Illuminating an Illuminated Islamic Document: The Twin Arts of Calligraphy and Embroidery in Fatimid Egypt: T-S K10.12
It’s been more than five years since I started working for the Genizah Research Unit here in Cambridge. Since then, I’ve written six Fragment of the Month articles – some of them even good – about Genizah fragments that I’ve found particularly interesting or challenging to interpret.1 My time in Cambridge ends with this month, and I am so grateful for the support of the Genizah Research Unit and University Library since 2019. I am equally grateful for the support of all our Fragment of the Month readers, so here’s one last manuscript mystery for the road.
The fragment for this month is T-S K10.12. It is quite large for a Genizah fragment, measuring 53.2 x 25.5 cm. It’s made of parchment and has a vertical ‘rotulus’ format, much taller than it is wide, typical of magical amulets, petitions, and certain other legal documents found in the Genizah. The most striking portion is the top third, which has two illuminated bands of ornamental Arabic calligraphy flanking a series of illustrated animals on a red background. Don’t worry, we will get to them – but first we have to figure out what this manuscript actually is.
T-S K10.12 recto. The verso is blank.
The lower two thirds of the manuscript used to be full of smaller Arabic writing, but the leaf is badly damaged and most of the text has rubbed off. It’s no mystery how this happened. Looking around the intact edges and the middle of T-S K10.12, you’ll notice a series of small holes lining the entire page. These holes are ‘sewing stations’, produced when a bookbinder sewed this parchment onto the cover of a separate book. The sewing stations in the centre of the parchment even make it clear where the spine of that book was situated. That means this face of T-S K10.12 spent much of its lifetime pressed against the hard boards of a book cover, and whenever that book opened or closed, a bit of ink rubbed off.
T-S K10.12 with surviving sewing stations highlighted. The yellow sections secured it to a book's cover boards, while the purple sections attached to the spine.
It was quite common for medieval bookbinders to recycle manuscripts in this way, especially those made with expensive parchment. Moreover, the Arabic chanceries in Egypt didn’t keep permanent archives, instead throwing out or selling old documents as scrap material. Some of these scraps ended up in Egypt’s Jewish communities, who used it for notetaking and bookbinding. This is the main reason that so many Islamic legal documents survived in the Cairo Genizah.2
Now it's not impossible to decipher texts that are this badly damaged. Sometimes you get lucky and a key word is legible. I hadn’t had much luck with this one, but the manuscript is so unusual, we didn’t want to just give up.
Cambridge University Library’s Cultural Heritage Imaging Laboratory (CHIL) helped us out and took new images of T-S K10.12 using multispectral imaging (MSI). MSI is a special type of photography that uses wavelengths of light beyond the visible spectrum to detect details in a manuscript that are otherwise invisible to the naked eye. It tends to be most useful for manuscripts written with iron-gall inks that have faded or been overwritten. For example, this is an MSI photo of the oldest Genizah fragment – a palimpsest of Hebrew poetry over a Greek Bible – clearly showing the difference between the Greek undertext and Hebrew overtext.
Multispectral image of T0S 12.184, part of the well-known Genizah 'Yannai Quire'3
The MSI results for T-S K10.12 were not quite that striking, probably because the ink is carbon-based, rather than an iron- or other metalo-gallic ink. Rather than fading like the ink in the palimpsest above, carbon inks tend to flake off over time, leaving less pigment behind for the MSI to detect. We can pick out a few more words now, but still not enough to reconstruct the whole text.4
True colour of the first few lines of T-S K10.12
Infrared of the first few lines of T-S K10.12
If this were the text of the Qurʾan or a Bible translation, then we would be able to decipher it with a high degree of certainty, but all signs point to T-S K10.12 being a legal document. The exact text of such a document is unique to the specific people and legal situation for which it was crafted, so it is unlikely that there is another copy of this manuscript that we could use as a key.
That said, legal documents are also formulaic, which means we expect to find the same parts of a documentary template in the same place on every document of that type. For instance, many contracts end with signatures of witnesses who were present during the agreement. There does seem to be a signature at the end of this manuscript from someone known as sayyid (?) Muḥammad bin (‘lord Muhammad son of’), though the adjacent elements of his name are too badly rubbed to read with confidence.
Possible witness signature on T-S K10.12
Many documents also begin with common formulae, and this does allow us to decipher the beginning of T-S K10.12:
First line of T-S K10.12. The text originally included the Arabic statement: وصلى الله على سيدنا محمد نبيه واله وسلم تسليما ‘May God bless our lord Muhammad, His prophet, and His family, and save them’.
This formula is the taṣliya, a blessing for the Prophet Muhammad that regularly appears at the beginning of Muslim documents. Shiʿi versions of the taṣliya also include a blessing for Muhammad’s family, as we see here, and Genizah scholars have recorded numerous similar versions of the taṣliya in documents from the Shiʿi Fatimid Caliphate (ca. 969-1171 CE).5 For example, Ḥasan abū ʿAlī, a Jew from Tyre, drafted this document in the twelfth century to release two associates from debts that they owed him. It begins with the same taṣliya as T-S K10.12:6
First few lines of T-S Ar.30.30 f2 verso, including transcription of the taṣliya formula
Other Genizah documents with similar versions of the taṣliya include Fatimid marriage contracts, leases, and government petitions.7 Unfortunately for us, the multispectral analysis was not enough to resolve much more of T-S K10.12’s contents. All we can really say from the presence of the Shiʿi taṣliya and the long vertical format is that this fragment is most likely a Fatimid document of some kind. It might be any of the types mentioned here.
Now for the illumination, which is not at all expected for an Islamic legal document. Most Fatimid documents are written solely with black-brown ink in the messy style of bureaucratic clerks with little time to spare. By contrast, the decorative bands at the top of T-S K10.12 were executed by a trained calligrapher and skilled artist.
Two bands of monumental Arabic calligraphy and an inhabited scroll on T-S K10.12
The first and third bands both bear the same Arabic inscription, repeated over and over: al-mulk lillāh 'sovereignty is God’s.' The second band is what’s known as an ‘inhabited scroll’, a series of animals in a row connected by vegetal elements. Inhabited scrolls are a common design from Roman-Byzantine iconography that persisted into art of the Islamic period.8 The three animals that survive on T-S K10.12 are a rabbit, a scimitar oryx, and some kind of bird (possibly a peacock?).9 There is also still a bit of gold leaf in the centre of the plant on the right side of the oryx.
Now, just because Arabic documents don’t tend to be decorated does not mean that there are no parallels to these illuminations in Islamicate art. They bear a striking resemblance to the patterns of tiraz, a type of textile that was popular in Fatimid Egypt and across the medieval Middle East. Tiraz embroidery inscribed text and other designs into woven fabric, sometimes even using silk and gold thread. The exchange of tiraz garments as diplomatic gifts played an important role in political relations between Islamicate dignitaries, so Fatimid rulers closely controlled their production in government-run factories.10
Tiraz fragment in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Attributed to Egypt, ca. 11th century11
Many of the patterns and motifs found in Fatimid tiraz descend from techniques that Coptic Christian weavers developed in pre-Islamic Egypt. To get a sense for this historical development, I paid a visit to Cambridge’s Westminster College, which holds a small collection of pre-Islamic Egyptian textiles. Twin sisters Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson – both key players in bringing the Cairo Genizah to Cambridge – endowed the land for Westminster College to train Presbyterian ministers in 1899. Upon their deaths, the College acquired their personal papers and artefacts that they collected during their travels in Egypt and Palestine.12 These textile fragments were among those artefacts. There is a clear stylistic connection between these earlier examples and the inhabited scroll in the second band of T-S K10.12:13
Pre-Islamic Egyptian textiles from Westminster College. Note that some of the information on the original labels is inaccurate. Most of these fragments date to the late Byzantine period and none of them are 'mummy wrappings.'
Shortly after visiting Westminster College, I stopped by Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum for a completely unrelated reason, and found that they also have a collection of Coptic textiles.14 This case is on display in their Egyptian gallery. Note number 38 in the bottom of the photos. It’s another rabbit on an inhabited scroll, dated ca. 500-600 CE.15
Coptic textiles from Fitzwilliam Museum's collections
By far the most common motif in Fatimid tiraz is monumental Arabic text in ‘Kufic’ script styles, just like the first and third bands of T-S K10.12. The introduction of textual inscriptions to tiraz was an innovation on earlier Coptic weaving techniques that first appears during the early Islamic period. These inscriptions often contain repeated mottos invoking God or the name of the ruler who commissioned a particular tiraz garment. As a reminder, the inscription on T-S K10.12 repeats the phrase الملك لله al-mulk lillāh ('sovereignty is God’s').
Tiraz fragment in the Royal Ontario Museum, beginning with the basmala (‘in the name of God’) and including the name of the Fatimid Caliph al-Muʿizz (952-976 CE). Note the ascending final stroke of the nūn ن in al-raḥmān الرحمن.16
Tiraz fragment in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The text repeats the Shiʿi shahāda and names the Fatimid Caliph al-Ẓāhir (1031-1036)17
Another tiraz fragment in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ca. 10th century. The inscription repeats al-mulk lillāh, exactly the same phrase as the Genizah fragment T-S K10.1218
Tiraz fragment in Cairo’s Museum of Islamic Art from the reign of the Fatimid Caliph al-ʿAzīz (975-996). The lower register repeats al-mulk lillāh in two ornamental bands that flank an inhabited scroll19
My conclusion, based on the comparison with these tiraz fragments, is that the person who commissioned T-S K10.12 was a high-ranking member of the Fatimid court in the late tenth or early eleventh century. It might even have been the Caliph al-ʿAzīz or one of his successors, though we can’t say for certain without deciphering more of the document. No matter who the patron was though, the illuminator was clearly aware of contemporary tiraz designs and intentionally recreated them in a different medium. That fact raises new, interesting questions for us at the GRU about relationships between calligraphers and embroiderers in Fatimid Egypt.
There’s one more thing I noticed during this project. In several of the Fatimid tiraz samples, Arabic letters with tails that typically descend below the baseline instead rise to the top of the line. Here is an example of what I mean in another tiraz from the reign of al-ʿAzīz (975-996):
Inset of MIA 9445. The text reads الامام العزيز بالله امير المومنين (al-Imām al-ʿAzīz Billāh, Commander of the Believers), with the tails of the ز in عزيز and ن in مومنين rising to the top of the line20
And here’s an example from al-ʿAzīz’s son, al-Ḥākim (ruled 996-1021):
ROM 978.76.62, highlighting the name الحاكم al-Ḥākim with ascending final م mīm21
This phenomenon reminded me of another Genizah fragment.22 T-S AS 181.228 is a run-of-the-mill tax receipt, except it has a seal on the verso that was produced with a carved wooden stamp.23 This seal says, quite simply, الامام الحاكم al-Imām al-Ḥākim. Just like the tiraz, the tails of both final mīms rise to the top of the line, rather than descending below the baseline.
T-S AS 181.228 recto
T-S AS 181.228 verso
Karl Schaefer previously published T-S AS 181.228 in his studies of Arabic block printing, but he dismissed out of hand any possibility that the seal refers to the Fatimid Caliph al-Ḥākim. His exact words were:
It is impossible to determine with any degree of certainty who, exactly, 'al-Imām al-Hākim' was. The temptation to see in this a reference to the notorious Fatimid caliph al-Hākim bi-Allāh (375/985-411/1021) is powerful, but such an identification is insupportable, even if the artifact does originate from Egypt.24
However, with the comparative evidence of contemporary tiraz inscriptions, we can make a reasonable case that the stamp really was used to mark a tax receipt in al-Hākim’s chancery, even if it may not have belonged to him personally. This would make T-S AS 181.228 one of the only woodblock ‘prints’ with a definite external date (ca. 996-1021 CE), at least to the extent that we can say a small wooden stamp is the same technology as larger woodblock printing.25 Either way, T-S AS 181.228 is worth another look.
Thank you again for reading and for supporting the Genizah Research Unit. If you haven’t heard yet, we are currently celebrating 50 years since the founding of the GRU in 1974. To mark this anniversary, we have a new book coming out called The Illustrated Cairo Genizah. T-S K10.12 appears in this book alongside full-colour images of over 300 other Genizah fragments from the Cambridge collections. It’s co-authored by me and the GRU’s Education Officer, the brilliant Dr Melonie Schmierer-Lee. If you enjoy our Fragment of the Month series, I guarantee you will enjoy this book. It will have a limited print run, but you can pre-order now from this link: linktr.ee/CambridgeGRU
The Illustrated Cairo Genizah, by Nick Posegay and Melonie Schmierer-Lee
Update 9 September 2024
Following the publication of this article, one of our readers, Mohamed Ali Abo Hamza, got in touch with me and requested to see the multispectral images of the entire fragment. He quickly deciphered portions of several lines below the taṣliya, confirming that the document is a marriage contract. He concluded that the contract was signed in Bahnasa (Oxyrhynchus), a city about 160 kilometres southwest of Fustat, on a Friday, but frustratingly, the rest of the date is lost. He further deciphered the names of the betrothed: […] ʿAbd Allāh bin ʿAyyād al-Ṣaqīl (عبد الله بن عياد الصقيل) and [Si]thum al-Bint […] (ستهم البنت). Another reader, Ahmed El-Aktash, confirmed his reading of the city and the names, providing me with a partial transcription of the first few lines. So far, I have been unable to find additional records that refer to either person named in the contract.I am extremely grateful to both Mohamed and Ahmed for sharing their expertise and offering to help. Follow them on Twitter (@Alsonamyhart and @aktash111) for more posts about Arabic manuscripts.
Footnotes
1 If you ask me, these ones are good: January 2020, June 2021, January 2023, and (my personal favourite) October 2023. These less so: July 2019, June 2020.
2 See Marina Rustow, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue, Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
3 For more on this palimpsest, see Francis Crawford Burkitt, Fragments of the Books of Kings, According to the Translation of Aquila from a MS Formerly in the Geniza at Cairo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897), https://archive.org/details/fragmentsofbooks00aquiuoft/page/n13/mode/2up.
4 At least, not enough for me to reconstruct the whole text. Not without a disproportionate amount of time and energy spent, anyway, and I’m pretty tired in general. I suspect some of the wizards at the Princeton Geniza Lab could do a better job. It is on the edge of feasibility for a dedicated specialist in Islamic legal documents. If you think you can decipher it, please get in touch with me for hi-res MSI images of the whole fragment (current contact info should be here: linktr.ee/nposegay).
5 The Fatimids took control of Fustat in 969 CE and ruled Egypt until the rise of the Ayyubids (under Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, AKA Saladin) in 1171.
6 The full text of this document appears with English translation in Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents in the Cambridge Genizah Collections, ed. Stefan C. Reif, vol. 10, Genizah Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 237.
7 Marriage contract: T-S Ar.38.66; leases: T-S Ar.38.115, T-S Misc.29.24, T-S Ar.5.1; petitions: T-S Ar.28.8, T-S Ar.39.464, T-S Ar.39.470. For editions and translations of all these documents, see Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents in the Cambridge Genizah Collections, ed. Stefan C. Reif, vol. 10, Genizah Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
8 See Royal Ontario Museum 978.76.132 (https://collections.rom.on.ca/objects/422392/tiraz-textile-fragment?ctx=..., accessed 23 August 2024).
9 All three animals appear to have jewelled collars, which are (apparently) signs of royal ownership; see Royal Ontario Museum 970.364.10 (https://collections.rom.on.ca/objects/527315/textile-fragment-with-ibex-..., accessed 23 August 2024). This detail would be consistent with my argument that T-S K10.12 belonged to a high-ranking Fatimid official.
10 Bernard O’Kane, ‘The Egyptian Art of the Tiraz in Fatimid Times’, in The World of the Fatimids (Exhibition Catalogue), ed. Assadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani (Toronto: Aga Khan Museum, 2018), 178.
11 MMA 29.136.5; Walker, Daniel S., and Aimee Froom. “Exhibition Notebook.” In Tiraz: Inscribed Textiles from Islamic Workshops. New York, NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992, no. 18, p. 29.
12 Cambridge University Library partnered with Oxford’s Bodleian Library in 2013 to purchase Lewis and Gibson’s collection of medieval manuscripts from Westminster College. Most of the newly renamed ‘Lewis-Gibson’ Collection is believed to come from the Cairo Genizah. The entire collection can be viewed here: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/lewisgibson.
13 Thank you very much to Helen Weller, the Westminster College Archivist, who kindly offered to show me the textile fragments. For more on the lives of Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, see Janet Soskice, Sisters of Sinai (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).
14 The museum is free. You should visit and skip all the Roman exhibits. Oh, and if you find the painting with the ugliest baby Jesus (I know where it is), send me a picture.
15 According to the display case in the museum. The accession number is Fitzwilliam Museum E.T.115.
16 ROM 963.95.5 (https://www.rom.on.ca/en/exhibitions-galleries/exhibitions/past/cairo-un..., accessed 23 August 2024). See catalogue entry by Lisa Golombek (https://collections.rom.on.ca/objects/371275/tiraz-textile-fragment?ctx=..., accessed 23 August 2024).
17 MMA 29.136.1 (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/448248, accessed 23 August 2024); Walker, Daniel S., and Aimee Froom. “Exhibition Notebook.” In Tiraz: Inscribed Textiles from Islamic Workshops. New York, NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992, no. 17, p. 28.
18 MMA 48.70 (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/450753, accessed 23 August 2024)
19 Cairo, Museum of Islamic Art 13015; Bernard O’Kane, ‘The Egyptian Art of the Tiraz in Fatimid Times’, in The World of the Fatimids (Exhibition Catalogue), ed. Assadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani (Toronto: Aga Khan Museum, 2018), 179.
20 Bernard O’Kane, ‘The Egyptian Art of the Tiraz in Fatimid Times’, in The World of the Fatimids (Exhibition Catalogue), ed. Assadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani (Toronto: Aga Khan Museum, 2018), 182.
21 https://collections.rom.on.ca/objects/526546/tiraz-textile-fragment?ctx=... (accessed 23 August 2024).
22 BONUS Fragment of the Month incoming. Let no one try to say I don’t give you your money’s worth.
23 On woodblock printing in the Genizah, see our Fragment of the Month from January 2023. On the identification of T-S AS 181.228 as a tax receipt, see the Princeton Geniza Project database (https://geniza.princeton.edu/en/documents/37507/, accessed 23 August 2024). On Arabic woodblock printing in general, see Kristina Richardson, Roma in the Medieval Islamic World: Literacy, Culture, and Migration (London: I.B. Tauris, 2022), 111–13.
24 Karl Schaefer, ‘Eleven Medieval Arabic Block Prints in the Cambridge University Library’, Arabica 48, no. 2 (2001): 226, https://doi.org/10.1163/157005801323224467. Frankly, I don’t understand why he said it is insupportable. See also, Karl Schaefer, Enigmatic Charms: Medieval Arabic Block Printed Amulets in American and European Libraries and Museums, vol. 82, Handbook of Ottoman Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 46, 94.
25 Several GRU colleagues thought I couldn’t sneak any printing into this FOTM and they were WRONG.
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The manuscripts in this article are part of the Cairo Genizah Collection in Cambridge University Library. To see more items from this collection visit: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/