Early Persian Documents from Khorasan
TL;DR: In this paper, a group of manuscripts of the eleventh century CE in Early New Persian, Early Judeo-Persian, Arabic, Japho-Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic was discovered in Afghanistan.
Abstract: The article reports on a find of manuscripts of the eleventh century CE in Early New Persian, Early Judeo-Persian, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic, recently discovered in Afghanistan. Some of the contents of this group of manuscripts is described, as well as the possible origins of the Jewish community where these documents were produced and kept. An example of a piece of poetry in commemoration of a deceased member of the community is given in transcription into Standard Persian. Some notes on the significance of these documents for studying the history of the Persian language and the dialect of Khorasan are supplied.
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01 Apr 2020
TL;DR: Chatterjee as discussed by the authors provides a unique micro-history of a family of landlords in Malwa, central India, who flourished in the region from at least the sixteenth until the twentieth century.
Abstract: Based on a completely reconstructed archive of Persian, Hindi and Marathi documents, Nandini Chatterjee provides a unique micro-history of a family of landlords in Malwa, central India, who flourished in the region from at least the sixteenth until the twentieth century. By exploring their daily interactions with imperial elites as well as villagers andmarauders, Chatterjee offers a new history of the Mughal Empire from below, far from the glittering courts of the emperors and nobles, but still dramatic and filled with colourful personalities. From this perspective, we see war, violence, betrayal, enterprise, romance and disappointment, but we also see a quest for law, justice, rights and righteousness. A rare story of Islamic law in a predominantly non-Muslim society, this is also an exploration of the peripheral regions of the Maratha empire and a neglected princely state under British colonial rule. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
17 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a case study of the binding of Leiden Or. 122 was presented, which preserved letters, decrees, and lists from Egypt and Syria at the beginning of the Mamluk reign.
Abstract: Abstract The nature and place of archives in the premodern Islamicate world is a much debated topic and various explanations are offered for the relative scarcity of preserved material as well as the regional imbalance in the record. One factor that stands out in this discussion is the general prominence of counter-archival practices for the survival of what we are studying today. This contribution is the first to examine one such practice that has led to the preservation of a great number of documents: the reuse of discarded papers for the production of bindings. The case study looks at the binding of Leiden Or. 122, which preserved letters, decrees, and lists from Egypt and Syria at the beginning of the Mamluk reign. They likely belonged to a large household in Cairo, more precisely located in the Ayyubid palace Iṣṭabl al-Quṭbiyya. The article offers an edition of the material with an analysis of the historical circumstances, namely the eventful early years of Mamluk rule in Egypt and Syria.
13 citations
Book•
16 Apr 2020TL;DR: Chatterjee as discussed by the authors provides a unique micro-history of a family of landlords in Malwa, central India, who flourished in the region from at least the sixteenth until the twentieth century, by exploring their daily interactions with imperial elites as well as villagers and marauders.
Abstract: Based on a completely reconstructed archive of Persian, Hindi and Marathi documents, Nandini Chatterjee provides a unique micro-history of a family of landlords in Malwa, central India, who flourished in the region from at least the sixteenth until the twentieth century. By exploring their daily interactions with imperial elites as well as villagers and marauders, Chatterjee offers a new history from below of the Mughal Empire, far from the glittering courts of the emperors and nobles, but still dramatic and filled with colourful personalities. From this perspective, we see war, violence, betrayal, enterprise, romance and disappointment, but we also see a quest for law, justice, rights and righteousness. A rare story of Islamic law in a predominantly non-Muslim society, this is also an exploration of the peripheral regions of the Maratha empire and a neglected princely state under British colonial rule. This title is also available as Open Access.
9 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the impact of Islam on families in 8th-century rural Ṭukhāristan (modern-day northern Afghanistan), at the periphery of the late Umayyad and early ʿAbbāsid caliphate, is analyzed.
Abstract: This paper is a first attempt at understanding the impact of Islam on families in eighth-century rural Ṭukhāristan (modern-day northern Afghanistan), at the periphery of the late Umayyad and early ʿAbbāsid caliphate. Tukhāristan lay in the ancient region of Bactria, which became the land and city of Balkh after the Islamic conquests of the early seven hundreds ad. My analysis is based on a fascinating corpus of legal documents and letters, written in Bactrian and Arabic in the fourth to eighth centuries ad, which were discovered, edited and translated relatively recently. Scholars of Central Asia have tended to discuss the region's early Islamic history within a politico-military framework based on chronicles and prosopographies written in Arabic and/or adapted into Persian centuries after the Muslim conquests. Such narrative sources describe an ideal state defined by genres of Islamic historiography, and come with the usual menu of distortions, simplifications and exoticisms. The documents under review, on the other hand, were written to serve immediate and practical uses; the evidence they offer is devoid of rhetoric, recording aspects of life and social groupings to which we would otherwise have no access. This paper argues that during the transition to Islamic rule (c. ad 700–771), Bactrian and Islamic administrative systems co-existed, and significantly affected family life and marriage traditions. Specifically, it is suggested that the early ʿAbbāsid tax system eclipsed the age-old practice of fraternal polyandry here: more by default than by design.
8 citations
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17 Aug 2012
TL;DR: In this article, a critical edition and translation of Salmon b. Yeroham's commentary on Qohelet is presented, where the primary themes: asceticism, eschatology, opposition to philosophy.
Abstract: This book presents a critical edition and translation of Salmon b. Yeroham’s Judaeo-Arabic commentary on Qohelet. The introduction situates the work in the history of Qohelet exegesis and discusses the primary themes: asceticism, eschatology, opposition to philosophy.
4 citations
2 citations
01 Jan 2011
TL;DR: The number of documents deriving from the Cairo Genizah and from other oriental sources of similar antiquity is now quite considerable as mentioned in this paper, and a new era began in the study of the Judaeo-Persian texts, with the publication by D. N. MacKenzie of what he called a 'Jewish Persian Argument' from a fragment at the British Library, a very interesting text from the linguistic and literary points of view.
Abstract: The number of Judaeo-Persian documents deriving from the Cairo Genizah and from other oriental sources of similar antiquity (i.e. roughly tenth to thirteenth centuries CE) is now quite considerable. In 1968 a new era began in the study of the Judaeo-Persian texts, with the publication by D. N. MacKenzie of what he called a 'Jewish Persian Argument' from a fragment at the British Library, a very interesting text from the linguistic as well as from the historical and literary points of view. Classical Judaeo-Persian literature is largely a product of the fourteenth century onwards, while the datable documents from the Genizah may be assigned to the period from the tenth up to the mid-thirteenth century. There are a number of other letters from the Genizah that present a different type of hybrid bilingualism. Keywords: Cairo Genizah documents; Judaeo-Persian documents; Persian Arabic bilingualism
2 citations