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.
4/Though key bits of text are missing, toward the end of the doc you’ll find a Samaritan government official. Fun fact: there were Samaritans living in medieval Fustat and Damascus, in addition to their holy site, Nablus. cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-TS-000…
5/The Samaritans are a religious group tracing their origins to the Northern Kingdom of Israel in the early first millennium BCE. Fewer than 1,000 Samaritans remain today.
6/Samaritans still practice animal sacrifice, while other groups who trace their descent to the ancient Israelites, such as rabbinic and Qaraite Jews, quit with the homo necans business some 2,000 years ago.
7/Next fun fact: The Samaritan in this document is called Abu l-Hasan al-quSTāl (standard Arabic qusTāl), a title meaning fiscal official. So the caliphs appointed Samaritans as state officials, in addition to Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians and Muslims. cambridge.org/core/books/fri…
8/Also fun: qusTāl derives from Latin quaestor, fiscal official. It‘s unsurprising to find a state official in early Islamic Egypt with a Roman-sounding title: like any sensible empire, the Muslims preserved the tax systems of the lands they conquered. No tax revenue, no empire.
9/But in the 9th c, this official began to be called jahbadh, an Iranian term via the Abbasids. Both the Islamic East and West saw continuity of administrative terms. But in 9th c Egypt, many local terms got replaced w/eastern ones. In Fatimid Egypt, then, qusTāl was an anomaly.
10/Did the Fatimids have a lone official called a qusTāl (who happened to be Samaritan)? Maybe. Or maybe he was long dead, and the house in Fustat named after him had an antiquated name. The gaps at bottom right of doc mean we can’t really know.
11/Bonus for linguists: Geoffrey Khan of @CambridgeFames, who published this deed in his magisterial 1993 book of #genizah documents from #fatimid and #ayyubid Egypt, hints that the #Roman term quaestor had a longer afterlife than we might expect.
12/The Iranian historian al-Tabari (d. 923) uses quaestor in the forms qusTār and qasTarī. Both are different from the Egyptian qusTāl, so likely derived independently (or qusTār may secondarily derive from qasTarī under the influence of qusTāl).
13/QasTarī also appears in a Jewish court deed from 11th c Siracusa, Sicily, also from the geniza, but in the plural qasādira. Did it come into Sicilian Judaeo-Arabic from romance? Or had al-Tabarī’s plural qasāTira gained traction in the west?
14/Either way, in Egypt, QusTāl appears to have forged its own path into Arabic. Latin administrative holdovers in Arabic make me happy: they remind me of Patricia Crone‘s claim, radical then but no longer, that the caliphate was a successor to Rome. books.google.com/books/about/Ro…
(Thanks to @DavidRSelis for getting me curious again about Samaritans in the #genizah.)
