In December 1033 CE – late afternoon on the 12th day of the Hebrew month of Tevet – a terrible earthquake shook Palestine. Across the region, cities were levelled and a tsunami wave arrived on the Mediterranean coast. The events of that day and its aftermath reached Egypt soon afterwards in a letter written by the scribe Solomon ben Ṣemaḥ. The letter, T-S 18J3.9, can be seen on Cambridge Digital Library with... Read More
Fatimid
Ben Outhwaite
on Tue 7 Feb 2023
Has tags: earthquake, Fatimid, Genizah Fragments, letter, Ramla, scribe
Melonie Schmierer-Lee
on Thu 25 Nov 2021
Our Throwback Thursday this week is taken from issue 56 of the printed edition of Genizah Fragments, published in October 2008, by Marina Rustow:
No one has satisfactorily explained why the Cairo Genizah preserved Arabic texts from the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk chancery (dīwān al-inshā), the bureau charged with, among other tasks, receiving petitions from Egyptian and Syrian subjects and issuing decrees in response to them. To date, 135 such documents have been... Read MoreHas tags: Chancery, Fatimid, Genizah Fragments, petition
Melonie Schmierer-Lee and Lorenzo Bondioli
on Wed 3 Nov 2021
Lorenzo, what are you working on at the moment?
I’ve been spending some time on T-S 10J12.26, a business letter from the prominent Genizah merchant Nahray b. Nissim, writing from Fusṭāṭ to his associate Barhūn b. Mūsā ’l-Tāhartī, who was out in the Egyptian hinterland (specifically in the town of Būṣīr). This document has been edited and discussed by Genizah scholars, starting from Goitein himself, but I still could not quite wrap my mind around it. What is so interesting about... Read More
Has tags: Fatimid, Genizah Fragments, Goitein, letter, Q&A, trade
Melonie Schmierer-Lee
on Thu 23 Sep 2021
Our Throwback Thursday this week is taken from issues 10 and 11 of the printed edition of Genizah Fragments, published in October 1985 and April 1986, by Geoffrey Khan while he was a Research Associate in the GRU:
The vast majority of Genizah fragments are written in Hebrew characters. This is not surprising, since reverence for the Hebrew script was the chief motivation for placing manuscripts in the Genizah. The language of well over half of them,... Read MoreHas tags: Arabic, Fatimid, Genizah Fragments, legal, Muslim-Jewish relations, petition
Melonie Schmierer-Lee
on Thu 15 Jul 2021
It’s the 15th of July, and 922 years since the Christian armies of the First Crusade captured Jerusalem from her Fatimid defenders. The siege of 38 days ended in a bloodbath, according to contemporary accounts, but the Cairo Genizah preserves what may be the earliest written account of some of the events of that day, and its aftermath. Weeks after Jerusalem was looted and burned, the elders of Ashqelon wrote to the Egyptian Jewish community to describe the reports of refugees who had either fled there ahead of the Crusaders or had been captured and released by them.
... Read MoreHas tags: Crusaders, Fatimid, Genizah Fragments, Goitein, Jerusalem
Melonie Schmierer-Lee
on Thu 13 May 2021
Our Throwback Thursday this week is taken from issue 13 of the printed edition of Genizah Fragments, published in April 1987:
In the course of editing a corpus of mediaeval Arabic legal and chancery documents preserved in the Cambridge Genizah Collection, Dr Geoffrey Khan, Research Assistant in the Genizah Unit, has discovered a decree on the subject of fishing rights.
The decree was issued by the Fatimid government of Egypt in the twelfth century and is intended to protect... Read More
Has tags: al-Hafiz, Chancery, Fatimid, fishing, Genizah Fragments, Geoffrey Khan