1/🧵This is Nabia Abbott. She was a groundbreaking scholar of #Arabic manuscripts, the first woman to be a professor at @UChicago’s Oriental Institute, and once sent me on a wild goose chase spanning 3 continents. She deserves a lot more than one thread, but here's a start.
2/Nabīha ʿAbūd (نبيهة عبود), later known as Nabia Abbott, was born in 1897 to a Christian family in Mardin (then the Ottoman Empire, now modern Turkey). Her family moved around a lot, which led to her attending school in India and completing a BA degree in Lucknow in 1919.
3/In 1923, Abbott moved to the US and earned her MA at @BU_Tweets. From 1925 on she taught at Asbury College (in Kentucky) where she eventually became the head of the Department of History. In 1933, she began a PhD at the @Orientalinst in Chicago (ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/z60…).
4/The Oriental Institute (OI) is a research institute for the study of the ancient Near East, part of @UChicago. It also was (and is - you should visit, it’s free) a museum with a substantial #manuscript collection. Abbott was tasked with cataloging their #Quran fragments.
5/These Qur’ans are among the oldest in the world (a few are digitized here: oi-idb.uchicago.edu/results.php?ta…). Abbott recognized that it would be necessary to date them by examining the style of their Arabic calligraphy (AKA 'paleography' - I see you euromedievalists, don’t @ me ).
6/She also realized the required research on early Arabic scripts did not yet exist, so she wrote a book to fix that: “The Rise of the North Arabic Script” (1939) (oi.uchicago.edu/research/publi…). Her preface has one of my favorite examples of an academic “Fine, I’ll do it myself.”
7/I *believe* this footage (excerpted from here: ) shows Abbott at the @orientalinst in 1938. The building was less than a decade old at the time. Around 20s she looks at a manuscript in a glass plate, probably a leaf from one of the Qur’ans in “Rise.”
8/Side note: the end of the film has an old-timey museum security guard, which was my job 6 years ago. No, the uniforms are different now. Yes, it’s like Night at the Museum. Inexplicably, the final frames show a man smoking a pipe carrying a plank of wood into the lake(?).
9/When I was a student at @UChicago, I had the privilege of photographing some of the Qur’an fragments from Abbott’s book. I also set off the alarm when I was leaving the secret artifact dungeon, which may have strained my relationship with the museum’s registrars.
10/This manuscript caught my eye because it has very weird red signs representing the #Arabic vowels (if you’re a huge nerd like me and you care how they’re weird see here: doi.org/10.1086/712876). Abbott had identified these signs on 2 badly damaged manuscripts in her book.
11/She also speculated that these 2 manuscripts might’ve come from the same Qur’an codex. Over the next year I kept my eyes peeled for more examples of the weird vowel signs. A colleague directed me to this one in Paris (@laBnF): gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv… @CellardEleonore
12/It turned out Abbott’s hunch was correct: the 2 manuscripts in Chicago belong together because they were originally part of this codex in Paris. Not only that, but a few years later I spotted 2 more pages, these ones in Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art (@MIAQatar):
13/“The Rise of the North Arabic Script” was just Abbott’s opening act. She went on to write extensively on women in early Islam, including “Aishah: Beloved of Mohammed” (1942) (free: oi.uchicago.edu/research/publi…) and “Two Queens of Baghdad” (1946) (also free: oi.uchicago.edu/research/publi…)
14/Also these 80-year-old articles which University of Chicago Press wants to charge $20 for. Please DM me if you want the PDFs.
“Pre-Islamic Arabic Queens” (1941) (doi.org/10.1086/370586)
“Women and the State in Early Islam” (1942) (doi.org/10.1086/370650)
15/She also published this fragment, probably the oldest extant manuscript of “Alf Layla wa-Layla” (One Thousand and One Nights). It’s one of the earliest #Arabic manuscripts written on paper (doi.org/10.1086/370926). Pic taken at @Orientalinst museum.
16/Abbott spent the latter part of her career on Arabic #papyri, which is mainly what she’s remembered for now. She published her findings across 15 years in the 3-volume “Studies in Arabic Literary Papyri,” available for free (thanks OI) here: oi.uchicago.edu/research/publi…
17/A few months ago, @ClassyArabic shared this card from (I assume) the Regenstein Library @UChicagoLibrary. Abbott checked out the same book twice, 10 years apart, with Marshall Hodgson (google him) in between. Pretty cool for Chicago dorks.
18/In 1975, Muhsin Mahdi (Abbott’s student) wrote an “In Memoriam” article about her for the OI Annual Report (oi.uchicago.edu/about/annual-r…). This is a little odd since she was still alive and lived for 6 more years, but it includes a rather poignant quote that sums up her career:
19/19 Nabia Abbott died well before I was born, and a lot of people in my field already know her work, but she had a remarkable life that is still worth talking about. And I didn’t even mention all the cool stuff she did before 1923. Someone should write a book about her.
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.