Artâs. She realizes the advantages of a monographic and an in-depth study and compares it with an archaeological excavation whose objective is to unearth all traditions, customs, and ways of thinking. Moreover, the photographs taken by Hilma Granqvist from Artâs (and from her trips around Egypt and Palestine) are partly among the earliest ethnographic photographs of Palestine and the inhabitants of a Palestinian village.
Like Lefebvre, we believe that rural studies should reflect the complexity of these apparently primitive societies. A researcher such as Granqvist understands the complexity of rural society and presents an important insight about local people, she even prefers to give the floor to the women of Artâs for the explanation of social or cultural practice rather than involving her own. Her monography and photographs provide us the opportunity to become directly acquainted with the culture, and customs of the rural population, social structure, and in general their way of life.
Most of the prior research about Granqvist 's works emphasizes her connection to the village of Artâs. This focus should be complemented by including other aspects of her work and her ideas about other Arab regions, especially Egypt. Considering the significance of Granqvist 's monographs and the fact that she mentions Egypt several times, the goal of this paper is to try in a comparative manner to identify relationships between Palestinian and Egyptian rural society. This paper shows to what extent is possible to find similarities between rural districts of Palestine with Egyptian villages based on Granqvist’s observations. By rereading four monographs of Granqvist we focus on the following questions: Why does Granqvist believe that there is a certain Egyptian influence in Palestine? How much do her writings add to our knowledge about Egyptian villages?

العلاقة بين المسلمين والمسيحيين في الريف المصري خلال القرن 13 دراسة تاريخية في مخطوطات تاريخ وسير البطاركة

Botros Elbaramosy, Alexandria University, Egypt

منذ دخول المسلمين أرض مصر في النصف الثاني من القرن السابع الميلادي، وبعد تحول بعض المصريين من المسيحية إلى الإسلام لظروف عده، وكذلك قدوم بعض القبائل العربية التي استوطنت في عدة أماكن من أرض مصر.. اصبحت مصر ثنائية الدين (المسيحية والاسلام)، وعلى الرغم من الانتشار البطيء للإسلام في بداية الامر الا انه ولكثير من الاسباب والتغيرات التي طرأت على المجتمع المصري .جراء هذا التحول أصبح أغلبية ساكني مصر مسلمين في القرون 13 و 14.
- ومع هذا التحول الكبير في ذلك العصر بدأ ظهور بعض المشاكل الاجتماعية بين المسلمين والمسيحيين.. هكذا تدون لنا مخطوطات تاريخ وسير الآباء البطاركة، وبإلقاء الضوء على الفترة المتعلقه بالبطريرك كيرلس الثالث (١٢١٦-١٢٤٣) وهو البطرك 73 من تعداد بطاركة الإسكندرية، والمعروف بلقب [ابن لقلق]، تورد لنا المصادر ال ُمشار إليها أن البلاد المصرية قد مرت بكثير من المشاكل الاجتماعية التي أقلقت صفو العيش والتعايش المشترك بين أبناء مصر بكافة أطيافهم وديانتهم، كذلك بعض المشاكل الاقتصادية الناتجة عن العواصف الوحشية السوداء المصحوبة بالبروق الشديدة، التي اقتلعت أشجار النخيل وسقوط كثير من المنازل بساكنيها.
- كذلك بسبب انخفاض ماء النيل حتى ظهرت الأحجار التي في قاع النهر مما عطل حركة التجارة النيلية وأثر على الاقتصاد، وتضرر الريف في الوجه القبلي، وما أتى على البلاد من أمراض عاتية اجتاحت الجميع.
الا ان الملفت للنظر ان المصادر تذكر أيضا ان أسقف صندفا ارتكب خطأ أخلاقي مع احدى السيدات المسلمات، مما تسبب في قلاقل داخل المجتمع الريفي المحافظ، والتقاليد والأعراف المصرية حتى وصل الأمر إلى فرض زي معين للأقباط (المسيحيين) لفترة معينة .
وسوف يتناول هذا البحث ذلك الحدث ببعض التفاصيل مع الاشارة الي الاحداث الأخرى التي تعرض لها الريف المصري صاحب القيم والعادات والتقاليد، وكيفية تعامل السلطات سواء السلطة الكنسية او السلطة المدنية مع مثل هذه الامور، والنتائج المترتبة على ذلك في المدى الزمني المشار إليه

The state’s other footprint: Communal concerns from the Egyptian countryside (11th-14th c.)

Tamer el-Leithy, Johns Hopkins University, USA

The paper examines petitions and attendant decrees about non-fiscal matters from the Egyptian countryside (11th-14th century) (In other words, I exclude both (i) administrative decrees and internal petitions between officials, and (ii) peasant petitions about inequities related to tax collection, forced labor, and land tenure). Unlike complaints related to taxation, say, this sub-corpus of ‘social petitions’ treats more local and intimate matters—from child kidnapping and induced miscarriage to theft and documentary intransigence. I read these petitions as deposits of peasant relations that led some actors to imagine state intervention as a feasible, effective, and expedient form of redress—for attaining justice. Unlike earlier studies of petitions as state documents, this paper focuses on the villagers, their conflicts, and decisions to petition. It turns from the quotidian background drone of petitions/decrees as tools of governance to listen for the more isolated, distant staccatos of rural appeal.
Fatimid petitions and decrees have recently been the subject of Marina Rustow’s compelling analysis and elegant interpretation (The Lost Archive, 2020). Rustow used these documents as sources onto the nature and workings of medieval Middle Eastern bureaucratic states. She discussed petitions as efficient checks on corrupt officials as well as evidence of wider cultural expectations about subjects’ right to justice. But Rustow’s focus was on the institutional pathways of state documents: following the Fatimid’s “very busy” bureaucracy, she revealed the caliphate as a complex textual bureaucratic polity, where governance relied more on a robust regime of paper than it did on coercive force.
I build on this fine analysis (and earlier seminal works) but make three methodological departures. The first is a focus on the rural background of the social petitions: I map a basic typology of the kinds of conflicts that peasants sought to resolve by petitioning. Whether they requested timely action (returning stolen goods, say) or demanded punishment (e.g. for homicide), aggrieved petitioners usually identified the offenders. Are there patterns among the identified offenders? Do the types of problems correlate with the authorities addressed (e.g. sultans vs. judges)?
Second, I examine ‘social petitions’ as indices of villagers’ expectations of the state—for both their understandings of justice and their imaginative relationship with those state authorities they invited to solve their problems. Combined, the temporal and regional density of cases as well as the types of offenses they discuss trace the state’s social and legal footprint in the countryside.
Finally, the paper examines petitions between the 11th and 14th c., extending across several dynastic periods. Can we detect diachronic changes in the density and/or types of cases petitioned? Or in the language used by state authorities in attendant decrees? Although our evidence is limited, this longer-term view allows us to compare different states’ social footprint—their presence and perceived efficiency and legitimacy—in the countryside. In some cases, some key changes do not appear to neatly map onto our traditional periodization based on dynastic politics and military battles.

Pasture Tax in the Egyptian Countryside in light of the Arabic papyrus Documents

Mahmoud El Said, Suez Canal University, Egypt

This study is concerned with the documentary sources related to Pasture Tax in the Egyptian Countryside.
It contains many texts preserved on papyri, these everyday documents written in Egyptian villages in Arabic and it is related to the pasture tax, allow us to study the economy, religion, family life, agriculture, administration, mentalities, culture and many other facets of life in the countryside.
There were many taxes paid by Peasants in the Egyptian countryside in the Islamic period, for example (food tax, Al Kharaaj tax, pasture tax).
The study talks about one of the most important taxes that appeared in the countryside in Egypt's history in the Islamic period, the Pasture tax through Arab papyrus documents.
In this research paper, a lot of information will be learned about the pasture tax, when did the tax appear in the Egyptian countryside in the Islamic period?
What the value of this tax?
How was the tax collected from Egyptian peasants?
There is a question that this study also asks: Is the pasture tax mentioned within the Arab historical sources of Egypt's history in the Islamic period?
This study will answer this question.
This study also talks about the person responsible for collecting the Tax from Egyptian Peasants.
This study contains a large number of Arab papyrus Documents that talk about the Pasture Tax at different periods of time in Egypt's History in the Islamic period.
Plan of this study:
First: What is the pasture tax?
Second: When did the pasture tax appear in Egypt?
Third: What is the value of this tax?
Fourth: The tax of pastures in the light of Arab historical sources.
Fifth: The tax of pastures in the light of Arab papyrus documents.
The Results of this study.

“She abandoned her husband”: The Marital Issues in Coptic Thebes' Society O.Copt.Cair. 4530.88

Rowida Abo Bakr Mohamed Fawzy, Luxor University, Egypt

Scholars and non-specialists alike know the Western Thebes region in Upper Egypt for its Pharaonic remains. However, between the sixth and eighth centuries AD, the Copts made a significant settlement movement in the region. They established a religious community in the first place, closely linked to a civil society that settled in Medinet Habu's temple area, known in Coptic documents as the Village of Jeme.
The Western Thebes were a diverse group of societies that interacted socially with each other as well as with neighboring regions; both written and archaeological Coptic evidence paint a picture of people's private lives and social relationships. One of these social relationships is that which exists between members of the Coptic family, such as parents and children or husband and wife. Some of Thebes' documentary texts reveal the existence of family problems, such as marital issues, parental disobedience, child rejection, and so on.
The ostracon published in this study is one of the texts that were discovered during the Metropolitan Museum's excavations in one of the most important monastic gatherings in Western Thebes, the Monastery of Epiphanius, which is located in the Sheikh Abd el-Qurna.
The ostracon No. 4530.88, which is currently preserved in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, sheds light on one of the marital issues, which is abandonment between spouses. This research will compare the text of this ostracon with other Theban documents to clarify the reasons for the spouses' disagreements in Thebes' society, which resulted in the wife's escape or expulsion from the home. Also discussed will be the critical role of monasteries in the region in solving this type of problem, either by word of advice or by punishing the offender from both sides.

Haram Documents regarding Villagers and Rural Communities

Yehoshua Frenkel

Our knowledge of the Mamluk rural society is mainly based on literary (chronicles) sources and legal manuals (fatawa by al-Subki and al-Ḥiṣnī; compendia by ibn Quṭlūbughā and al-Balāṭunusī), though recent archeological projects (Walker) enriched our understanding of the material culture, habitat and farming. Documentary sources were less in use (Cl. Cahen). These sources reflect primarily the view from above, that of the administration, military aristocracy and the religious establishment.
Yet, recent years witnessed a turn in the historiography of Islamic (and non-Muslims) rural society in the Abode of the Caliphate. These documents furnish rich data on Mamluk villages and crops. And indeed these sources were analyzed by several fine scholars (Abū Ghāzī). Thus for example dozens of waqfiyyāt (including texts engraved on walls) name endowed village, and illuminate income (taxation), yields and social networks, as well as relations between villages and urban institutions. I myself had used them in several studies of Mamluk land tenure and village.
Based upon a vast range of sources the present project aims at looking into the base level of village community in Mamluk Bilad al-Sham. It will dwell upon aspects of the iqṭāʿ regime (al-Qunawī) and study the social organization and economy of rural communities. The backbone of it are several documents, published and unpublished, that were unearthed at the Haram in Jerusalem (Northrup. Little). These documents cast light on village society, taxation and life in 14th century Palestine. Indeed, the Haram document are not “history from below”. However, by studying and editing (and translating) these Haram documents, as well as other legal manuscripts, we obtain a penetrating insight of the relations between the Mamluk administration and the face/nameless villagers, as well as the social reality of a voiceless subjects.

The Abbess Maṭrī in arabic legal Documents from late 12th century Toledo

Theresa Grabmaier, LMU Munich, Germany

This presentation seeks to analyze the scope of action of Maṭrī, abbess of the monastery San Clemente in Toledo, who represented the monastery and its nuns in terms of legal action from about 1158 to about 1193.
The collection of the Mozarabic documents from Toledo counts 1175 documents, of which 1155 are written in Arabic. The Archivo Histórico Nacional de Madrid as the nowadays home to the collection had gathered documents from different churches, convents, and monasteries in 1866, and in 1913 Angel González Palencia started editing them. These editions need further investigation.
To do so, I will firstly analyze all 11 documents that contain Maṭrī as the abbess of San Clemente, being the first abbess of this monastery mentioned. How does she enter transactions? Is she buying more than she is selling? What does that mean in terms of liquidity for the monastery? Not only the abbess represented the monastery in legal terms, she only does so in about 1/3 of about 28 transactions involving the monastery in her term of office. Other representers were nuns and priests of this or other monasteries or, in cases of the monastery receiving donations, no representation was necessary. A difference to be seen in the nature of the transactions lies in the price of the transferred property: in most cases, the abbess manages all transactions with a worth higher than 11 miṯqāl.
Secondly, the presentation examines what impact the actions of Maṭrī had on the monastery in the longer run. Presiding over an economically successful monastery seems to not have been a matter of course, as can be seen in other monasteries.
Finally, I intend on trying to enter the “perspective of the countryside”, in this case asking the question whether people preferred selling their property to a monastery, the cathedral or to a private person, maybe based on the sheer number of transactions (115 out of 1175 involving the monastery as a party). Can a certain perspective of landowners be found in the sources?

Meet the Banū Balīṭ: A Coptic family from 9th century Tebtynis, their dossier, and their associates

Ursula Hammed & Michail Hradek, LMU Munich, Germany

During the preparatory work for the project EGIPTOS (currently a web portal for information on Arabic documents), we noticed a cluster of Arabic papyri from the 9th century CE, all mentioning inhabitants of Tebtynis, Ṭuṭūn in Arabic. More specifically, the documents all seem to mention members of the same family. Starting from the unpublished fragment P.Utah inv. 426, information on the descendants of a certain Balīṭ gradually unravelled. Published and unpublished material from at least three different institutions comes together in the dossier that documents the legal proceedings the family was involved in. They seem to have been assisted by a Muslim family of professional witnesses, whose activities are likely traceable until the beginning of the 11th century CE. Our paper will present the dossier(s), address its difficulties, and sketch possible conclusions on legal practice and consequent societal circumstances in 9th and 10th century CE Tebtynis.

Agricultural partnership in the Islamic Egyptian countryside

Ahmed Kamal, Centre of Documentation of Islamic and Coptic Antiquities, Egypt

Throughout history, agriculture was one of the most essential daily activities of the Egyptians, and they were one of the first groups of people to engage in extensive agricultural activity. Fortunately, some Arabic documents and papyri from the Egyptian countryside have survived, allowing us to identify some features of agricultural activities during the Islamic era. The remaining Arabic official administrative records, especially the tax receipts, offer us some information about agricultural activities in the Islamic Egyptian countryside. However, there is not much research that dealt with the farming operations details carried out by farmers. Since only a few of the surviving published documents contribute to our knowledge of some details of the agricultural activities undertaken by the farmers themselves, it would be useful to pay more attention to it and publish more related documents.
In my talk, depending on the relevant published documents as well as a document being published for the first time from the Berlin Egyptian Museum collection (P.Berl.inv. 6216) I'll discuss farmers' cooperation in rural areas to cultivate land. The unpublished document is a list divided into four sections that were created by one of the farmers to track the amount of grain and seeds that were used from his storehouse in conjunction with many other farmers to cultivate various plots of land. While each segment of the document is attributed to a separate partnership, they all include information about how much wheat or barley seed was used, the day it was created, and the name of the recipient.

What's in an archive? On strategies to identify archives

Andreas Kaplony, LMU Munich, Germany

How to identify archives in a bulk of scattered documents? Shared names and terms obviously are the silver bullet, but how significant is a strong similarity of formal document types and paleography? And what about notes on acquisition? We will first test this on a small number of well-known archives and then apply it to a small corpus of documents from the Berlin Collection.

The taxation and ownership of land in the Abbasid countryside: simple questions?

Marie Legendre & Dalia Hussein, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

The modern historiography on Abbasid taxation has been dominated by two imposts: a land tax and a poll tax, understood as two tenants of the so-called ‘Classical Islamic fiscal system’. The present paper will offer a reassessment of the relevance of a ‘land tax’ when studying the Abbasid fiscal system. It is no surprise that land was taxed in a multiplicity of ways, as for any pre-modern society, land was a major source of wealth in Abbasid Egypt. However, papyri from the Egyptian countryside show that the taxation of land was a multifaceted process that concerned several types of taxes. With the end of taxation in kind at the turn of the 8th century, the consequences of that shift on the fiscal system of Egypt in general and on the taxation of land in particular will be reconsidered. The taxation of land is also famously interrelated with the issue of land ownership. However, land ownership appears as a tricky question in the Abbasid countryside. The present paper will present our work in progress on all those issues.

The Amir’s Administration: Documentary Traces of the Activities of Mamluk Emirs in the Egyptian Countryside

Daisy Livingston, Durham University, England

The Cairo Sultanate (c. 1250-1517) has left us with an enormous number of literary sources which shed light on the administrative organisation of Egypt and Syria under Mamluk rule. From these sources – comprising chronicles, administrative and chancery manuals, and encyclopaedic works – we can learn important details about the governance of territory, including the arrangement of the iqṭāʿ system which was the predominant fiscal tool used during this period. Despite this, we remain surprisingly ill-informed about how this administration functioned on the ground, especially in regions outside Cairo. The urban perspective of Mamluk-era authors means that they present the activities of government from a top-down perspective. The way that administrative officials and iqṭāʿ-holders organised their tax collection and other responsibilities remains largely unknown.
By turning away from such narrative sources and towards surviving documents, this paper seeks to shed some light on how Mamluk administration occurred on the ground. Specifically, it investigates the involvement of Mamluk emirs in routine activities such as the gathering of taxes, the extraction of services from rural communities, communication with the local elites, and the distribution of justice amongst the local population. Traces of these processes can be found in published and unpublished documents from the Vienna papyrus collection, and these provide invaluable indications of the ways in which emirs and their administrative offices were embedded in local communities outside the capital. The numerous surviving documentary traces suggest that emirs had a tangible presence in the Egyptian countryside, in particular through their involvement in judicial processes. By discussing the evidence for the emir’s administration, this paper demonstrates the potential of surviving Mamluk-era documents to contribute to a broader bottom-up history of the governance of the Cairo Sultanate.

Fāṭimid letter of designation over construction work of certain estates of Alexandria

Ahmed Nabil Maghraby, University of Sadat City, Egypt

In order to guarantee and secure the long-term sustainability of its annual kharaj tax revenues, the Fatimid government, like its predecessors, used to allocate a part of the Egyptian annual collected land tax revenues for the construction works of the agriculture lands that needed to be done, such as digging or dredging water canals, building and maintaining dikes and building aqueducts for land irrigation. In this term, the government assigned to each district an employee to oversee the necessary construction work on its lands.
The unpublished paper P.Utah. ar. Inv. 834, which belongs to the Aziz S. Atiya collection at the J. W. Marriott Library of Utah University, illustrates to us such official procedure in details. It is an official letter belonging to the Fatimid Chancery, written in 26 lines on recto and verso and dated to the 27th of Jumada II 376 A.H./1st of November 986 A.D. (reign of the Fatimid Caliph al-ʿAzz bil-lāh), in which the addresser informs Abū al-Yumn ʾIṣṯafan ībn wazīr, the scribe (al-Kātib) that he is officially designated by an order of the most Illustrious vizier (Ya‘qūb ībn Killis) to head the construction works al-ʿimārah of certain estates (ḍiyāʿ) namely al-Saḥilayn of Alexandria (kūrat al-Iskandariyya), under the supervision of the governor of Alexandria, Abī al-Ḥassan al-Khaṣīb ibn ʿAbd Allāh. Then, he continues by informing him of some detailed instructions to ensure that all necessary construction work was completed and that all payments were recorded in the registers in the presence of the governor and the accredited witnesses.
Generally speaking, this document's exceptional worth derives from the rarity of the documentary material pertaining to the administration of Alexandria and its governors throughout the various periods of Islamic Egypt. In particular, it affirms the information provided and discussed by al-Makhzūmī, al-Nuwayrī and al-Maqrīzī regarding the annual official procedures that the government utilized to carry out construction work to receive, control, regulate and distribute the water of the Nile during its respective seasons.

A Snapshot at the Countryside of Hermopolis under the governorate of ʿAmr b. al-ʿĀṣ

Élodie Mazy, University College London, England, & Lajos Berkes, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany

This paper presents preliminary results of an ongoing study by Élodie Mazy, Lajos Berkes, and Nikolaos Gonis conducted in the framework of the AHRC-DFG project ‘Documentary Snapshots from Seventh-Century Egypt: Local Responses to Regime Transitions.’ As part of the project, we prepare the reedition of an understudied fiscal codex, or perhaps rather fiscal dossier, which records tax payments by male residents of the village of Senilais (in Greek; Tjinela in Coptic) and other smaller settlements, located in the north-east of Hermopolis (al-Ashmūnayn) in middle Egypt. They pay taxes on private land, rents on public land, and a tax on their person. The account entries are given in Greek, while village officials add sworn declarations in Coptic. These refer to ‘the health of Ambros’, which allow us to assign the document to 641–644 or 658–663/4, one of the two terms of office of ʿAmr b. al-ʿĀṣ as governor of Egypt. The date allows us to understand the last charge as the capitation tax introduced in the wake of the Arab conquest; the other two charges have a longer pedigree. Thus the account reflects the realities of the old and new regimes: the fiscality of the last years of Byzantine rule in Egypt, still very imperfectly known, and the new policies of the Arab rulers. Furthermore, the socio-economic significance of the account is not limited to fiscal history: taxes reflect social stratification and the distribution of wealth, and this is a detailed snapshot of a rural community at a given time. Names, of which we have hundreds, also tell stories. On a different level, we gain insights into accounting practices and the mechanics of tax collection, especially the involvement of local authorities in it.

Kinds of Oils and their uses in Egypt during the Islamic era

Mohamed Mohamed Morsy, Helwan University, Egypt, & Ibrahim Chandi Ibrahim Al-Jamal, Sadat City University, Egypt

Oils are among the most important industrial crafts products for which the Islamic state was famous in Egypt during the beginning of Islamic period. The reason for its importance was the multiplicity of its types and production centers, whether in Upper Egypt or Lower Egypt. Its importance is increased by the presence of a special trade in oils in the markets of Fustat, Upper Egypt.
The oil industry and production have had historical roots dating back to the ancient Egyptian times, which led to maximizing the benefit from this industry and expanding the use of oils for multiple and varied purposes. For example, dietary oils, essential oils, and oils used medically to treat patients. The Arab papyri provide us with many texts that carry important information about oils in the early centuries.
This research paper aims to study the subject of oils through papyri from several aspects
1- Types of oils such as Anop P.David-WeillLouvre 12 -13 (P.Louvre inv. 6379 verso), radish oil P.MuslimState 28 (P.Mich.inv. 5623 recto), flax oil P.GrohmannWirtsch. 22 (P.Vind.inv. A.P. 9089 recto), Palestinian oil P.Berl.Arab. II 40 (P.Berl.inv. 24084 recto), canna oil, watermelon oil.
2- Oil uses: These uses have varied between food, aromatic and medicinal, and the papyri have detailed these uses.
3- Oil prices and measures: Many papyri included the prices of different oils and the measures used in the buying and selling operations, which differed from one place to another, such as the installment, tide, pound, and others.
The papyri also showed many villages and cities that were characterized by the cultivation of raw materials that were used in the oil industry. And the places of manufacture, which made some people keen to order the purchase of these oils from certain villages and cities and send them to them for different uses due to the quality of the raw materials and the quality of industry that were distinguished in these villages.
The papyri and historical sources also show several social, economic, and military aspects related to the oil industry and its trade. We find it used to pay tribute, or to supply the army, or as a means of punishing outlaws and others.

Villagers under duress. Climate stress and labor coercion in the Mamluk Levant

Undine Ott, Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), Germany

During the first decade of the 14th century AD the Eastern Mediterranean suffered from drought. As narrative sources reveal, the regions of the Mamluk sultanate witnessed drought in 1304-1306 and again in 1307-1309 when the summer Nile floods in Egypt remained low and winter rains in the Levant (Bilād al-Shām) largely failed. The periods of drought resulted in harvest failures in the countryside. People from rural areas fled their homes. The fields they had worked were left untended. Food became scarce and prices rose.
The paper focuses on 15 Levantine villages and explores how their inhabitants coped with the weather-induced crisis of the 1300s. All of these villages belonged to the Ḥaramayn endowments of the Ḥaram al-Sharīf in Jerusalem and Abraham’s Shrine in Hebron. A unique body of 27 Arabic paper documents dating from the years 1306 to 1309 has survived in Jerusalem’s Ḥaram collection and provides an insight into how the drought of the 1300s affected rural populations in the Levant and how the crisis disrupted the unequal relations the villagers maintained with the management of the endowments.
The Ḥaramayn endowments were one of the principal landowners in the region. As the documents from the Ḥaram collection reveal, the relationship between endowment authorities and villagers was determined by coercion: The villagers suffered from the burden of the levies they were supposed to deliver year by year for the upkeep of the Jerusalem and Hebron sanctuaries and the alimentation of their staff and other urban beneficiaries. When the villagers were unable to raise the levies, as happened during the crisis of the 1300s, the mighty amirs who oversaw the endowments would resort to the legal system and have the failed levies recorded as debt obligations binding the villagers to the endowments for the foreseeable future. When villagers attempted to flee their destitute living conditions by leaving their plots and moving elsewhere, the management of the endowments would attempt to restrict their movement and tie them to the land they worked.
Coercion in labor and social relations in the Mamluk sultanate has, so far, been studied mainly with regard to urban households and military units stationed in cities. The present paper, by contrast, focuses on the countryside. It explores how coercive relations between peasants, village notables and landowners were renegotiated in times of crisis.

The Sasanians in Egypt and Bactria - Rulership at the Edges of Ērānšahr and the Connection to the mighty Clan of the Mihrān

Nils Purwins, FU Berlin, Germany

The Sasanians conquered and occupied Egypt for more than ten years in the first half of the seventh century (since 716-721). During this period, the Persians established their own administration, which cooperated with the Roman-Egyptian administration. Accordingly, Egypt formed one of the westernmost frontier provinces of the empire during this period.
In the northeast, the Sasanians held dominion over Bactria, the easternmost province of the empire, since the crushing of the Kushan Empire in the third century. This rule was severely tested by the wars with the invading Huns since the fourth century, and finally the Hephtalites occupied Bactria for several decades after 484. The Hephtalites based their administration of Bactria on that of the Sasanians. The phenomena of these administrations will be juxtaposed in this lecture. In addition to this first-time comparison, light will also be shed for the first time on the Mihrān clan, whose seat was in north-central Iran in the area of the city of Ray (now part of Tehran), and its connection to Sasanian rule in Egypt and Bactria.
The sources are Middle Persian and Bactrian leather documents, papyri and seal impressions from the fourth to the seventh century.

The Arab protectors of southern Fayyum, 1015 – 1070 CE

Yossef Rapoport, Queen Mary University London, England

In the period from 1015 to 1070, individual men and women with Arab tribal names assumed formal roles as protectors of villages and monasteries in southern Fayyum, forming new elites among majority Coptic peasant population. The Arab protection (khafāra) developed several decades after the Fatimid takeover of Egypt, and was sanctioned, and probably even encouraged, by the Fatimid state. After 1070, the institution disappears from our sources, as abruptly as it had appeared. The great economic crisis that engulfed Egypt in 1068 – 1074 led to the desertion of several villages in southern Fayyum, and the Arab protectors left their caches of documents behind.
This paper will argue that eleventh-century khafāra was a formalized and routine fiscal institution, one that directly affected cultivation and landownership. This was not ad hoc extortion, and appears to be quite different from modern practices of khuwwa. The right of khafāra, separate from title deed over land, was treated as an alienable right, and was bought and sold. While an element of violence is implicit, the protectors fulfilled a primarily fiscal duty. The spread of Arab khafāra was linked to other fiscal innovations, the ḍamān and the iqṭāʿ, which are attested in contemporary documentary and literary evidence.
The khafāra in eleventh-century Fayyum was at the hands of men and women who went by tribal names going back to the Arabian Peninsula. Arab protection over Christian villages is first attested in the Jazīra during the course of the tenth century, following the reported migration of several tribes from northern Arabia. Arab dynasties such as the Banū Ḥamdān then established autonomous rule in the Jazīra and Greater Syria. The Fatimids, who took over Egypt and Syria in 969, also chose to delegate provincial security to groups who identified as Arab and tribal. The appearance of tribal protectors in the Fayyum was therefore not a localized phenomenon, but should be seen within the wider context of Arab ascendancy.

Al-Rāzī in the Egyptian Countryside. A 9th-/10th-Century Coptic Archive of Medical and Alchemical Manuscripts and its Intellectual Background

Tonio Sebastian Richter, BBAW/FU Berlin, Germany

While Coptic scientific manuscripts are generally scarce, there is a small dossier of (for the most part unpublished) Coptic alchemical manuscripts on whose edition I have been working for long (see Richter 2009, 2015, 2017, 2021). Five out of seven Coptic alchemical manuscripts can be assigned to one single archive which also contained two Coptic medical papyri, P.Louvre AF 12530 (ed. Richter 2014) and the large Coptic medical papyrus kept in the IFAO (ed. Émile Chassinat in 1921). It is the latter which provides an anchorpoint for the identification of the archive’s place of discovery supposedly in the ruins of Nagʕ al-Mašāyḫ, the ancient site of Lepidotonpolis. Today this archive is scattered over collections at Cairo (IFAO), Paris (Louvre), Oxford (Bodleian Library), and an unknown place, but is could be reconstructed from provenance information and features of the manuscripts and texts (Richter fc.). This Coptic medical and alchemical archive (CMAA) is a unique pre-medieval assemblage of alchemical and medical manuscripts with traceable historical coordinates. It testifies to a community of literate persons in a provincial town of 9th/10th-century Egypt who used and produced collections of medical and alchemical recipes, and who most likely engaged in healing practice and metallurgical experiments. The historical reality of combined medical and alchemical professionalism cannot be traced before the 9th century and started in the Arabic science (Temkin 1955). The famous Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakariyyāʾ Al-Rāzī (865-925) is an early representative of this, at his time novel approach.
The proposed paper raises the question for the intellectual background of the archive and its protagonists. Medical and chemical substances, laboratory apparatus and technical procedures found in the CMAA are for the most part referred to by their Arabic terms and resemble overall those known from Al-Rāzī’s Kitāb al-asrār (Ruska 1937) which may indeed be one of its sources.

Nabulsi's "acqueducts (ʿabbāra li’l-māʾ)" in Lake Qaroun.

Cornelia Römer, DAI Cairo, Egypt

According to the 13th century description of the irrigation syystem in the Fayum written by the engineer An-Nabulsi an aqueduct had been built by the Ptolemies over Lake Qaroun to connect the Fayum with Soknopious Nesos (Dimeh) in the north of the Lake. So far, no traces of such an installation that did not exist anymore in Nabulsi's time have been found. A team of the German Archaeological Institute has made some attempts to verify a connection between the northern and southern shores of the lake. If such a building ever existed it must have had an important impact on the life of not only of Soknopaiou Nesos but also the entire Fayoum. The paper tries to elucidate Nabulsi's ideas about this installation in Lake Qaroun.

Emotions, Arabic scribal practices, and Islamic law in the Egyptian countryside: transforming personal conflicts into matters of law

Tobias Scheunchen, University of Chicago, USA

P. Michaelides A 1346 is a seventh or eighth-century letter (first edited and translated by Khaled Younes) of a marriage gone sour: after prohibiting his ex-wife al-ʿAllāna from leaving the house, its sender ʿAmr b. Zubayd complains to his father-in-law about her putatively mischievous deeds and audacity to seek legal redress by taking the affair to the local arbitrator (ḥakam). Adding to ʿAmr’s embarrassment, al-ʿAllāna — intent on terminating the marriage — alleges to have suffered beating and oppression at the hands of her husband. ʿAmr fiercely denies her allegations and, in an attempt to minimize the publicity of the affair, sends one of his companions to “remind” (read: threaten) her to practice a life of restraint and in fear of God. The drama unfolding in P. Michaelides A 1346, like several other contemporary papyri, offers historians a far-reaching picture of the social and emotional worlds of ordinary Egyptians living during the first centuries of Islamic rule, as well as the social and legal mechanisms to seek redress in times of crises. By combining a textual with a sociolegal analysis of three Arabic papyri from the Egyptian countryside, this paper contributes to our understanding of the complicated intersection of emotions, Arabic scribal norms, and Muslim judicial practices. I argue that the late antique “textualization” of emotions—i.e., their compression into predetermined scribal formulas and patterns—was conducive to transforming the subjective worlds of individuals and families and their conflicts into matters of social and legal import. Drawing on work on the history of emotions, the analysis of the papyri shows how scribal writing and appeals to legal authorities, on the one hand, provided late antique subjects with viable means to contend with situations of conflict, and, on the other, functioned as a way of recasting disputes in the increasingly normative language of Islamic law and infused its values and expectations into the everyday lives of ordinary Egyptians.

The kurāt Aswan under early Muslim rule

Stefanie Schmidt, FU Berlin, Germany

Aswan, a town located at the First Cataract, has a long tradition as a manufacturing and trading centre from the Pharaonic to the Muslim period. Its strategic position at the border to Nubia, the prospect to benefit from cross border trade, the mobility of people on their pilgrimage to Mecca and the exploitation of the gold mines in Wadi Allaqi were stimulating factors for its cultural and economic flourishing in the 11th and 12th centuries. However, which internal and external parameters favoured the development of this peripheral region in the early stages of Muslim rule in Egypt? Who were the main actors in the early Muslim community that established and consolidated social and economic relations with the people of Aswan and its surroundings? What factors were beneficial to their social and economic rise and what do we know about the administrative constellation that may have facilitated this development?
The paper aims at shedding more light on the hitherto little‐studied early Muslim time of the frontier town of Aswan, paying particular attention to internal factors that led to the prosperity and social advancement of the Muslim inhabitants, such as their involvement in trade, but also their rural and immobile property in the countryside. A further focal point will rest on the outlines of the kurā’s administrative composition, which, apart from a note by al‐Maqrīzī that some governors came from Iraq, is yet unknown.
The main sources for describing these factors are literary accounts, papyri/ostraca and archaeological finds. However, a recent study of the tombstones from the Museum of Cairo, carried out by the author of this abstract, allows us to take into account also this epigraphic source, which has not been fully accessible until now. The tombstones from the Muslim cemetery of Aswan contain personal names of several generations, a nisba, sometimes the social status of a deceased individual (slave, servant, mawlā), and/or a profession and provide thus further insight into the society of early Muslim Aswan.
By focusing on local resources such as landed property, my paper wishes to offer further insight into the question of economic life in the countryside of Muslim Egypt.

Paleographic similarity in document clusters

Leonora Sonego, LMU Munich, Germany

The similarity of two handwritten texts, or even the identity of the scribe, is often obvious to the human eye, but difficult to verbalize and measure. Eva Youssef Grob had suggested a „Catalogue of dating criteria“, of which some are categoric (sīn with teeth: yes/no), some are continuous, namely the angles between vertical strokes, the baselines of single words and the writing line. This approach has been used for the tool https://www.apd.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/apd/paleography.jsp, accessible since March 2021. In a forthcoming article, it is asked how textual conventions (genres, „types“, internal structures) interfere with the dating issue. In the current project, the focus is more on identifying clusters. For this purpose, we have enlarged our corpus with the data of a known cluster, which is the Abū Hurayra Archive, published by Rāġib in P.Marchands I-V, and paleographic data of more than 30 published and 100 unpublished documents from the Berlin collection. We will feed this data into a statistical tool published by the university of Hamburg in spring 2021 (https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/publications/software.html), and also test a software which has been shown to detect scribal identities (Mohammed, Hussein, Volker Märgner, und Tilman Seidensticker. „A Comparison of Arabic Handwriting-style Analysis Using Conventional and Computational Methods“. manuscript cultures (mc) 15 (2020): 15–24.), without involving any human paleographic description.

In the Vault: Inventorying Collections of Arabic Papyri, with a Presentation of Some Newly Found Items

Ekaterina Trepnalova, Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, Russia & Mehdy Shaddel, Leiden University, The Netherlands

In the Vault is an about-to-be-launched initiative that marks the first phase of a larger project dedicated to the study of fiscal regimes in the successor states of the Roman Empire. This phase of the project intends to conduct a large-scale survey of collections of Arabic papyri which are not fully digitized, including the Erzherzog Rainer Collection in Vienna and the Ägyptisches Museum in Berlin, as well as to examine smaller collections that have largely been ignored. As a first step, a survey of the part of the Wessely collection held in the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, the Likhachov collection of Arabic papyri in the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Golenishchev collection in Pushkin Museum have been conducted. The aim of the initiative is to compile inventories of the items held in each collection, to be eventually shared with the broader community of papyrologists, in addition to publishing specimens of relevance to the larger project.
In this presentation, we give a brief description of the above-mentioned collections and their history, and discuss and (re)edit two fragments from Saint Petersburg: P.Ross.Georg. IV 27h, published by Jernstedt in 1927 but without a photo, which is a fragment of a letter by Qurra ibn Sharīk to Basileos, the pagarch of Aphrodito, and P.Likhachov.A 241, a tax refund petition dated 150 AH and contains the first attestation of the term kharāj in Egypt. The presentation will conclude by exploring the implications of the application of new terminology such as kharāj in Egypt for our understanding of the nature of reforms introduced by the Abbasids in the immediate wake of the revolution of 132 AH.

A Fatimid village in the Fayyum. Buljusūq according to papyrological sources

Mathieu Tillier, Sorbonne Université, France

Thanks to the desertification of the Tanabṭawayh Canal in the second half of the eleventh century CE, the inhabitants of the southern fringe of the Fayyum were forced to move their villages northward, following the example of Ṭuṭūn, which is well known thanks to archaeological excavations. The migrants sometimes left part of their archives on site. As a result, these archives have partly survived the passage of time and now allow us to study the social, economic and institutional life of those rural settlements, especially in the early Fatimid period.
Buljusūq (ancient Kerkesoucha Orous) is one of these lost villages of the southern Fayyum. It has been documented so far by 18 edited documents, and remains much less understood than Ṭuṭūn. Over the past five years, Naïm Vanthieghem and I have identified 21 new documents from this village, and their study has allowed us, among other things, to locate this village more precisely along the Tanabṭawayh village. The resulting corpus, consisting mainly of legal deeds (deeds of sale, inheritance, lease contracts, tax receipts), documents several Coptic families of the village, and enables us to propose a reconstruction of a series of neighborhoods between 335/946 and 450/1058, as well as several aspects of the village’s institutional structures and agricultural economy. At the beginning of the Fatimid period, the settlement appears to have been partially Islamized, and had a mosque, probably to the north of the central part of the village which was still populated by Christian populations.
The study of these deeds makes it possible not only to better understand the articulation between various institutions within the village, but also to reconstitute some of the land parcels. Although the village of Buljusūq has now vanished, it can be assumed that its architecture followed the pattern of other villages on the southern fringe of the Fayyum, some of which have been excavated. By confronting archaeological data available for other villages – especially Ṭuṭūn – with the information that can be gleaned from the Buljusūq documents, I will attempt to show what this village may have looked like in the first half of the eleventh century CE, and how resident Coptic families managed their land holdings, especially through succession strategies.

“I did not purchase anything for him because of the prevailing hunger, and because food prices were higher in the countryside than Fusṭāṭ”: Egyptian famines in the 10th-12th centuries through the lens of the countryside

Yusuf Umrethwala, Columbia University, USA

Egyptian chroniclers like al-Maqrīzī and Ibn Muyassar among others report several famines that plagued the lands of Egypt from the beginning of the tenth century, blaming them primarily on low Niles and ongoing political strife. Their accounts are like the horror stories of modern-day fiction in which pillages and cannibalism were just a starting point. The works of these chroniclers focus primarily on the consequences of famines in the metropolises and the state of people living in the urban fabric. On the contrary, the letters of Geniza merchants dating to these years suggest that trade continued as usual, with occasional hiccups. Several letters between the traders and peasants in the countryside also shed light on the prevailing conditions in the countryside during famines and times of food shortage. In this paper, through a study of the Geniza corpus supplemented with Arabic papyrology dating to that period, I try to examine the social history of Egyptian famines from the 10th to the 12th centuries from the perspective of the people in the countryside. How did they perceive the famine? Were they aware of the ongoing crises in the metropolises and did they affect them? Were they instrumental in countering the food shortages or did they aggravate the situation by hoarding grain or favoring the cultivation of commercial crops over food crops? Were the periods of famine as severe as historians narrate? Did the famines occur because of environmental catastrophes coupled with political crises or were they urban shortages for which the state had inadequate means to tackle?

New insights into the archives of Fayum textile merchants

Naïm Vanthieghem, CNRS, France

The archive of the Arab merchant Abū Hurayra Ǧaʿfar b. Aḥmad, who lived in the rich province of Fayyūm during the reign of Aḥmad b. Ṭūlūn (868-884), constitutes, with more than two hundred and fifty documents (of which one hundred are unpublished), the largest archival collection known to date for Abbasid Egypt. In addition to a very large number of letters and legal acts published mainly by Y. Rāġib in his volumes of P. Marchands I-V, the archive includes accounts but also fragments of fiqh and šurūṭ manuals as well as ḥadīṯs and prayers that the merchant recorded in writing as a token of piety. These documents provide information on many aspects of the economic and social life of medieval Egypt and also allow to delve into the daily life of this family, and to learn about their sorrows, joys, fears and aspirations, as well as the intellectual and religious atmosphere in which they were steeped. As part of an "Émergences" project generously supported by the City of Paris, Mathieu Tillier and I have resumed the study of this archive and begun to study the unpublished material. In this presentation, I will show the contribution that the unpublished pieces of this archive, as well as previously unseen literary sources, offer to the history of this merchant and his family.

Surety Contracts from Late Antique and Early Arab Egypt

Lucia Waldschütz, Princeton University, USA

The papyrologcial evidence from Egypt’s Ptolemaic and Roman periods shows that surety contracts were used as a common and well-attested measure to secure transactions and obligations like financial debts, appearances at court, or the fulfillment of liturgical tasks. Starting in the late fourth century, however, the preserved Greek documents from the Byzantine period suggest that surety contracts, and sureties for release (Enthaftungsbürgschaften) in particular, were used by the landowning elite to secure and further their own interests by strictly overseeing and controlling the workforce on estate lands through guarantors as middlemen. Suretyship in the Greek documents had thus shifted from a public context to an ostensibly private one, with the addressees, despite oftentimes holding public offices, acting seemingly as private individuals in their function of landowner. It appears that those elites took advantage of an established legal instrument and shaped it according to their need—they developed it further and ‘repurposed’ it.
The Coptic and Arabic surety contracts, however, do not seem to reflect such a shift in usage despite partly being issued contemporaneously with the Greek documents (Coptic ones from the seventh century onwards, Arabic ones from the early eighth century onwards). This paper aims to highlight the development of surety contracts in terms of their actors, purposes, and contexts of use in late antiquity and the early Arab period. In particular, I will demonstrate that, compared to the Greek documents, Arabic sureties did not cater to the needs of private individuals trying to perpetuate their prosperity and wellbeing at the expense of tenants and farmers. On the contrary, Arabic surety contracts seem to have been issued for more traditional contexts, ensuring debt repayments, appearances, and similar obligations. This return back to the ‘Roman way’ may be indicative of the landed aristocracy’s lost influence and power upon the Arab conquest of Egypt as well as the dissolution of the estates-system which had bound farmers and tenants to an aristocratic land owner in the Byzantine period. A close examination of Arabic surety contracts will show the shifts in their usage and emphasize both continuities and discontinuities in the way sureties were applied within the socio-economic framework of early Arab Egypt.

"May the Lord establish him firmly upon his throne ...": The late Coptic bishop's letters

Vincent Walter, FU Berlin, Germany

Within the late Coptic letters of the 10th–11th centuries, the letters written by and addressed to bishops differ in clear ways from the rest of the corpus. Besides differences in phraseology—without a doubt triggered by the high social status of bishops within the Christian community of Egypt—some of these letters are also visually distinct, employing, for example, a different type of external address or even an altogether different layout more akin to what one would expect in a literary manuscript.
Due to the high social status of at least one of the parties involved in these letters, one could assume them to be more linguistically conservative in comparison to contempary letters between people of lower social status, for example regarding their loanword usage. But this issue has yet to be investigated before it can be conclusively proved or disproved.
The paper will present this heterogeneous yet distinct dossier in its entirety, considering both the documents as material objects as well as the texts contained within them. Special attention will be paid to linguistic matters, such as orthography, morphology, and loanword usage, as well as diplomatic aspects, such as phraseology, punctuation, and layout. Finally, the contents of the letters will be taken into account to see if any relationships between the matters discussed and the aforementioned linguistic and diplomatic factors can be established.

The Arabic Documents of Dayr al-Naqlūn: A Preliminary Report

Lev Weitz, Catholic University of America, USA

This paper will present a preliminary report on the corpus of Arabic documents found on the site of Dayr al-Naqlūn, the medieval Fayyūm monastery that has been the focus of excavations by the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, University of Warsaw, since the 1980s. The presenter and Naïm Vanthieghem are currently preparing an edition of the document collection for publication.
The paper will begin with a brief outline of the character of the corpus. It includes approximately two hundred separate items, of which six are papyrus and the rest paper. A paleographical survey indicates that the bulk of the documents cluster in the ninth-eleventh centuries CE in the Ṭulūnid, Ikhshīdid, an especially Fāṭimid periods; a smaller number stretch into the Mamlūk period. The corpus is thus largely contemporary with the Arabic documentary corpora from nearby Fayyūm villages like Ṭuṭūn, Buljusūq, and Uqlūl, and adds to the picture those corpora provide of an active rural society into the eleventh century. The Naqlūn documents, though quite fragmentary on the whole, fall into many well-known documentary genres: letters, contracts, orders for delivery, tax receipts, and accounts.
The paper will then offer a closer look at several notable examples from the corpus that give insight into the workings of this monastic community: a set of orders addressed to a deacon named Rumayyīl (Eremiel), apparently an active administrator, that attest to the monastery’s agricultural business; a contract of sale for a monk’s cell indicative of the community’s connections to the wider legal practices of the Fayyūm; and a message to a high ecclesiastical official that mentions a local tribal emir of the fourteenth century known from narrative sources. All told, the Dayr al-Naqlūn documentary corpus adds to the evolving picture of rural society and institutions in medieval Islamic Egypt that only documents can provide.

The Countryside Life in Ancient Egypt through Hieratic Papyri

Ahmed Farouk Zaafrany, Minia University, Egypt

While searching in different Hieratic Papyrus, I found that there were many of sentences and formulas describe the countryside life in those papyrus whether in the same tale or in another one.
Firstly: In the tale of "The Two Brothers" there were passages describe the countryside life as the environment of the two brothers which live in it, appeared in:
1- when Bata drive his cattle to let them graze in the field to increase their offspring very much. 2- Bata did all kinds of labour in the field such as plowing, sowing seeds and harvested. 3- When Bata returned to his house in the evening laden every good produce of the field like vegetable, milk and wood.
Secondly: In the tale of "The Eloquent Peasant" The life of Peasant and his family all expresses on manifestations of the countryside life, appeared in:
1- The word "sxty" which mean "Peasant" or "Citizen" indicate a man who live in Countryside life. 2- The works which did the wife of the Peasant which called "Mrt" such as measured the barley that is in the storehouse, and turned her for his husband amount of barley into bread and beer to can live on it during he goes to Egypt. 3- Collecting the Peasant for the products of Wadi- Natrun on its donkeys and going to trade with it in Egypt, all of these manifestations of the countryside life.
Thirdly: In "The Heqanakht Papyri" appeared the manifestations of the countryside life as came in:
1-In Letters from I-III which talk about instructions from Heqanakht to his employees Merisu, Heti's son Nakht and Sinebniut to interested in the agricultural affairs in the Heqanakht estates.
2- The village which Heqanakht's live called "nbsty" it's located near Thebes and appear in it The Countryside Life.