Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #FragmentFriday
Most recents (9)
We've got "maria", and then something with a y--probably "hymnus". So likely a minor responsory for Vespers or Lauds of a Marian feast, followed by the hymn--but we can only read the bottoms of the letters! fragmentarium.ms/view/page/F-f3…
one word looks like maybe it's "chorus". "chorus" is a pretty popular word in hymns it turns out. 
sometimes fragments are bits of nice books that got repurposed, but sometimes they're really genuinely scrappy, like this lil guy fragmentarium.ms/view/page/F-co…
doesn't seem to be anything on the back, and the chants are a bit of an odd combination, too. gonna choose to believe this was somebody's cue sheet.
having a delightful #FragmentFriday with these bits of binding. Fun With Fragments up ahead...
This guy in the lower left has 1) a piece of John 15:6-7 2) a tiny bit of the chant Gloria et honore ("...tuarum") cantusindex.org/id/g01260
3) a prayer, Apostolici reverentia.
3) a prayer, Apostolici reverentia.
All that checks out for some sort of vigil mass for an apostle. There's a little A where you'd expect the name to be, "beati A...", but A for Apostle or A for Andrew? Either way, probably a page at the end of its book, easy pickings for binding material. 3/
A Fatimid palace memorandum from the caliphate of al-Mustanṣir: another multi-handed document, as promised in the last #fragmentfriday. This one is datable to 1049–50 (441H). But it's only a piece of some larger whole. /1
@theUL @theULSpecColl @CamDigLib
@theUL @theULSpecColl @CamDigLib
S. M. Stern of Oxford published this fragment in 1962. /2
Based on what he had of the text, Stern thought it was part of a petition to the caliph al-Mustanṣir. /3
Another Fatimid tax receipt for your viewing pleasure. This one leapt out of the pile this morning, from the collection of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris. /1
The AIU collection contains lots of Ottoman texts. Geniza document specialists have neglected it; we cluster in the 1000–1500 range. Ottoman Ladino and Arabic from AIU are getting attention now from Alan Elbaum of the PGP team; the Ottoman Turkish material awaits its Goitein. /2
But back to the Fatimids! Here's the AIU tax receipt with the same grid I introduced in my most recent #fragmentfriday post. The zones overlap, and there is a possible bonus: a sixth hand (?) at top, which echoes hand 1 (the cashier). It says addā "he paid." /3
Multihanded documents for your #fragmentfriday! I like these, despite their illegibility: they suggest that bureaucracy was not a modern invention.
By bureaucracy, I don't mean annoying paperwork, though there was some of that, but regularity and predictability of procedure. /1
By bureaucracy, I don't mean annoying paperwork, though there was some of that, but regularity and predictability of procedure. /1
This is a Fatimid tax receipt from 1015 (405H).
It's housed @theULSpecColl. There are others at @JTSVoice and @egyptlibrary. /2
It's housed @theULSpecColl. There are others at @JTSVoice and @egyptlibrary. /2
Fatimid tax receipts are *very* difficult to decipher. The cashiers didn't care about you, or me, or my sorry attempts to read their writing.😢
This makes me sad, though it has also helped me kill hours that would otherwise have been consumed with pandemic anxiety./3
This makes me sad, though it has also helped me kill hours that would otherwise have been consumed with pandemic anxiety./3
For your #fragmentfriday: A letter from a Libyan Jew in 1103 who gripes, in rhyming Judaeo-Arabic, about a string of Red Sea ports on his way to Aden. I find it hilarious; your mileage may vary. cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-TS-000…
2/“I arrived in ʿAydhāb, which is truly a city of tribulations (Arab. adhāb). Then we left al-Maqlaʿayn and set sail in a ship that had in it not a single nail of iron, but rather was tied together with ropes, may God protect us with his shield.”
3/(There’s abundant archeological evidence of this nailless ship-building style around the Indian Ocean basin; see swahiliweb.net/ziff_journal_3…, and Dionisius Agius, Classic Ships of Islam. Whether such ships were indeed terrifying to Mediterraneans I can’t confirm.)
Some fun facts for your #fragmentfriday: medieval Samaritans, caliphal tax officials, and #Latin terminological fossils in #Arabic. All converge in a Cairo geniza document from @theULSpecColl.
2/This tattered yet beautiful Arabic parchment is a 12th c qadi court record. Legal documents from medieval Egypt were written on both parchment and paper after about 900, and on papyrus before that. (Here’s another 12th c parchment deed regarding a sharābī, a seller of potions.)
3/The Arabic deed is a bill of sale for part of a house in Fustat (?) from 1135. Fustatis were constantly subdividing their properties, like brownstones in NYC today. You would find 1/24 of a house leased out, tho not measured out as precisely in reality as in the court record.
For your #fragmentfriday (tho’ I‘m vaguely aware it’s Sunday): a long vertical scroll (rotulus) from the #cairogeniza with an equally long social history. A winding thread: I’ll tell the story backwards, pts. 1-7 are modern, pts. 8-23 medieval:
1/This fragment comes from the Lewis-Gibson collection, now owned by Oxford and Cambridge. They jointly acquired these 1700 mss in a model of cooperation under the leadership of @richove of @bodleianlibs and @annejarvispul of @theUL (now of @PULibrary). bodleian.ox.ac.uk/news/2013/hist…
2/Oxbridge acquired the Lewis-Gibson fragments from Westminster College, a Presbyterian seminary (now United Reformed) whose land, and whose geniza fragments, they received as a donation from Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson (both b. 1843; they were twins).
