Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #FragmentFriday

Most recents (9)

what #chant got snipped off this lovely manuscript? a #FragmentFriday mystery! Image
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. ImageImageImageImage
Read 10 tweets
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… Image
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.
v.thoughtful of this worm to munch alongside but not through the music

happy #FragmentFriday! Image
Read 9 tweets
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.
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/
Read 23 tweets
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
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
Read 15 tweets
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
Read 6 tweets
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
This is a Fatimid tax receipt from 1015 (405H).

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
Read 14 tweets
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… Image
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.)
Read 19 tweets
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. T-S Ar. 38.117, a 12th cent...
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.) Image
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.
Read 15 tweets
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: ImageImage
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).
Read 24 tweets

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