Cambridge University Library
The Arabic Poetry in the Cairo Genizah project (APCG) recently embarked on a tour of the United Arab Emirates, showcasing its collection of poetry manuscripts to scholars and the public in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Dr Mohamed Ahmed, head of the project, organized the tour in the Gulf with the aim of highlighting the significance of the Cairo Genizah as a repository of Arabic literature and an important – but little known – resource for Arabic textual history.
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Has tags: Arabic, exhibition, Genizah Fragments, poetry
Alan, which fragment are you looking at today?
My job description at the Princeton Geniza Project is to look at uncatalogued or minimally catalogued documentary fragments, and while looking for these I came across T-S NS J479, a single page covered with strange symbols written in all directions. I’ve probably glanced at around 50,000 Genizah fragments by now, and I’ve never seen anything that looks like this.
What is it? Which language is it?
Most of it is written in what I think is a made-up code, though whether it was invented or... Read More
Has tags: Arabic, cipher, Genizah Fragments, poetry, Q&A, Sufism
Amir, you made an exciting discovery last week. Can you tell us about it?
Yes! I'm describing some documents at the moment for the Princeton Geniza Project, and while going through some of the manuscripts of the Jewish Theological Seminary I encountered two fragments containing a long piyyut.
There are tens of thousands of these piyyutim – liturgical poems – in the Genizah, and they’re not your area of research. Why did this one catch your eye?
It was written by a hand very familiar to me. It was the handwriting of Halfon b. Nathaniel... Read More
Has tags: al-Andalus, Genizah Fragments, Jewish Theological Seminary, Judah ha-Levi, poetry, Q&A
Michael, what are you working on at the moment?
I’ve recently finished a book (Studies in the Medieval Hebrew Tradition of the Ḥarīrīan and Ḥarizian Maqama) on what, for lack of a better word, we can call the “classical” maqama. A maqama is a rhymed-prose narrative into which poems are inserted. The sorts of maqamas on which I am working are called picaresque maqamas, as they involve the adventures of a narrator and a hero. Picaresque maqamas went into the makeup of... Read More
Has tags: Arabic, Genizah Fragments, literature, mamluk, poetry, Q&A, theatre
Hi Mohamed, which manuscript are you working on today?
I’m working on T-S Ar.42.8. It’s a fragment in Arabic script by an unidentified author and scribe.
Can you tell me about it?
It’s a fragment of a work on poetics, covering the subject of prosody in Classical Arabic poetry and mentioning famous Arabic poetic scholars, such as al-Ḵalīl and al-Aḵṭal. The recto... Read More
Has tags: Arabic, Genizah Fragments, literature, poetry, Q&A
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