Download PDF | ( Islamic History And Civilization Volume 55) P. J. Sijpesteijn, Lennart Sundelin ( Eds) , Papyrology And The History Of Early Islamic Egypt, Brill ( 2004)
295 Pages
PREFACE
The studies appearing in this volume represent papers delivered at a colloquium held in March 2002 in Cairo on the theme “Documentary Evidence and the History of Early Islamic Egypt.” The conception of this meeting and its organization originated with a number of graduate students and young scholars at Princeton University, as did the initiative for the simultaneous founding of an International Society for Arabic Papyrology. This is an encouraging harbinger for the future of Near Eastern Studies.
Two important currents of recent historical interests converge in the essays published in this volume—one is chronological and the other is methodological. For some time now, one can observe a heightened interest in careful and detailed re-examination of the first years of the Islamic era, trying to establish fixed points and sure footings in an attempt to reconstruct the reality—political, social, economic and religious. No literary source has been spared in this exploration and no received wisdom has been left unquestioned.
Conventional views on an array of sensitive subjects—the contents and dating of the Qur’an, the nature of Muhammad’s message, the constitution and transmission of the vast body of hadith literature—have not been spared a renewed and rigorous interrogation. The same is true for a variety of issues related to the beginnings of Islamic law and the institutions of governance in the Middle East and North Africa in the seventh through tenth centuries.
And now documents are coming into their own. It was not so long ago that entire sectors of medieval Near Eastern history were pronounced inaccessible to historical research because of a lack of appropriate sources. Indeed, there were frequent laments concerning the penury of documentary sources for the pre-Ottoman period, especially for issues of social and economic history. As interest in certain areas of historical research grew, so, it seems, did the availability of relevant documents. An increased and stubborn interest in the economic, social and cultural life of the medieval Islamic world has, paradoxically, produced the appropriate documents, and not vice versa. Not only was the existence of documents, such as the Arabic papyri from Egypt, known for almost two centuries, but they survived in large numbers and many have long been accessible through publication and translation. What has changed during the past two decades or so is the awareness of how much such documents can tell us about issues of crucial importance to the history of the Islamic Middle East.
The ten papers published here are only a selection, corresponding to one-third of the thirty papers delivered at the Cairo colloquium in March 2002. This meeting brought together scholars young and old, but mostly young, from all parts of the Middle East, as well as from Europe and North America. Its conception and organization were entirely the result of the initiative and vision of two young scholars—Petra Sypesteyyn and Lennart Sundelin—both at that time graduate students in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.
Their efforts, which were dedicated and indefatigable, were amplified by the generous and efficient collaboration of Dr. Johannes den Heyjer, the director of the NetherlandsFlemish Institute in Cairo. There were others, both at Princeton and in Cairo, who contributed time and resources to the success of this scholarly endeavor, and they have our full appreciation. However, it is to these three scholars—Petra Sypesteyjn, Lennart Sundelin and Johannes den Heiyer—that our full homage and our gratitude 1s extended.
The contents of this volume (and the other papers presented at the conference) have amply confirmed the faith of its organizers in the considerable potential of the papyri and related documentary material.
A, L. Udowitch Princeton University
September 25th, 2005
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would first like to thank the many sponsors who made the Cairo Conference and the publication of this volume possible, including the International Society for Arabic Papyrology, the Program in Near Eastern Studies (Princeton University), the Department of Art and Archaeology (Princeton University), the Program in Hellenic Studies (Princeton University), the Council on Regional Studies (Princeton University), the Program in the Ancient World (Princeton University), PInstitut Francais d’Archéologie Orientale (Cairo), the American Research Center in Egypt, and the Royal Netherlands Embassy, Cairo.
We are, however, most of all indebted to our hosts in Cairo, the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC), and to the efforts of the staff there, whose professionalism and (very importantly) calm demeanor were essential for the success of the Conference. ‘This was true of all the staff, but perhaps especially the manager, Tilly Mulder, and the director, Johannes den Heyer. And Dr. Den Heijer was also one of the organizers of the Conference from the beginning, as well as a participant who contributed an important paper.
Likewise, we want to thank the staff of the Dar al-Kutub (Egyptian National Library) for hosting the sessions on the third day of the Conference, and for their willingness to introduce Conference participants to their valuable holdings, especially the important collection of Arabic papyri there. And our special thanks go to the Keeper of the Arabic Papyri at the Dar al-Kutub, Dr. Sa‘id Maghawry, who, with his warm hospitality and boundless enthusiasm for the study of these precious relics, was an inspiration to us all.
We are also indebted to the staff of the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, who were involved with the planning and organization of the Conference, especially Kathleen O’Neil and Kate Fischer. And we would like to thank A. L. Udovitch, Peter Brown, and Patricia Crone for their early encouragement of this project, for serving on the organizing committee, and for their willingness to help us secure the funding necessary to pull it all off: Likewise, we want to thank our editors at Brill, Trudy Kamperveen and Boris van Gool, for their efficiency and unflagging good nature as we brought the Conference proceedings to publication.
Finally, we have chosen to dedicate this volume to the memory of Sarah J. Clackson. She was a brilliant scholar, a participant in the Cairo Conference, a contributor to this volume, but, most importantly, our friend. She is missed.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Sarah J. Clackson was the Lady Wallis Budge Research Fellow in Egyptology, Christ’s College, Cambridge, and the author of Coptic and Greek Texts Relating to the Hermopolite Monastery of Apa Apollo (Oxford, 2000). Her book It fs Our Father Who Writes: Orders from the Archimandnite’s Office at the Monastery of Apollo at Bawit is to be published in 2005 in the series American Studies in Papyrology.
Alia Hanafi is Professor of Papyrology in the Department of Ancient European Civilization, Ain-Shams University, Cairo. She is the former director of the Center of Papyrological Studies and Inscriptions located at Ain-Shams University, and is the author of numerous publications dealing with Greek and Arabic papyrology.
Raif Georges Khoury is a professor in the Seminar ftir Sprachen und Kulturen des Vorderen Orients at the University of Heidelberg, and head of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies there. He is the author of more than twenty books and over one hundred articles, including several editions and studies of early Arabic historical and literary texts found on papyrus.
Tonio Sebastian Richter is an assistant lecturer at the Egyptological Institute of Leipzig University and an editorial assistant for the Keuschrift fiir Aegyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde. He has recently published Rechtssemantitk und forensische Rhetorik. Untersuchungen zu Wortschatz, Stal und Grammatik der Sprache koptischer Rechtsurkunden (Letpzig, 2002).
Petra M. Siypesteyn recently finished a Ph.D. in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and is now a junior research fellow at Christ Church, Oxford. She is currently working on a rural history of Egypt during the first two centuries of Muslim rule.
Adam Silverstein is a British Academy post-doctoral fellow in Middle Eastern history at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Cambridge University.
Lennart Sundelin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He has taught Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern history at St. Joseph’s University (Philadelphia) and most recently at Dartmouth College.
Sofia Torallas ‘Tovar holds a doctorate in Classical Philology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (1995) and was a postdoctoral fellow in University College London (1997-2000). She is currently a research fellow at CSIC (Madrid) and is also the curator of the papyrus collection at the Abbey of Montserrat (Barcelona).
Frank R. Trombley is Reader in Religious Studies at Cardiff University. He teaches Byzantine and early Islamic history. His research deals with the expansion and decline of Christianity in the eastern Mediterranean, and war and society in the early medieval Near East. He has published Hellenic Religion and Chnistamzation c. 370-529 AD. (Leiden, 1993-94).
Klaas A. Worp is Senior Research Associate in the Classics Department at the University of Amsterdam and Professor of Papyrology in Leiden University. His publications include numerous editions of literary and documentary papyri and studies on a wide range of papyrological subjects.
INTRODUCTION: PAPYROLOGY AND THE STUDY OF EARLY ISLAMIC EGYPT"
Lennart Sundelin
In 1902, when Alfred Butler published his classic study The Arab Conquest of Egypt and the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion, the first fruits of spectacular recent papyrus finds were only just then becoming available to historians. Starting with documents discovered in 1877 on the site of ancient Arsinoe, just outside Madinat al-Fayyim, thousands of Greek, Coptic, and Arabic texts were soon being dug up there and elsewhere in the Fayyam oasis. Major finds were likewise made at [hnas al-Madina (Heracleopolis), Bahnasa (Oxyrhynchus), Ashmiinayn (Hermopolis), Kom Ishqaw (Aphrodito), West Thebes, Aswan (Syene and Elephantine), and at several other sites in Upper and Middle Egypt.’ Written predominantly on papyrus, but also on parchment, cloth, wood, bone, leather, and broken pieces of pottery (and some of the later documents also on paper), these texts were found in the course of archaeological excavation, clandestine digging by local inhabitants, or simply by accident, often as a result of the expansion of Egyptian agriculture in this period.
From the 1880’s on, editions of texts as well as descriptive catalogs of major collections began appearing with increasing frequency. Butler was already able to consult the first of these and he made several references to the papyri. For example, in his discussion of the problems posed by the considerable gap between the seventh-century chronicle of John of Nikiou and the much later appearance of Arabic historical writing about the Conquest period, Butler suggested that “there is some hope of bridging the gulf when the immense mass of Fayam and other papyri comes to be examined.’ And, later in the book, some documents from the Vienna collection would be used to resolve a question about a name appearing in John’s Chronicle.
Before the 1870’s, there had been very few papyrus texts available for the study of early Islamic Egypt and the tumultuous decades of Byzantine and Persian rule that preceded the Arab Conquest. Yet, the potential historical importance of these artifacts had come to the attention of European scholars already by the mid-eighteenth century, particularly after the 1752 discovery of hundreds of papyrus rolls at Herculaneum in Italy. And European travelers to Egypt had been bringing home scraps of ancient texts on papyrus for centuries. By the early nineteenth century, more were being found in excavations carried out by collectors of Egyptian antiquities.
The first Greek papyrus to be edited and published appeared in 1787, then a second in 1813.2 Throughout the nineteenth century there was increasing interest and the pace of publication slowly picked up. But these early editions of Greek papyri were generally texts stemming from the Ptolemaic or early Roman eras, periods of much greater interest to scholars of that day than later materials. In fact, it often happened that when later documents were found in the course of excavation, they were simply discarded by collectors who were really only interested in classical period texts. It has been estimated that “many thousands” of Byzantine Greek, Coptic, and Arabic documents were lost in this way.° And, before the late nineteenth century and the rise of Theodor Mommsen’s Altertumswissenschaft, there was limited interest in documents at all, as opposed to literary texts, which were what really interested both scholars and collectors.’
Interestingly, Arabic documentary papyri had been published as early as 1825, when two eighth-century safe conduct passes were edited by the renowned French orientalist A. I. Silvestre de Sacy.
He would go on to publish two more early Arabic papyri, as well as a re-edition of his first two texts, but it would then be decades before anyone else stepped forward to continue his pioneering work. In general, very little documentary evidence relevant to this period, in any language, would be available before the end of the nineteenth century.
The real contribution of the papyri for the study of late Byzantine and early Islamic Egypt would only come with the publication of documents from those large finds which began to be made in 1877. These included texts written in Arabic, Greek, and Coptic, and even some in Syriac and Middle Persian. Because the cataloging of document collections remains incomplete, and because papyri continue to be found in Egypt and continue to appear in the hands of antiquities dealers or private collectors, it is difficult to say with any precision how many texts have been found in total. Nevertheless, it is clear that a staggering amount of material is available for researchers. In 1993 the papyrologist Peter van Minnen estimated that 35,000 Greek papyri had already been edited and published.’ In the ten years since, the pace at which new texts have been appearing has only increased. Although the exact number of Greek documents which date to the late Byzantine and early Islamic period is not known, a considerable percentage of the major late nineteenth century finds were from this era. In some places, such as at Kom Ishqaw (Aphrodito) in Middle Egypt, most of the material found was late.
In the case of Arabic documents, it is safe to assume that they all postdate the Conquest. Although the total amount published thus far is considerably less than is the case for Greek papyri, the number of texts awaiting editors is enormous. The man who dominated Arabic papyrology for much of the twentieth century, Adolf Grohmann, estimated in 1952 that some 50,000 Arabic documents had been found, of which roughly 16,000 were written on papyrus, most of the rest being later documents on paper.'’ A little more than forty years later, the French papyrologist Yusuf Raghib could say with confidence that this number was now far too low and he suggested that the total was probably more than 150,000, noting that the Vienna collection alone had some 83,300 Arabic pieces (of which 46,300 were papyrus and 36,335 paper).'' Many of these pieces are mere scraps, and most texts are fragmentary, but the abundance of material remains astonishing.
The amount of Coptic material in most collections is much less than is the case for Greek and Arabic, but still considerable. At Vienna, for instance, there are some 11,159 cataloged pieces in Coptic, of which 7153 are on papyri, most of the rest on parchment or paper; if uncataloged materials are included there are about 26,000 Coptic objects.'? Of the Vienna coptica, more than 2300 texts have been edited. While Vienna is the world’s largest collection of papyri, there are museums, libraries, and private collections of Greek, Arabic, and Coptic documents throughout the world with holdings of various sizes, several of them having collections numbering in the thousands of pieces.'*
Among the documentary texts available in these collections, we encounter a diversity of content which mirrors the complex social and economic realities of early medieval Egypt. There are private documents, such as personal letters, bequests, marriage contracts and documents governing divorce; commercial texts including accounts, contracts for sale and rental, quittances, lists, business correspondence, and orders for goods; and there are official documents, such as tax demands and receipts, tax surveys, official declarations and edicts, administrative correspondence, orders to appear before a judge, records of legal proceedings, petitions, even international treaties.
Unlike documents from medieval Europe, which have often been preserved in institutional archives of some sort (e.g. in ecclesiastical, monastic, municipal, or state collections), no archives have survived in this way from early medieval Egypt. Nevertheless, it is clear that both personal and institutional collections of documents did exist in ancient and medieval Egypt, and a number of these have been found, at least in part, including several from late Byzantine and early Islamic Egypt.'* The vagaries of the antiquities trade meant that batches of documents found together were often divided up and sold as individual pieces. Even when purchased as lots, related documents not infrequently were separated and went to different collections. Yet, despite this dispersal of the individual texts, sometimes across several continents, such archives have in several cases been successfully reconstituted.'°
The literary texts that have been found in archacological contexts are just as important for our understanding of late Byzantine and early Islamic Egypt.'® Unfortunately, they are generally studied separately from documents found alongside them.'’ Yet, such texts offer us important early evidence for literary, scholarly, and religious activity, as well as for the circulation of the products of these activities, in comparison with manuscript traditions that are invariably later. The paper contributed by Raif Georges Khoury to this volume discusses the papyri as witnesses of Arabic literary activity as early as the eighth century.
This is a period for which the evidence is otherwise inconclusive and has engendered considerable debate as, for example, in the question of whether religious and historical texts were being written down at all, as opposed to oral transmission. As has also been the case with classical and early Christian literature from Egypt, the fragments found of post-Conquest literary works include our earliest attestations for a number of important texts, as well as the remains of some works long thought to be lost.'!® And they provide us with information about what sorts of texts were being copied and read in those centuries, much more than we can glean from the end products of the manuscript traditions.
Moreover, these literary texts, found written on papyrus, parchment, and other materials, sometimes contain important information about their owners and those who produced them; for example, when colophons make reference to the patronage of manuscript production, or name the scribes who copied them.'? And, although literary texts without colophons offer few internal clues as to their provenance, date, ownership, or use, if we look closely at cases where they are found in association with documents, or in a controlled excavation, it might be possible to start to answer these questions with more precision. Finally, semi-literary texts, such as the two Arabic amulets published in this volume by Alia Hanafi, provide important information about the society in which they circulated, in this case with respect to religious belief and practice. Similarly, the numerous writing exercises and other school texts recovered from this period have much to say about literacy and the organization of education.
In addition to texts written on papyrus and similar media, Egypt has produced various other important types of ‘documentary’ evidence which should not be overlooked. Inscriptions, graffiti, seals and stamps, weights, and coins are all available from the first centuries of Islamic Egypt, in some quantity, and in Greek, Coptic, and Arabic. Likewise, the data produced in archacological excavations also needs to be more thoroughly integrated into consideration of this period. Although the Cairo conference “Documentary Evidence and the History of Islamic Egypt” did not include papers dealing with these forms of evidence, it is anticipated that future meetings sponsored by the International Society for Arabic Papyrology will widen their scope to consider the important contributions such materials can make to this study.
Papyrology and History
In comparison with literary sources which were usually written long after the events they purport to describe, the papyri and these other documentary materials offer an immediate and relatively unmediated window through which to view the early development of an Islamic society. And, since we have very little in the way of documentary evidence for this period from other parts of the Islamic world, and everywhere the literary evidence is mostly late, the Egyptian documents take on additional importance as we try to understand contemporary developments from the Atlantic to the Oxus.”°
There are numerous instances where documents, inscriptions, coins, or weights will mention important historical personages known to us from the literary record.”' These texts sometimes provide details missing from the historiographical record, and they also allow us to check the accuracy of reports found in those literary sources. A well-known example of this is found in the extensive administrative correspondence of the governor Qurra ibn Sharik (in office 90-96/ 709-15). These Greek, Coptic, and Arabic letters were sent from Fustat to local administrators, particularly the pagarch of Aphrodito, Basil. As has been pointed out on numerous occasions, the papyri seem to contradict the image of this Umayyad governor as found in the primarily Abbasid-era historical sources.” In those narratives, Qurra is portrayed in a mostly negative light and as something of a tyrant. In the papyrus letters, however, he comes across rather as a careful administrator concerned with efficiency and justice, threatening Basil and other local officials with punishment if they abuse taxpayers or allow village leaders to do so.
In this volume, Frank Trombley’s paper provides us with an example of how documents can be used to enhance our understanding of important events and developments appearing in the chronicles. He uses a combination of literary and documentary evidence to study the ways in which an expanding Umayyad naval program affected the Christian population of Egypt, particularly through the requisitioning of manpower and supplies. Trombley further suggests links between these developments and important eighth-century administrative reforms we know largely from the papyri, such as the increased surveillance and control of population movement (e.g. through the issuing of safe-conduct passes, or ‘passports’).”
In some cases, documents exist which allow us to evaluate conflicting claims found in the literary sources. Adam Silverstein’s paper in this volume is a good example. In studying the early development of the “Islamic postal system” (barid), he compares the information found in documents and in literary sources to check the interpretation and reliability of both, and documents are likewise used to choose between contradictory accounts found in the historiographical and administrative literatures. As Silverstein also points out, this is one of the rare cases where the material from Egypt may be compared with documentary evidence from elsewhere in the early Islamic world, in this case documents referring to the bartd found in Central Asia.
In most cases, however, documentary texts instead provide us with ‘anonymous’ data which can be used to reconstruct social, administrative, and economic interactions which go completely unnoticed in the literary sources. Most fundamentally, there is the mass of detail about the day-to-day life of ordinary people in this period, Muslims and non-Muslims, rich and poor, rural and urban, male and female. We have access to segments of the population that otherwise remain largely invisible because of the focus of literary texts on important historical personalities and the activities of particular social and political groups (e.g. ruling elites and the ‘ulama). We become privy to many aspects of their daily affairs through the wide variety of texts at our disposal, ranging from personal letters to the wide-ranging documentation produced by the state and its administrative activities.
There are whole fields of economic activity that make virtually no impression on literary sources preserved in the manuscript tradition, and which can only be studied through documents. Take, for example, practices of estate management, which figure prominently in the Arabic papyrus letter edited here by Petra Sypesteyyn. Agricultural activities produced a large volume of documentation, and papyrologists working on the Ptolemaic and Roman periods have made impressive advances in their understanding of the internal workings of estates and other units of the agrarian economy, as well as the relationship of these to cities and to the state. Jairus Banaji has recently used Greek papyri to study such issues for the Byzantine period and the first decades after the Conquest.** And Gladys FrantzMurphy has done important work using Arabic documents to study land tenure as this relates to fiscal policy.”° Still, a massive amount of material relevant to the rural economy in early Islamic Egypt awaits further study.
This is also the case for social and economic life in provincial towns, places like Madinat al-Fayyam, Ashminayn, and Aswan. In the paper contributed to this volume by Klaas Worp, we get aglimpse of how much information is available in the papyri for some of these towns. This is important because such places rarely appear in the chronicles and other literary texts, which are focused primarily on what was happening in the new Egyptian capital, Fustat, or in the imperial capital. Studies which reconstruct the socio-economic realities of particular villages and towns, places for which we have concentrations of documentary evidence, would seem to offer much promise. This has now been born out in Terry Wilfong’s examination of the lives of women (and men) in a large village in Upper Egypt during the seventh and eighth centuries.*° The economic relationships of these towns and villages with their hinterlands, and with Fustat, should likewise be further explored.
Sumilarly, there are important developments which, if not entirely missing, are at least obscured in the literary sources we have at our disposal. For example, the early evolution of Islamic law is largely hidden behind a ‘classical’ system that later historians and jurists seem to assume had existed since the Conquest. Using the early legal documents which have survived, scholars can investigate continuities with older Near Eastern, Mediterranean, and Egyptian legal traditions, and various other aspects of legal adaptation and change in the first Islamic centuries, for example the development of legal formularies.”’ Along the same lines, administrative law underwent considerable evolution before the ‘classical’ system began to coalesce in the mid- to late-eighth century. Although ongoing debates in the legal literature offer hints that we are dealing here with problems still being resolved, tying those texts to what was really happening in the countryside is problematic. We can only hope to trace this evolution by means of the documentation produced by the tax system.
For instance, with the eighth-century legal controversies over the fiscal status supposedly accorded to various lands at the time of the Conquest, depending on the circumstances of their capture, we are clearly dealing with the retrojection of the ‘classical’ system onto earlier times to serve current political and economic purposes.” But it would be very difficult to determine from the debate itself what had been the reality ‘on the ground’ in the first decades after the establishment of Arab rule. Yet, a large number of tax demands, receipts, registers, and correspondence exist in Greek, Arabic, and Coptic, from as early as the 640’s. This material is not always easy to interpret, and several key points remain controversial, but these documents do allow us to get behind the anachronisms of the Islamic legal literature, which was produced only much later.
To date, most of the historical research which has made use of documentary evidence from late Byzantine and early Islamic Egypt has focused on administrative history. Already in the first decades of the twentieth century, the historian Carl Becker and the papyrologist H. I. Bell were using recently discovered Greek and Arabic papyri to delineate the structure of the new Arab regime’s administrative system. The first historical monograph to make extensive use of papyrological evidence from this period, Conversion and the Poll Tax in Early Islam, by D. C. Dennett, Jr., was a study of early fiscal policy. And, more recent work based on the papyri has generally been focused on administrative developments, too.
Scholars have been tracing the ways in which the Arab-Muslim state adapted the Byzantine system to its own needs and traditions, sometimes in surprisingly creative ways. Byzantine models of administrative and documentary practice would long continue to be important, and not just in the seventh and eighth centuries when Greek and (to a much lesser extent) Coptic remained in use as administrative languages. Patterns of social, economic, and administrative organization established in the Byzantine period (or earlier) left an imprint on Egyptian society which persisted well into the Islamic period, in some cases up to the present.
In an encouraging development, however, the past few years have also seen the appearance of several studies based on documentary evidence that instead are interested in various aspects of social, economic, and religious history. Taking highly focused topics such as women in an Upper Egyptian town in the seventh-eighth centuries, the cult of the saints in late Byzantine and early Islamic Egypt, or Christian ecclesiastical office holders in this period, these monographs have shown the rich potential of the documents for the study of more than just fiscal, administrative, and legal history.*’ It is hoped that scholars using the Arabic documents will now continue this trend, which has thus far been based primarily on the use of Greek and Coptic materials.
Finally, but very importantly, these documents have been, and will continue to be, a crucial body of evidence for the study of the grammar, lexicography, and development of the three languages used in early Islamic Egypt: Greek, Coptic, and Arabic. ‘The work of Joshua Blau and Simon Hopkins on the development of ‘Middle Arabic’ has long drawn on the Egyptian documents, both those found in the Cairo Geniza as well as the earlier texts.*' The evolution of the Egyptian language and its various Coptic dialects, including the impact of contact with first Greek and then Arabic, remains a topic of great interest.
The paper of Tonio Sebastian Richter published in this volume takes up this issue, particularly the problem of Arabic loanwords appearing in Coptic documents. And, Greek, too, continued to evolve in this period. While we tend to think of borrowing and influence as having worked primarily in the other direction, Sofia Torallas Tovar’s paper examines evidence for lexical interference in the Greek used in late antique Egypt. Indeed, there is a wide range of socio-linguistic questions about this unique trilingual environment which have only begun to be studied. The intriguing question of how factors such as gender and social relationship helped determine which language was used in drawing up any particular document is touched upon briefly in Sarah Clackson’s contribution.
To be sure, the papyri and other documents are not unproblematic sources. Working with these materials is difficult and proper training in their reading and interpretation is hard to come by.” Greek papyrology remains by far the most developed of the fields, but it too is very much a ‘niche’ specialty with limited opportunities for training, research funding, and employment. Moreover, the unique problems associated with Greek documents from Byzantine and early Islamic Egypt are rarely dealt with even when formal training in papyrology is available.
Adding to the problems, the texts themselves are widely scattered in a number of public and private collections across Europe, North America, and the Middle East, not always easily accessible even to established scholars in the field, let alone students trying to learn the craft. Though a large number of edited documents are now available on-line through the Duke Database of Documentary Papyri, for our period these are only Greek materials.** The increasing number of digitized images of texts available on-line is an important and encouraging development, and projects such as the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS) are a tremendous resource, but, again, Greek papyri remain the primary interest of such initiatives.
As for the more conventional ‘hardcopy’ published editions of documents, fairly complete research collections of such materials are available in only a handful of libraries. Even when one has access to these resources, the lack of up-to-date, reliable handbooks to guide the uninitiated means that it may take a very long time for a student or non-specialist to develop any sense of what is available and how to find what he is looking for.* The situation is somewhat better for Greek papyrology, and there is now a general introduction to using the papyri in historical research which even makes some effort to take into account the Coptic evidence.*® Nevertheless, a considerable investment of time and energy is required for anyone who wants to be able to use papyrological materials with any facility.
As sources of information, the documents present their own set of problems. They have ‘blind spots’, too. The events and developments most interesting to the authors of chronicles and other literary texts often make no impression on the documentary record. Wars and revolts can pass without producing a ripple in the papyri. And coverage is primarily focused on particular aspects of life in these societies, most especially the administrative, legal, and commercial interactions so productive of documentation. Private and even business letters sometimes take us outside of the stereotyped, highly formulaic world of documentary practice, but not always and never entirely.
Even familiar letters tend to be somewhat restricted in their contents, usually revolving around a handful of conventional topics. Of course, coverage is not as biased towards social elites as is the case with literary texts, and a much wider swath of society makes regular appearance in documents, but here, too, the humbler members of these communities tend to remain fairly anonymous, if they appear at all. A textile merchant is likely to have a much higher profile in the documentary record than a shepherd. On the other hand, neither is likely to appear in a literary text.
Coverage in chronological and geographical terms is also uneven. We have very little in the way of documentary evidence from the Delta, or even Alexandria (yet another reason the text edited here by Petra Sypesteijn is an important contribution). The overwhelming majority of documents that have been recovered come from Middle and Upper Egypt, and, in fact, most of those come from a half dozen districts which have been particularly productive of finds (the Fayyaum/Arsinoe, al-Bahnasa/Oxyrhynchus, Ashmtinayn/Hermopolis, Kom Ishqaw/Aphrodito, Western Thebes, and Aswan/Syene).
A considerable number of Arabic documents have also been found in Fustat, the capital of Egypt after the Arab Conquest, and texts sent from or mentioning Fustat have been found at sites up and down the Nile. The ‘Cairo Geniza’ should also be mentioned here. It is an amazingly rich collection of documents in Arabic (and other languages) that were produced by (or sent to) members of the Jewish community there, though few of these texts date from before the eleventh century.*’
The Cairo Conference and Future Research
The conference held in Cairo in March 2002 under the name “Documentary Evidence and the History of Early Islamic Egypt” was an attempt to bring together, for the first time actually, historians and papyrologists working on this period and interested in making use of the papyri and other documentary sources in all three languages, Greek, Coptic, and Arabic. This was also the occasion for the creation of an organizational framework to encourage cooperation, projects of common interest, and the dissemination of information about this field of research. ‘That organization has been established as the International Society for Arabic Papyrology (ISAP).
The chronological limits set as the focus for the Cairo meetings (seventh to tenth centuries) were somewhat arbitrary, but nicely coincided with the period during which papyrus continued to be the primary writing support in post-Conquest Egypt. By the end of the tenth century, papyrus had largely been replaced by the use of paper. The interests of ISAP and its membership, however, extend more widely in material, chronological, and geographical terms. These interests encompass the study of various kinds of documentary evidence from throughout the early Islamic world, as well as related sources of information, e.g. the papyri of Byzantine Egypt, the Geniza materials, etc.
Although the potential of documentary evidence for the study of this period has been noted by historians from time to time, there had been no previous attempts to bring together in one place scholars from all the various disciplines whose interests intersect in this important time when an Islamic society was being born in Egypt and the indigenous population was experiencing a wide-ranging transculturation. These scholars have traditionally been divided by disciplinary and professional boundaries which have only in rare cases been breached. The problem of the “compartmentalization of scholarship” which Sarah Clackson tackles in her paper with regard to Coptic and Greek papyrology, is a problem which has afflicted the study of this period more generally.
In some cases this has been rooted in old cultural, chronological, and linguistic prejudices on the part of scholars, preyudices which have only recently begun to erode, but often the barriers have been and remain institutional. Researchers come from different traditions of scholarship (Classics, Early Christian studies, Egyptology, or Arabic and Islamic studies), and few of them have had the training to work with materials in all three languages, or to master the various cultural and religious backgrounds associated with these languages. Likewise, they generally belong to entirely different professional associations, attend separate scholarly conferences, and rarely conduct their research and teaching within the framework of the same departments and programs.
It is hoped that the Cairo conference and the papers being published here represent a new level of interaction between members of these various scholarly groupings. It is further hoped that such interaction will continue in the future and produce the sort of interdisciplinary cooperation necessary for the successful study of this complex period of cultural and linguistic interplay, exchange, and transformation.
The tools available to researchers interested in working with documents remain limited, and work on such projects of common interest needs to be encouraged and facilitated. ‘The recent integration of Coptic documents into what is now the Checklist of Editions of Greek, Latin, Demotic and Coptic Papyri, Ostraca and Tablets was an important step, and it is to be hoped that Arabic will soon follow.“ Having for Coptic and Arabic the basic resources long available for the study of Greek papyri, such as the Sammelbuch and the Berichtigungsliste (which since 1913 have been collecting texts edited in scattered, unindexed volumes, as well as corrections made to previous editions of texts), is an important desideratum. There are encouraging signs. The first volume of a Coptic Sammelbuch has now appeared, with a second on the way.*® There has even been talk of the creation of an ‘electronic Sammelbuch’ for Arabic documents.
Ultimately, electronic databases of texts similar to the Duke Data Base of Documentary Papyri and the APIS project, providing both transcriptions and digitized images, need to be created for Arabic and Coptic materials. And, perhaps most importantly, opportunities for training in these disciplines need to be available for interested students. Even for Greek papyrology, which is relatively well-organized and provided for, the study of documents from the Byzantine and early Islamic period requires special training that is difficult to find. In addition to facilitating the editing and study of texts by papyrologists, having these tools and basic training opportunities will also make it possible for historians to fully exploit these unique resources, a prospect which remains daunting for most.
Developing these fields of research and fostering the interdisciplinary cooperation needed to successfully interpret both the documents and the society which produced them is a goal that today remains far short of fulfillment. But the excitement of scholars present in Cairo at the conference in 2002 was palpable, as is that of colleagues who were not able to be there but who are participating in this project. It is to be hoped that students and scholars will now capitalize upon that excitement and the intrinsic interest of these texts to more fully exploit their rich potential. The success of the second ISAP conference, recently convened in Granada (24-27 March 2004), suggests that these materials are finally beginning to attract the attention they deserve.
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